Blood in the Hills

by Charles W. Sasser

  The NVA kept up the pressure every day for the rest of January. Some days over a thousand rounds of enemy artillery hit the base, reducing its living conditions to unbearable. The stench was appalling, what with huge piles of garbage smoldering and excrement burning in oil drums. In their underground bunkers, Marines endured the nauseating odor of sweat and urine while plagued by rats scuttering across their legs as they tried to sleep and pouncing from the rafters onto their chests.

  Less than two weeks after the siege on Khe Sanh began, the American people received more bad war news. Before dawn on 30 January as Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, began, more than eighty-four thousand communist NVA and Viet Cong fighters appeared seemingly out of nowhere to attack cities and provinces all over the South. The scale of the surprise offensive was staggering, demonstrating after three years of US involvement in the war that South Vietnam was still vulnerable.

  Within two days, the American Embassy in Saigon was hit, along with 36 of the nation’s 44 provincial capitals, 5 of 6 autonomous cities, and 64 of 242 districts. Fighting between US forces and the communists raged throughout the month while Khe Sanh remained under siege. General Giap’s and Uncle Ho’s objective was not to overcome and take the nation by strong arm. Rather, they hoped to bring about the collapse of the South Vietnamese government by encouraging a popular uprising. Commies always thought the people were either on their side or could be forced to be on their side.

  The NVA shelling of Khe Sanh continued for five relentless weeks. NVA infantry couldn’t invade the base and in fact launched very few direct attacks to try. Marines at the same time remained trapped inside the wire. On one of the few occasions when a patrol ventured outside to locate an enemy mortar position hammering the base, only four of twenty-nine Marines returned. The bodies of the twenty-five remained outside the wire, decaying in the sun and rain.

  The siege, as are all sieges, became one of attrition and wills. Who broke first lost.

  While the NVA controlled the ground around Khe Sanh, Americans ruled the air. Designated Operation Niagara, the air war against the enemy resulted in a tremendous downpouring of death. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps fighter-bombers supported high-altitude Arc Light bombing missions by B-52s. Air traffic became so heavy that warplanes stacked up in “daisy chains,” each waiting in the pattern for its turn over a target.

  A new technique called “Bugle Note” brought streams of B-52s flying from Guam on a twelve-hour round trip in raids that contributed mightily to breaking up enemy concentrations before they could launch attacks against the Combat Base. The effectiveness of the bombing and the terror it sowed in NVA ranks became amply apparent when Marines captured an NVA soldier on Hill 881S.

  A Marine jet screamed overhead minutes after the prisoner was taken. The man lost complete control of himself, psychologically destroyed by the constant pounding he and his comrades had endured from the air. He collapsed in a quiver at the bottom of a trench, whimpering like a beaten animal, his muscles in spasms, urinating and defecating all over himself.

  In the meantime, by early March, the Tet Offensive had run its course and the last of the towns infested by NVA and VC cleared. In purely military terms, Tet was a resounding victory for General West-moreland. He claimed that at least thirty-seven thousand communists were KIA. The final tally may have been as high as fifty thousand.

  But while Westmoreland might declare Tet a military victory, Uncle Ho was claiming a political one. The American public even saw it as a win for the communists.

  Public opinion was turning against the president. His numbers were tanking. By late March, only 26 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the war. Fearing Khe Sanh would become a military disaster, President Johnson spent sleepless nights haunted by “another damn Dien Bien Phu.”

  In the middle of nights, looking worn and old, LBJ endured his own siege in the White House’s basement Situation Room where he read and re-read the latest cables and casualty reports from Khe Sanh and studied a terrain model of the Combat Base and surrounding landscape. He demanded daily reports in minute detail from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Westmoreland. Westmoreland himself was often summoned to the Situation Room at midnight or later. For two months he was forced to sleep in the Combat Operations Center.

  “Can Khe Sanh hold?” LBJ repeatedly asked his generals.

  Furthermore, he required the entire JCS to “sign in blood” a declaration that Khe Sanh would hold no matter what it took. The image of Marines retreating down Route 9 with their tails between their legs was too horrible to contemplate.

  At 9:00 p.m. on Sunday night, 31 March 1968, while the siege at Khe Sanh continued, President Johnson seemed to give up. Before a bank of TV cameras and radio microphones in the Oval Office, looking tired and discouraged, he began a speech that many considered an admission of failure in Vietnam.

  “Tonight,” he began, “I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. No other question so preoccupies our people. . . .”

  He offered Hanoi an olive branch, proposing to slack off US bombing against the North if the communists would agree to engage in serious negotiations. Ho Chi Minh, smelling military success, more or less spat on the olive branch.

  The president ended his speech with a shocker: “I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

  General Westmoreland piled on the Marines a bit of insult to injury when he placed the US Army in charge of siege ground and air activities and tapped the army’s 1st Air Cavalry to lead Operation Pegasus, the effort to fight through to the air base and break the siege. The relief movement began at 8:00 a.m. on April Fools’ Day. Colonel Pappy Delong’s 2/3 Battalion advanced west along both sides of Route 9 while the AirCav conducted heliborne assaults to clear the surrounding hills.

  Eight days later, the AirCav passed through the destroyed Khe Sanh village, finding little but rubble, craters the size of houses, and rotting corpses, and from there slogged on to meet up with Marines who had defended the Combat Base during seventy-seven days of siege. By this time, the Marines did not need relieving. Most of the enemy shelling had ceased. NVA in the hills were already pulling in their claws and preparing to withdraw.

  On 15 April, General Westmoreland declared the relief of Khe Sanh complete. During the two weeks of Pegasus, the relief effort cost the lives of 92 Americans KIA, 667 WIA, and 5 MIA. Defenders at the Combat Base lost 205 Marines KIA.

  On 11 June, General Westmoreland relinquished command of US forces in Vietnam, succeeded by General Creighton W. Abrams. Abrams immediately initiated Operation Charlie—the destruction and evacuation of the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The base was officially closed on 5 July. Marines withdrew east on Route 9.

  Abandoning the Combat Base on top of Tet helped foster the perception of Khe Sanh as a defeat in the minds of the American public. Ho Chi Minh scored his propaganda win. Never mind that the American stronghold successfully defended itself against a much larger force while sustaining only a fraction of the losses imposed upon the NVA.

  Neither was it as though the United States had turned tail and run, abandoning the base to General Giap and the communists. The Americans pulled back from Khe Sanh only a few miles on Route 9 before establishing a new forward base at Ca Lu, a location much easier to defend and supply. There, Marines and soldiers continued to carry out mobile infantry and recon against the NVA to close off infiltration routes.

  No matter. Antiwar protests escalated in the United States. Although it prevailed against the enemy at Khe Sanh and during the Tet Offensive, and in almost every battle before and after, to the American people the war was lost. Ho Chi Minh was to comment afterwards how America’s wavering encouraged him to continue the fight. After the final withdrawal of troops from South Vietnam in 1975 in the famous helicopter rout from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, Uncle Ho admitted that he was “ready
to give up, but the Americans pulled out.”

  Front-page headlines brought the news of Khe Sanh’s closure home. By that time I had been sent home to Tulsa to recuperate from my wounds. A friend dropped by Mom’s house with a copy of the Tulsa Tribune.

  “Bobby, you were at Khe Sanh, right? What do you think about this?”

  It didn’t make sense. Not only had the Combat Base been abandoned, I felt like we who fought there had also been abandoned. Why did we go through all that misery and dying in the Hill Fights to save Khe Sanh, only to give it up? I was more stunned than angry, like somebody had just punched me in the balls. Like our sacrifices were unnecessary and meant nothing.

  Linda curled up on the sofa next to me. “Bobby? Bobby, it’s all over. You’re home again. That’s what counts.”

  For those who fight for life, it has a special flavor the protected shall never know.

  At the moment, the special flavor I savored was a bitter one.

  Afterword

  “Did you know so many guys who died in the war?”

  That question posed innocently by a bystander echoed in my mind and back across the decades as Sergeant Ed Crawford, Tony Leyba, and I stood silently and misty-eyed before The Wall, with its 58,191 names of servicemen and a few women who died in a war that ended twenty-seven years earlier. Our names could have been on that black wall with those we fought with and who died for what now seemed a hopeless cause. We won the war militarily and lost it politically. We bailed out with our tails tucked between our legs. Uncle Ho’s communists swarmed in, took over, and slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people in the name of “the workers.” Tens of thousands more, the “boat people,” fled to sea on rafts, inner tubes, boats—anything that would float. Chancing death rather than accept state slavery.

  I sometimes felt guilty, as though I had somehow personally let the South Vietnamese down.

  Names on The Wall were arranged according to the year the men died. The year 1967 was a big “body count” year. I touched with my fingertips the names of the Marines who died in the Hill Fights. Faces seemed to emerge from the black granite, the serious countenances of young grunts who took being Marine so earnestly that they died for it.

  During the Hill Fights, Gene Kilgore lived with the premonition that he would die in Vietnam. He even described how he would die. That it would be by machine gun fire in a surprise ambush. I remembered now what he wanted inscribed on his tombstone: PFC Gene Kilgore. A Marine Who Died For His Country.

  News reached Tony and me months later that he had indeed been killed. In an ambush. I searched for his name on The Wall, but the only Kilgore I found was a “Danny” Kilgore. I wondered if “Danny” could have been part of Kilgore’s name. No matter now. This “Danny,” if not Gene, had still been there. And, like the other names on The Wall, he had died there.

  Tony stood at my side at The Wall, the same as when we were in Vietnam. We had lived together in the holes, ate together, slept together, pissed “Good morning, Vietnam!” together, were wounded together. My brother by another mama and daddy.

  He had gained weight in the thirty-five years since the Hill Fights, which made him look even more like Buddy Hackett. I had gained weight too. We were in our mid-fifties now, not quite old men looking back on an old war, but close to it. I reached and squeezed his arm with my left hand.

  With my right, I reached for Sergeant Crawford. He reached back and gripped my hand. Big Ed had been mentor to young Marines. What would Big Ed do? had guided our course.

  Big Ed was now in his seventies. A little stooped, a bit slower, shuffling one leg due to wounds, his face lined and his hair thin and gray. But the Marine bearing remained in the way he held his head, the proud square of his shoulders. Once a By-God Marine, always a Marine.

  Big Ed had been waiting for Tony and me when the USS Princeton with a sick bay full of wounded Marines pulled into Subic Bay, the Philippines, to transfer us to the Navy hospital. Ed had been wounded for his second time in Vietnam two days before Tony and I got hit. He was already up and about and planning on going back into the fight.

  “Have you guys notified your parents that you were wounded but you’re okay?” was the first thing he asked.

  I hadn’t. I wanted to make sure I was really okay before I called Linda. There was a possibility, a real probability, that I would go home half a man. I wasn’t sure how Linda would accept it.

  “We may have to take your left leg,” the surgeon said when the medevac offloaded casualties aboard the Princeton.

  I thought of how Vlasek died that day with his face shot off. How he wouldn’t have wanted to live that way.

  “Doc, please, sir?” I begged. “I can’t go home with one leg. Let me die first. Doc, you don’t understand.”

  The drawn expression on his face told me he did understand, that he had confronted situations like this many times before. Turned out his home town was Sand Springs, Oklahoma, a Tulsa suburb. We were practically neighbors.

  “Son,” he said wearily, “I’ll do everything I can to save your leg.”

  He did. I wasn’t going to lose it. Tony and I would return to the war.

  “You’ll both phone your parents and tell ’em,” Big Ed decided. “I’m taking you to the Petty Officers’ Stork Club on the Navy base for dinner and a drink where you can use the phone.”

  We were in the ship’s sick bay. We weren’t authorized to leave. We didn’t have Liberty Cards. Even if we somehow got off the ship, we had no transportation.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Sergeant Crawford promised.

  He did. Somehow, he obtained Liberty Cards for Tony and me, as well as dress uniforms with lance corporal stripes. We hobbled down the gangplank to the liberty boat and went ashore, me on crutches, Tony wrapped about the chest in bandages, his “Peggy” arm in a cast and sling. Big Ed waited for us dockside with a Navy staff car.

  “Ask no questions, I’ll tell you no lies,” he said.

  Late that night, Big Ed arranged our return to the Princeton in style: he commandeered the admiral’s barge.

  Sergeant Ed Crawford, a Marine’s Marine, had been a legend in the 3rd Marine Division. Now, these years later, he was an old man, and Tony and I were getting there. The three of us turned away from The Wall clutching our name etchings and climbed the few steps up toward the larger-than-life bronze statue of American warriors in combat. Sniffles from some of the onlookers accompanied our departure. Come on! We were not to be pitied; we were Marines and we had done our duty.

  Heads high, shoulders square, in step, we marched out of the scene. Never let ’em see you cry.

  About the Authors

  Following Vietnam, Robert “Bobby” Maras served in the Oklahoma Army National Guard. He was a police officer with the Tulsa Police Department for over twenty years and is now retired. This is his first book.

  Charles W. Sasser served twenty-nine years in the military (active-duty and reserve): four in the US Navy as a journalist, the remainder in the US Army, including thirteen years in Army Special Forces (the Green Berets). Like Maras, he is a combat veteran. He was also a police officer in Miami, Florida, for four years, and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for ten years, where he was a homicide detective. Maras and Sasser served together on the Tulsa Police TAC/SWAT team. He is the author of over sixty published books.