by Robert Pisor
Dabney served three years in the ranks, finishing his enlisted tour on Okinawa. He applied for admission to the U.S. Naval Academy, and was accepted, but he decided to seek his degree at the Virginia Military Institute because VMI would credit his year at Yale—and because three of the last four commandants of the Marine Corps were VMI graduates. Dabney’s goals were very high.
He achieved all the necessary scores as a student and young officer, but some of his peers placed special significance on Dabney’s marriage to the daughter of Chesty Puller. Lt. Gen. Lewis B. Puller was the most decorated man in the history of the Marine Corps, a legendary warrior whose name alone could lift a thousand combat veterans to their feet in lusty cheers. Like his father-in-law, Dabney was an exacting officer with a special affection for enlisted men. Dabney in Vietnam could read “Eat the apple; Fuck the Corps!” scrawled on a Marine private’s flak jacket—and laugh. He’d been there himself.
Almost a third of the men in India Company were draftees, a jolting departure from the traditional volunteers-only policy of the Marine Corps. Captain Dabney had been keeping charts on his men’s performance, reliability, and other measures of competency, and he’d decided there was not a dime’s difference between volunteers and draftees. A veteran gunnery sergeant might hawk and spit at such a conclusion, but a lot of old gunnies were dead—or had decided to get old by retiring early. Vietnam was proving to be a hard war for the Marines.
India Company, however, was in unusually good shape. Freed from the heatstroke temperatures of the lowlands and rigidly dosed every day with anti-malaria drugs, the unit was near full strength—a rarity in a war that hospitalized American soldiers with fever and fungus five times as often as with combat wounds. Dabney required his platoon leaders to line up the men each morning, place a dapsone anti-malaria pill and a swallow of water in each mouth, and then stand, waiting, “until his Adam’s apple bobbed.”
The Marine captain had several tasks today, beyond a renewed search for the missing radio and code sheets. He was to seek out the enemy force that had suddenly appeared on Hill 881 North, and he was to cloak the placement of a new recon team on the hill. The helicopter had proved to be both a curse and a blessing for the reconnaissance trade. The agile craft could reduce a recon team’s march to a target from months to minutes and, like an angel of the Lord, it could snatch the team out of almost hopeless situations. But the helicopter was a noisy herald for a furtive mission, and it always marked the time and place of a team’s arrival in enemy country. In recent weeks, the 26th Marines’ long-range reconnaissance patrols had required emergency extraction almost every time they went hunting. Today, an eight-man recon team—helilifted to Dabney’s hilltop from the combat base the night before—would tag along until India Company ended its search, then melt into the jungle to stay behind on 881 North.
Dabney did not know that he might meet two North Vietnamese Army divisions, one of them distinguished by its discipline and courage in the Hill Fights of last spring and the other a veteran of the historic battle of Dien Bien Phu. He walked cautiously anyway. Ninety percent of all combat casualties in Vietnam were inflicted on company-sized units—usually in the first few minutes of battle. “In other words, they bag ’em,” was the blunt explanation of Lieutenant General John A. Chaisson, a Marine from Maine who commanded Westmoreland’s Combined Operations Center in Saigon.
Putting his men into the tiger’s mouth was not a part of Dabney’s plan for January 20, 1968. He divided the company into two mutually supporting columns with his most experienced platoon leaders at the front. Lieutenant Brindley, who had covered this ground three days earlier on his rescue mission, was leading the right-hand column up a treeless ridgeline toward the summit of 881 North. The new recon team and a section of light mortars trailed his platoon. On the left, on a nearly parallel ridgeline, Lieutenant Fromme led a stronger column that included Dabney’s small command group and a reserve platoon of forty-five men under Second Lieutenant Michael H. Thomas.
It was not a quiet march.
High explosive shells from the 105mm howitzers marked the path to the top. Stealth and tactical finesse, traditional assets of the infantry, were often sacrificed to reconnaissance by fire in Vietnam in the hope that the falling shells might trigger an enemy ambush prematurely. Some officers compared the practice to whistling past a graveyard, but a heavy majority employed it whenever possible. Pocket radios blaring Beatles’ songs, frequent visits by helicopters with mail or hot food or curious battalion commanders, the loud whacking of machetes, and the constant How’s-it-going?-Seen-anything-yet? radio chit-chat of units in the field had pretty much eliminated stealth as an American tactic, anyway.
As Brindley moved forward on the right, enemy troops suddenly opened fire on his platoon with automatic rifles, heavy machine guns, and shoulder-fired rocket grenades. The point man fell in his tracks, mortally wounded. Caught on the open ridge with only waist-deep grass for concealment, Brindley’s men sought the cover of folds in the hillside as the enemy fire grew more intense.
From his vantage point on the left ridge, Dabney could see Brindley’s platoon pinned on the grassy hillside. He ordered the lieutenant by Radio to call for more artillery while Fromme moved up to outflank the enemy positions.
Fromme had hardly begun his dash up the left ridge when a single deafening volley of automatic rifle fire scythed through his platoon, dropping twenty men in less than thirty seconds, many of them with severe leg wounds. Fromme called in a medical evacuation helicopter only to see it shot out of the sky by a heavy machine gun on a ridgeline even farther to the west. With flames streaming from the engine cowling, the stricken aircraft careened over the lieutenant’s head and crashed. A crew chief leaped from the burning helicopter, breaking his leg when he fell near Fromme. He was carried inside friendly lines.
Over on the right, Brindley added 155mm howitzers to the explosives he was directing at the enemy positions. The ninety-five-pound artillery shells rose from the combat base more than five miles away, hurtled high overhead, then rushed out of the sky to slam the ridgeline with incredible force.
Brindley waited until the huge earth hammers subdued the enemy fire and then rose to his feet, shouting to his men. Zigzagging up the ridge, urging his men forward in the face of fire, the young lieutenant led a textbook infantry assault against the small knob of ground that blocked his path to the summit. With a final surge, his men broke into the North Vietnamese positions in a killing rage. They grenaded the most stubborn defenders, and loosed whole magazines of M-14 fire at the survivors, who reeled away to the east.
The brave charge over open ground, launched while shock waves from the artillery shells still rippled on the hillside, had cracked a superior enemy force and driven it from the field.
It was classic—and costly.
Tom Brindley was killed on the hilltop. The platoon sergeant and the squad leaders had fallen in the assault. The recon team, which had joined the charge up the ridge, had vanished. Sniper fire and steady bursts of a .50 caliber machine-gun fire beat around the Marines as they tumbled into the enemy’s fighting holes and old bomb craters. Brindley’s radio operator, a corporal, told Dabney by radio that he was the senior man still fighting. The captain sent his executive officer running for the ridge to take command of the platoon. Within minutes, he learned that the unit had suffered heavy casualties—too many to evacuate wounded and still prepare for a counterattack that was already forming on the ridge to the east.
Now it was Second Lieutenant Thomas’ turn to get into the fight.
With the eagerness that characterized many young American officers in Vietnam, he moved his reserve platoon quickly into action. Thomas had already organized the evacuation of Fromme’s wounded, led a rescue party to recover the crew in the downed helicopter, and helped to prepare Fromme’s defensive positions on the left ridge. With Dabney in his column, Thomas moved the reserve platoon back down the ridge, across five hundred meters of low ground, and up the right
ridge to reinforce Brindley’s battered unit.
Lieutenant Thomas darted from hole to hole on the small knob, urging the men to dig deeper and directing their fire toward the enemy-held ridge to the east. Then he joined Dabney in a shell hole which, because of the command group’s radio antennas, was attracting heavy fire. The captain had already hoisted his helmet on a stick—and seen it pierced by a high-powered rifle slug. Crouched in the hole together, the two officers learned that the missing reconnaissance team had been spotted in a brushy saddle between the captured knob and the major enemy strong point to the east.
The spine of the ridge had separated the recon team from Brindley’s platoon during the wild charge up the hill. The eight men had veered right and down the slope into a thick stand of brush and elephant grass. When the strong North Vietnamese force was driven from the ridge, it withdrew to the east—and rolled right over the tiny team. In a brief, savage close-quarters fight, all the team members had been killed or wounded. Under the guns of the enemy, they now lay dying in the saddle between the ridges.
Retrieving wounded comrades from the field of fire is a Marine Corps tradition more sacred than life. Lieutenant Thomas organized a rescue party, climbed over the lip of the crater, took two long strides down the ridge—and was killed instantly when a bullet hit him in the face. His platoon sergeant, Daniel Jessup, followed him over the crest and crawled down the slope under heavy fire. He located the lost team in the tangled brush, hoisted the most seriously wounded man on his back, and staggered back up the ridge. Gathering a half dozen volunteers, Jessup returned to the saddle to evacuate all the dead and wounded, then went back a third time alone to collect the team’s radio and rifles.
Captain Dabney had become the conductor of a great orchestra of death. From a shell hole, with a backpack radio for a baton, he cued a score of the big guns at the Khe Sanh Combat Base to join the heavy mortars, recoilless rifles, and artillery pieces that blasted the ground around him from the platform atop Hill 881 South. Now, he added the authoritative shriek of jet fighters, the boiling red-black roar of napalm, and the staccato thunder of cluster bombs to the cacophony on 881 North. Tumbling silver canisters of liquid fire had splashed on one enemy counterattack, melting the khaki-clad enemy troops like soft lead soldiers. Marine jets literally blasted the top off the enemy-held ridge to the east with five hundred-pound bombs.
This great storm of steel and fire explained why 185 men could set out to look for 10,000. This was the Götterdämmerung of firepower that was the hallmark of the U.S. military in Vietnam. Infantry captains in this war were as much the coordinators of supporting arms as they were the leaders of men. Dabney now crouched in a landscape that bucked and heaved and burned at his every gesture.
The official Marine Corps history pictures Dabney at this moment as a feisty, impatient field commander calling for reinforcements to roll up the chain of enemy defenses that had been broken by Brindley’s assault. The order to withdraw, says the history, “hit him like a thunderbolt” because it ruined the opportunity for a breakthrough.
Dabney remembers it differently.
The captain looked at his watch when the order came, and he was stunned to discover that it was five o’clock in the afternoon. India Company had battled the terrain and the North Vietnamese for twelve hard hours. Seven of his men were dead, including two platoon leaders, and thirty-five were wounded. Brindley’s riddled platoon was no longer effective. Fromme, who had not been engaged since the initial volley halved his platoon, was still isolated on the western ridge. Despite the bombs and shells and napalm, enemy fire was building all across his front. Grass fires ignited by napalm and tracer rounds had burned away much of the thin cover on the knob he held—and night was only hours away.
Saddened by their losses but satisfied with the hurt they had put on Mr. Charles, the men of India Company pulled back down the ridge carrying their dead and wounded, and began the steep climb to the bunkers and barbed wire on Hill 881 South.
Captain Dabney had no way of knowing that his Marines had just fired the opening shots in the largest battle Americans would fight in the Vietnam war. It would become a siege, a seventy-seven-day test of firepower and hand-to-hand combat that would utterly rivet the attention of the U.S. military command.
India Company counted almost 200 men present on the morning roster of January 20; only 19 would answer the roll call when the battle was over.
The looming struggle would cause General Westmoreland to weigh the use of “a few small nuclear weapons.”
It would drive a deeply worried President to the war room beneath the White House to stand in slippers and robe and sleepless fear, pawing through cablegrams from Saigon and praying he would not be fated to relive the dread thrills of the manly myth of his Texas childhood: the Alamo.
The battle would open raw sores in Army-Marine relations.
It would send ferrets of fear slipping into the sleep of American military professionals everywhere—sharp-edged dreams that echoed with shouts, the crash of hand grenades, the cries of desperate men. The fall of flags.
Dabney had lifted the curtain on the greatest stage play of the American war in Vietnam: the Siege of Khe Sanh.
2.
WESTMORELAND
When news came that battle had been joined at Khe Sanh, General William Childs Westmoreland permitted himself a deeper crinkling of the creases at the corner of his eyes, a twitch of the muscles that tightened the joining of his lips, a faint flaring of the wings of his patrician nose. This was the tight, satisfied smile of a professional. In Westmoreland, it was exultation. He had been preparing this battlefield, a honeyed bait at the very doorstep of the enemy, for almost six months, and now it seemed the North Vietnamese were going to take it. Perhaps Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese commander who was acclaimed a genius even in the Western world, was not so brilliant after all.
Trim, erect, surely born to his collar of stars, Westmoreland seemed like a man without nerve endings. He stood, sat, listened to peasants, briefed Presidents, viewed the dead and played tennis with a stiff, handsome, forceful air that he had practiced from a time before his teens. American military professionals call this aura “command presence,” and they value it above all other attributes in an officer. Westmoreland’s ambiance of authority and assured self-control and, most of all, a carriage that announced command, had moved him smoothly and swiftly past West Point classmates who had outscored him in every other test of leadership. He had paid for his primacy with a loss of spontaneity—a quarter-second delay before he laughed at a well-told story or turned to rebut a critic; his impulses always stopped on the road to expression to check with the Command Presence.
Westmoreland was at the pinnacle of a distinguished military career. His sense of place and pride of achievement showed in the glittering white uniforms and viceregal posture he wore to formal receptions in the Presidential Palace in Saigon, and in the glossy combat boots, and perfectly faded, tailored, and creased khaki fatigues he wore in the field. Even at his ease he stood with his chin lifted, his deep-set eyes focused intently, his head cocked squarely, his shoulders set, his back straight, his neck and knees locked firmly, his weight forward the faintest fraction—balanced, poised, ready, a man waiting to be photographed.
He had been First Captain of his class at the U.S. Military Academy, a signal honor that recognized his unique leadership potential and placed him in the elect company of Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur. He had won the Pershing Sword, West Point’s symbol of first rank in military proficiency.
Now, thirty-two years later, he commanded an American field army of a half million men, “the most mobile, best-equipped, highest-firepower army in the world—under any flag,” and directed a multinational force larger than the United Nations Army that had fought in Korea. His everyday decisions rippled the social and economic fabric of an entire nation, and he spent long, serious hours pondering South Vietnam’s problems with agriculture, sanitation, ance
stral piety, education, and transportation. He possessed, and exercised, the power of life and death in a land of sixteen million people whose language he neither spoke nor understood.
He was indeed an American viceregent in Asia. Time magazine had proclaimed him “Man of the Year.” He had addressed a joint session of the Congress, and had sat at the right hand of the President. Cabinet secretaries, senior senators and renowned foreign generals sought him out, respectfully, and film stars, football heroes, Broadway singers, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and Saigon passers-through amused and bemused him seven days a week with foolish flattery and earnest ignorance. The South Carolina legislature had saluted him with standing ovations last year, and friends and influential leaders in his home state had urged him to consider a campaign for the presidency.
His inevitable promotion to Chief of Staff of the United States Army, scheduled for next summer, would be a distinct anticlimax. Combat leadership is the apotheosis of a military career—not the backbiting and bumsitting of Washington. Westmoreland’s calling was war. The test of his life of training was battle, and like the very good soldier that he was, Westmoreland moved reflexively toward the sound of heaviest fighting.
It wasn’t that Westmoreland would not be good at budgets or bureaucracy. He had already proved himself in previous Pentagon tours, and he had demonstrated during a year at Harvard’s Graduate School of Business that Command Presence worked as well in boardrooms as it did on battlefields. Awed classmates later said he had so impressed the 166 business leaders in his seminar that he could have had a dozen top executive posts “at the snap of a finger.” He counted the most senior members of the House and Senate armed services committees—Democrats all—as his angels, and his friendship with House Republican Leader Gerald Ford had been forged high over Newfoundland in the hold of a transport plane that reeked of monkey shit.