The Cold War

by Robert Cowley

  In your autobiography, you write, “I later learned that President Johnson and his advisors did not want to get the American people stirred up, because there was a fear that the hawks would get the upper hand, and possibly provoke a confrontation with China or Russia.” Do you still believe that?

  I did at the time I wrote the book. In view of Red China's conduct since that time, I'd be inclined to back off. What they didn't appreciate was the historical animosity between the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Whether the Vietnamese would have invited the Chinese to come in, I don't know. The last time the Chinese came down, they stayed for a thousand years.

  Does Vietnam ever get to you?

  I had three cases of amebic dysentery. [Laughs.] I never let Vietnam get to me. The psychological pressures on a commander are there; you can't escape them. But frankly, I don't have any strong sense of pressures as I look back, even though I was putting in sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

  Has your country ever let you down?

  Well, I don't think so, except— Let me put it this way. I was a little surprised that the government didn't in some way come to my rescue after that hatchet job by CBS. [The CBS documentary The Uncounted Enemy alleged that Westmoreland manipulated enemy troop strength figures.] That was a disillusioning experience for me.

  Philosophically and psychologically, they were in staunch support, but from the practical standpoint, there wasn't anything they could do.

  What do you mean?

  The government picking up the legal tab of a private individual.

  There is one solution that has come to me that did not occur to me at the time. This is interesting, and you're the first person I've ever mentioned this to. In retrospect, there was another course of action I could have taken. As a retired officer, I could have demanded that the Department of the Army try me for doing what CBS said that I had done. That would have put the burden of proof on CBS in a court-martial atmosphere, where there would be a jury of officers. It would be a military tribunal with officers who knew what the war was all about. You can't get a civilian jury that understands something as technical as intelligence on the battlefield, the chain of command, the responsibility of a commander.

  Can someone ask for that and get it?

  Well, theoretically, I think so, but practically, I don't know. But it is something that rather intrigues me. CBS would have looked like fools after it was over. It would have cost me a lot less money, too.

  How was the money raised?

  By a not-for-profit foundation.

  Did it actually cost you anything?

  Oh, yes, about sixty thousand dollars.

  That's a lot of money.

  It was tax-exempt. But not peanuts.

  Doesn't it take courage to do what you've done during the last ten or fifteen years?

  I don't think of it as courage. Facts are facts.

  I always ask veterans if they dream about the war after it's over. Do you have Vietnam dreams?

  Not that I can recall. In most of my dreams, I'm dreaming that I lost my baggage, or the keys to my car.

  The Mystery of Khe Sanh

  JAMES WARREN

  Nineteen sixty-eight was one of those years marked by its tumult, a historic year probably, a turning point possibly. Did the New Order of youth take over, with long-lasting results? Did an older, more conservative one reassert itself in the end? Vietnam, the war that seemed eternal, underlay everything that year: the American cities that went up in flames, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the student riots in Paris, the “occupation” of Columbia University that began almost festively and ended in a riot, more riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Prague Spring put down by Soviet tanks in August—and, finally, almost as an afterthought, the election of Richard M. Nixon, as the buds of tomorrow were abruptly pinched off. For the nations of the non-Communist world, 1968 had been a terrible interval, one that must have given the prolegarchs of Moscow and Beijing immense satisfaction.

  Fittingly enough, the year began with an event that became a national obsession for Americans that winter: the North Vietnamese siege of the combat base at Khe Sanh. It was, as James Warren points out, “the longest and most dramatic battle in America's longest war.” Sensing what seemed to be the importance of Khe Sanh, print and TV journalists, photographers, and film crews descended on the menaced outpost. There were so many that they were allowed to stay only a day or so at most. Roughly one quarter of all TV reports that winter dealt with the plight of the marines at the beleaguered outpost. Then the media swarms returned to Saigon to write speculations on whether or not Khe Sanh would turn into an American Dien Bien Phu. President Johnson was haunted by the same fear. He commissioned a three-dimensional terrain model for the windowless White House basement chamber known as the Situation Room. In the words of Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer, LBJ “insisted on a formal paper from the Joint Chiefs, ‘signed in blood,’ as he put it, that Khe Sanh could be held.” The president didn't want a major military catastrophe on his watch. The Khe Sanh malady was contagious, from the top down. The American public caught it. The siege—and the Communist Tet Offensive that began on January 30 at the beginning of the South Vietnamese lunar new year—put paid once and for all any optimistic visions of the war.

  Warren's account deals with the many questions of Khe Sanh, some of which are still unanswered and may not be until the archives of the former North Vietnam are fully opened. Was the Dien Bien Phu comparison truly apt? Had General Westmoreland concentrated too many men— over 50 percent of all U.S. maneuver battalions—in the northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, close to the 17th Parallel boundary? Was Khe Sanh merely a Communist ruse designed to distract Westmoreland from the countrywide Tet Offensive? Was he correct in calling Khe Sanh his proudest moment, as he did in the interview with Laura Palmer? Why did holding the base seem so important that he even considered dropping tactical nuclear bombs on the area held by two North Vietnamese divisions? (“Although I established a small secret group to study the subject,” Westmoreland wrote in 1976, “Washington so feared that some word of it might reach the press that I was told to desist.”) Tactical nukes or no, did he manage to turn Khe Sanh into a death trap for the North Vietnamese—partly because they, too, gave in to the same obsession that gripped the Americans? And why was the base eventually, and so unceremoniously, abandoned? Some may ask why this backwater was even contested. Who really won? And, in the end, did it matter?

  JAMES WARREN, a New York editor, is the author of Portrait of a Tragedy: America and the Vietnam War (with Harry G. Summers) and Cold War: The American Crusade Against World Communism, 1945–1991.

  IT WAS A SERIOUS PROBLEM, and it required a quick response: A team from the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion had been patrolling north of Khe Sanh Combat Base (KSCB), the westernmost U.S. Marine outpost along the demilitarized zone separating North and South Vietnam. On January 17, 1968, the recon team was moving slowly and quietly along one of the many gnarled ridges that made up Hill 881 North when they were ambushed by soldiers of the Vietnam People's Army—regular troops of what is popularly known in the United States as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

  Within just a few seconds, the team commander and his radio operator were dead. The six other Americans, all wounded, pulled back from the NVA firing positions as fast as they could and called the commanding officer of India Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment, Captain Bill Dabney, whose command post was on Hill 881 South. The team was in big trouble. As luck would have it, Captain Dabney had a platoon from his company based on the very same hill. It was quickly dispatched to attempt a rescue. With the help of helicopters from the combat base, Lieutenant Thomas Brindley's 3rd Platoon managed to pull off the rescue with great aplomb. But in the excitement of the action, the rescuers left behind a radio and the sheets of radio codes called shackle cards.

  The cards were considered vital; Dabney didn't want them in NVA hands. Two days la
ter, he sent out another platoon to collect the gear. This platoon, too, came under attack from an estimated twenty-five North Vietnamese soldiers. Lieutenant Harry Fromme's marines withdrew under the steady cover of mortar fire. It was the second time the NVA had engaged his marines on the same terrain: That was unusual. Something big was in the wind, or so Dabney believed. And the captain was not the only marine officer to think so.

  Since November, signs of increased enemy activity—fighting holes, bunker complexes, widened trails, even newly created, paved roads—were uncovered on a regular basis uncomfortably close to the KSCB and the surrounding hills that protected the approaches to the main marine outpost. Recon teams were spotting NVA soldiers brazenly marching out in the open. Often the enemy soldiers were wearing new uniforms and carrying new AK-47 assault rifles. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Green Berets at Lang Vei, which lay seven miles to the west of KSCB, were discovering ominous signs of an enemy escalation on their deep patrols into Laos. What the foot patrols observed, the vast array of electronically gathered intelligence—from both the air and the ground—con-firmed. There were more than ten thousand enemy soldiers in the area, and more were en route.

  Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of the big build-up came in the form of a group of NVA officers who had been shot on January 2 while attempting to gather intelligence just a few hundred meters from the eastern perimeter of the Khe Sanh base. This incident, more than any other, ratcheted up concern over whether KSCB could be held—concern that reached to the highest levels. Walt Rostow, the president's national security adviser, told Lyndon Johnson that in the estimation of the field commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, “The NVA were massing for another major offensive in this area, perhaps targeted this time around Khe Sanh.”

  On January 11 a gravely concerned General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cabled the field commander in Saigon from Washington, asking for contingency plans in the event of an attack, and asking if such an attack might be forestalled by a marine withdrawal to the east. The next night, after conferring with the III Marine Amphibious Force commander, Lieutenant General Robert R. Cushman, Jr.—commander of the marines in all of I Corps, the northernmost military region of South Vietnam—Westmore-land cabled back his answer: Two marine battalions could be on the scene in twelve hours if needed. He had already alerted an army brigade about going north to fill the marines' shoes if they had to. And Westmoreland vigorously rejected the withdrawal option:

  This area is critical to us from a tactical standpoint as a launch base for SOG [Special Operations Group, a Saigon-based joint CIA-military command] teams and as flank security for the strong point obstacle system [a series of manned outposts and unmanned barriers stretching across much of the demilitarized zone (DMZ)] it is even more critical from a psychological viewpoint. To relinquish this area would be a major propaganda victory for the enemy. Its loss would seriously affect Vietnamese and U.S. morale. In short, withdrawal would be a tremendous step backwards.

  Recalling the situation on the eve of the battle, artillery aerial observer Major Jim Stanton “saw literally hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers in their bright green, easy-to-see uniforms. They were in large numbers, they were bivouacking in the open, they were doing things that made it very difficult to patrol. I could go out and recon areas by fire and always get North Vietnamese to scatter.”

  It was against this backdrop that Dabney asked his battalion commander for clearance to conduct a reconnaissance in force on the morning of January 20. He would use most of India Company's infantry to determine just what the enemy was up to in the area of Hill 881 North.

  The first several hours of the patrol were slow going. Progress was hampered by fog—it was the tail end of the monsoon season—and by waist-high elephant grass and the hilly terrain. As the marines advanced toward Hill 881N along two ridgelines, approaching a series of four small hills, NVA infantry opened fire from their fortified positions on those small hills.

  Within thirty seconds, twenty marines were dead or wounded. Brindley's platoon, leading the right column, was stopped cold and went to ground in the folds of the hillside. Firing and maneuvering continued for several hours. In the course of the engagement, the NVA shot down a CH-46 chopper sent in to retrieve the wounded. Brindley called in artillery fire on the NVA positions, momentarily silencing their guns. Once the artillery barrage lifted, the lieutenant rose to lead his men in an attack on the NVA positions. It was described by one observer as a classic U.S. Marine frontal assault, like “a page out of Chesty Puller….”

  It worked. The NVA broke and fled their positions as the Americans continued to pour small arms, mortar, and artillery fire in the direction of the enemy withdrawal. But Thomas Brindley was killed at the moment he reached the summit of the NVA stronghold, and the recon team that had joined in the assault was overrun and shot up by the fleeing NVA troops. The next objective for the marines was to retrieve that recon team, all of whom were wounded or dead. This, too, was accomplished, but several more marines fell in the process.

  It was now late in the afternoon. Dabney could see the NVA were preparing to counterassault the ground that had cost him the lives of seven men, and he acted fast. He called in jet strikes on the enemy positions and then pulled his weary marines off Hill 881 North. By the order of Colonel David Lownds, who commanded the entire 26th Regiment, they were to return to their own real estate on Hill 881S.

  Although they couldn't have known it at the time, Dabney's marines had just concluded the first fight in the longest and most dramatic battle of Amer-ica's longest war. Within weeks, an apprehensive American public was transfixed by the developments around Khe Sanh, and they remained so even as the war's great turning point, the Tet Offensive, came and went. From late January through March, stark and striking images of an isolated garrison of some 6,000 American troops (and one battalion of South Vietnamese Rangers) locked in combat against an estimated 20,000 NVA soldiers were transmitted via nightly newscasts, newspapers, and magazines.

  It seemed to many Americans, including a number of military strategists, a deadly gambit; the marine outpost was in effect totally surrounded. Route 9, the only road connecting the base to the string of other U.S. strongpoints along the DMZ, had been under enemy control since August 1967, when the marines determined that too many men were required to protect the “Rough Rider” truck convoys that brought food, ammunition, and desperately needed construction supplies to KSCB. This meant that the 150 tons of supplies a day it would take to keep the marines in fighting shape had to be transported by air alone.

  Lyndon Johnson, the man who had first committed combat troops to Vietnam in March 1965, became obsessed with the fate of the marines and the dynamics of the battle, with its dangers, and with its potential to alter the whole calculus of a mystifying and frustrating war against a third-rate power. On many nights during the siege that followed the fierce combat, Johnson could be found in the basement of the White House in his bathrobe, poring over the latest strategic assessments. Indeed, Johnson was delighted when the National Photographic Center provided him with an exact model of the combat base and surrounding environs so he could better acquaint himself with each day's developments. “No single battle of the Vietnam War has held Washington and the nation in such complete thrall as has the impending struggle for Khe Sanh,” observed Time magazine in mid-February.

  No one was more focused on the impending battle than its chief architect,

  William Childs Westmoreland, who had for over a year pressured and cajoled marine command in Da Nang first to keep Khe Sanh operational, then to expand the size of its garrison. Westmoreland had moved a number of army battalions up north to I Corps in preparation for what he plainly conceived of as the war's Big Battle.

  For their part, General Lew Walt, who commanded all the marine units in Vietnam from June 1965 through May 1967, and his successor, General Robert Cushman, couldn't see the wisdom of holding the line so far to the west of South Vie
tnam's highly populous coastal plains. It was, at least in marine com-mand's estimation, a war for the villages. The area around the village of Khe Sanh, under twenty miles from Laos, was thickly jungled, mountainous terrain, populated largely by isolated pockets of Bru Montagnard tribesmen. To the marines, Khe Sanh seemed a distraction from the main theater of the war. They saw their large infantry units' primary use as providing a shield for the Combined Action Companies, which worked to win hearts and minds in the village hamlets by providing security, training, medical care; improving the lot of the Vietnamese people; and, of course, denying the Vietcong access. As Marine Corps Brigadier General Lowell English put it, “When you're at Khe Sanh, you're not really anywhere…. You could lose it and you haven't lost a damn thing.”

  So why did Westmoreland persist with such ardor in having it out with the NVA at Khe Sanh when the people ostensibly in charge of the war in I Corps thought it futile? Both during and after the battle, the army general was never at a loss for reasons. He described the base as the “crucial anchor of our defense along the demilitarized zone.” It was, in his view, necessary to cut off infiltration into South Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and KSCB was an optimal place to conduct operations against the trail. Westmoreland also told his senior officers in Saigon that the base would be necessary for his ambitious plan to launch a devastating thrust into Laos, designed to destroy the enemy's base camps as well as the network of trails and roads by which he moved his supplies into the heart of South Vietnam. (The invasion into Laos in 1967 and 1968 was not a live option, as Washington had ruled out any combat actions in either Cambodia or Laos. Hence, Westmoreland's plan rested on the assumption that he could convince Washington to jettison that restriction.)