Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  He was, in fact, the first perfect model of America’s post–World War II “compleat general, excelling not only as a combat leader, but a diplomat, technocrat, scholar, executive, and manager.”

  Handsome, church-going, square-jawed, straight as a ramrod, a recruiting poster of a general, Westmoreland would do very well at stroking congressmen and steeling Presidents. Stepping back from battlefield leadership in the midst of war, however, would be hard.

  Khe Sanh would be the capstone of his combat career.

  In a war that frustrated traditional analysis or easy measurement, Khe Sanh would be the single, dramatic blow that would cripple the North Vietnamese beyond any question or doubt. It would be the definitive victory, the perfect finishing stroke for his generalship in Vietnam, and he had prepared it painstakingly.

  Westmoreland had personally walked the ground at Khe Sanh. He had rehearsed the aerial resupply of the combat base, lengthened and improved the runway, tripled the size of the garrison, diverted intelligence assets to its environs, and moved the U.S. Army’s largest field guns into support range. At his fingertips, he had a stupefying abundance of aerial firepower which he had personally code-named Niagara “to evoke an image of cascading shells and bombs.”

  Within the past few weeks, Westmoreland had completed a massive amd complex movement of American troops into I Corps, the northernmost military region in South Vietnam. Using the code name Checkers for security, Westmoreland had begun last November to pull brigades and then divisions from around Saigon and out of the Highlands and jump them north. Now there were nearly fifty U.S. battalions in the north—half of all the American combat troops in Vietnam. Including the crack Marines of the Koreans’ “Blue Dragon” brigade and two of the very best South Vietnamese Army divisions, Westmoreland had a quarter million Free World Forces braced for battle in I Corps.

  In the last forty-eight hours, Westmoreland had moved his kings onto the board: 12,000 veterans of the 1st Air Cavalry Division and 5,000 paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division. Even now they were deploying in base camps only thirty minutes by helicopter from Khe Sanh. The northern end of I Corps had been the exclusive preserve of the U.S. Marines since the first days of the war, but for this climactic moment Westmoreland wanted the Army’s finest shock troops on hand.

  Westmoreland wanted this battle. He had planned it and prepared it. He had willed it.

  This was the week before Tet, the Vietnamese celebration of homecoming and thanksgiving that on January 30 would mark the end of the Year of the Goat and inaugurate the Year of the Monkey. Westmoreland planned for 1968 to be the Year of the Hammer. Khe Sanh would be his anvil.

  The general would have preferred a bolder finish to his years in Vietnam. He longed for a war of movement, of multidivisional thrusts into the enemy heartland. In just two days, Westmoreland would send to Washington a detailed proposal for the invasion of North Vietnam, a “daring amphibious hook” à la MacArthur, with Marines assaulting the beaches and Army troops leapfrogging ahead by helicopter to bypass enemy strong points, capture hidden guns, and destroy supply caches. Westmoreland was also reviewing his plan for a three-division strike deep into Laos to cut enemy supply routes, with Khe Sanh as the jumpoff point. He had dreamed of such a raid for four years. Now, with the 26th Marine Regiment as the spear point and the First Cav and 101st Airborne for mobile muscle, he had assembled the offensive striking force he wanted for the mission.

  The fact that American policy prohibited ground operations outside of South Vietnam neither slowed nor deterred Westmoreland’s preparations. He dismissed Washington’s phobia about Chinese intervention as “chimerical.” There had been many, many prohibitions when he arrived in Vietnam four years ago, and Westmoreland had removed them one by one. It was simply a matter of careful planning and persuasion, of demonstrating to reasonable men that certain military actions were absolutely essential to the successful prosecution of the war. The barriers fell more slowly than West­moreland wished, but they did fall. The “can do” general had not come to Vietnam to be undone. Westmoreland had survived, and even triumphed, under burdens that might have crushed lesser men.

  Three days after he arrived in South Vietnam in early 1964, a group of generals had deposed the generals who had deposed and murdered the country’s president a few months earlier. Coup followed coup. The “leaders” came and went every few months, or weeks, a carousel of colonels, a jumble of generals and civilians and singsong syllables, Duong Van Minh, Nguyen Khanh, Nguyen Xuan Oanh, Tran Van Huong, Phan Khac Suu, Phan Huy Quat, Lam Van Phat, Tranh Thien Khiem, Nguyen Cao Ky, Nguyen Van Thieu. . . . Westmoreland never even learned to pronounce their names before they were gone. He always seemed most comfortable with Duong Van Minh, “Big Minh” as he was called. The American general could find moments of peace at Big Minh’s villa, playing tennis perhaps, or sitting for an hour and talking as Minh tended his rare orchids and chattered affectionately with exotic pet birds.

  Westmoreland discovered that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was paralyzed by politics and riddled with corruption. The South Vietnamese specifically excluded from service their country’s most experienced battlefield commanders, the tough veterans who had led the Viet Minh fight against the French. The best-trained, best-equipped ARVN units—elite paratrooper and Marine brigades—were rarely used in battle. Military coup leaders kept these troops under their personal command, tucked in close around Saigon, with the primary mission of discouraging new coup attempts.

  Westmoreland sometimes found entire ARVN divisions standing down from military operations while their commanding officers, weary of war, retired to the mountain resort of Dalat “for a rest.” The American general, a highly motivated officer who had risen by achievement to the top of a demanding profession, now dealt with division commanders in their twenties, with corps commanders who had been table waiters in Paris, and with generals who vaulted to command through well-placed uncles. Seven thousand ARVN soldiers walked away from their units every month.

  American confidence in ARVN was stored in pressurized tanks in Westmoreland’s headquarters in Saigon. The general, worried that his elite ARVN honor guard might bolt in the face of enemy attack, or even join an enemy attack, had fitted his rooms with hidden nozzles that could fill the building instantly with clouds of disabling gas. Only Westmoreland and his immediate staff knew where to find gas masks. Westmoreland soon replaced his ARVN guards with Nungs, slender, dusky-skinned ethnic Chinese who had fled North Vietnam and who now fought for money in South Vietnam. Many tribes and nations served the Americans as mercenaries in this war; the Nungs were considered the toughest, and the best-paid.

  Buffeted by coups and corruption and incompetence among the people he had come to assist—“like trying to push spaghetti,” he complained—and baffled by the glottal song of their language, Westmoreland sought every opportunity to escape Saigon. He reveled in the more familiar truths of combat, and he wanted to get a feel for the pitch of the hills, the heat of the lowlands, the thickness of the jungle, the mood of his soldiers, and the skill of the enemy. He talked for long hours with Sir Robert Thompson, the acknowledged British expert on anti-guerrilla operations, and he even flew to Malaysia to see for himself the terrain on which the British had mixed police and military operations to quell a jungle-based Communist insurgency. He read Sun Tzu, a seminal thinker in Chinese military philosophy, and he analyzed the French military effort in Indochina.

  Westmoreland diplomatically consulted with Vietnamese military commanders during the early months of 1964, but his attention was clearly focused on Americans. Even before he took command, Westmoreland had decided that only American troops could save Vietnam; the Vietnamese were obviously not up to the job.

  He never hesitated to go to the most isolated or dangerous outposts in his search for first-hand information. During his familiarization tour, enemy machine gun bullets had ripped through his plane as it lifted from the runway at A Shau, wounding both pilots and four
of the passengers. Westmoreland did not believe, however, as do some generals, that Command Presence confers immortality. He would not walk erect on the field of fire, nor foolishly land his helicopter in the midst of battle.

  He knew that one of the risks of his profession was death, and he accepted it, without bravado. He believed in showing himself to his men, in sharing the hardships of combat duty, even if only for a few minutes in a mostly symbolic way. He gave his trust to new commanders, he recognized the faces of old comrades, he listened attentively to lieutenants—and he remembered their names at second meetings, weeks later.

  Westmoreland first visited Khe Sanh in his earliest months in Vietnam. Centered on a sturdy concrete bunker built by the French, Khe Sanh was then a tiny outpost defended by a dozen U.S. Army Green Berets and several hundred Montagnard tribesmen. The wind from Laos sighed in the groves of coffee trees and rippled the nine shades of green that clothed the hills and flatland. He was tremendously impressed by the place:

  “The critical importance of the little plateau was immediately apparent. . . . Khe Sanh could serve as a patrol base for blocking enemy infiltration from Laos; a base for [secret border-crossing] operations to harass the enemy in Laos; an air strip for reconnaissance planes surveying the Ho Chi Minh Trail; a western anchor for defenses south of the DMZ; and an eventual jumping-off point for ground operations to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”

  This was bold vision in early 1964, when ARVN was crumbling like a cookie, and a scattered 16,000 American soldiers were restricted to advice and support.

  The war was different then. The senior United States military advisers in Saigon worked nine-to-five in those days, water skiing on the Saigon River in the bright afternoons of summer, weekending on the white sand beaches of the South China Sea, or relaxing in the colonial ambiance of the Cercle Sportif, an aging tennis and swim club near the Presidential Palace. And in a deadly game that applauds a sudden knee to the groin, there were even “rules”: American planes were prohibited from bombing enemy troops unless the planes had South Vietnamese student pilots on board—thus qualifying the bombing runs as “training flights.”

  Westmoreland’s teenage son, nicknamed “Rip,” led packs of his pals on spirited motorbike chases through the streets of Saigon. Once a week, all the American kids in the neighborhood gathered at the Westmoreland villa to watch movies flown in from the States. The general’s vivacious wife, Kitsy, began to organize a social schedule that reflected the imminence, and eminence, of his Command.

  It was all a mirage, and none knew it better than Westmoreland.

  South Vietnam was falling apart. It might not last long enough for Westmoreland to complete the logistical buildup he was planning. He was already thinking of support for more than a million troops, of sandbags and survey equipment, tons of concrete and megatons of ammunition. The books he carried into meetings with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara that spring and summer included numbers on the miles of cable that were needed, recommended troop levels, bombing proposals, new airfields and ports, even BTUs of air conditioning. He outlined his needs carefully, buttressing them with facts and figures, and stripping the requests of any hint of emotion. He had learned well the lessons of politics and management, and he wanted there to be no misunderstanding about his plans for the war. His careful preparation and attention to detail, his readiness for every contingency, were the very strengths that had propelled him to high rank.

  Another asset was his obedience to the code of American generals: “conform, avoid error, shun controversy, forego dissent.” Westmoreland listened impassively when Gen. Paul D. Harkins, the commander he would soon replace, told McNamara that another six months should pretty well wrap up hostilities in Vietnam. West­moreland knew it would take longer than that to deliver the cement he would need to build the ports that would be necessary to support the Army that would have to be fielded if this war was to be won. It wasn’t necessary to correct or criticize the general; it was enough to get the job done properly.

  Westmoreland took command in June of 1964.

  By July, U.S. troop levels had climbed to 21,000 men and Westmoreland’s civilian flank in Saigon had been secured by Maxwell D. Taylor, the new American ambassador to Vietnam. Taylor was a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a paratroop commander who had won the admiration of his country for both leadership and literacy. Not incidentally, he was a friend and mentor who had helped shape Westmoreland’s military career. Taylor had looked up from his own guns during the 1943 battles in Sicily and seen an eager, aggressive artillery officer who was willing to scout enemy positions personally and who kept his guns in first-class condition. Impressed, he later offered Westmoreland a colonel’s eagles as executive officer for the 101st Airborne Division’s artillery. In the years since, Taylor had been generous with career advice, key assignments, and supporting words in important Washington councils.

  In August, Westmoreland stood stiffly, a lodgepole pine of pride as Ambassador Taylor on one side and his wife Kitsy on the other pinned a fourth star to his squared shoulders. Now, he was truly General Westmoreland, Commander, United States Military Assistance Command, Viet Nam. COMMUSMACV. It was a unique professional achievement, and it confirmed his preeminent place among American military leaders. Westmoreland privately regretted that he did not possess absolute control of all U.S. naval, air, and even State Department assets in the Pacific, but he was mellowed enough by his ascendancy to remark that sharing power “was not a thing for which I was going to fall on my sword.”

  Three days after Westmoreland’s ceremony of stars, American fighter bombers roared out of the rising sun to blast North Vietnam’s harbor facilities and destroy its tiny navy. It was a piece of cake, like banging a toad with a stick. Many of the planes made several bombing runs before turning back toward U.S. Navy carriers in the Tonkin Gulf. It was announced as a punishment raid, an eye-for-an-eye reply to the torpedo boats that had attacked U.S. Navy destroyers operating innocently in the Gulf. Outraged at such Communist effrontery, the U.S. Senate had extended war powers to President Lyndon Johnson with only two dissenting votes.

  The rest of 1964 was a catalogue of disaster.

  Coups and counter-coups paralyzed the government and the armed forces of Vietnam. The primitive people of the mountains, the Montagnards who were abused and exploited by the Vietnamese even in the midst of war, declared themselves “neutral.” U.S. Army Green Berets, who relied on these people for soldiers and reports on enemy movements, struggled to win them back. Enemy mortars blasted a huge airfield near Saigon, destroying American planes. University students and Buddhist monks and nuns clogged the streets with demonstrators to protest South Vietnamese war policies and growing American influence. On Christmas Eve, the Viet Cong exploded a bomb at the front door of the Army’s Brink Hotel in downtown Saigon, killing two Americans and wounding fifty-eight. Tile-roofed, treelined Saigon was changing, and Kitsy and the kids joined the exodus of American dependents.

  In the last week of 1964 the Viet Cong 9th Division captured a town east of Saigon, then ambushed and all but annihilated two separate relief columns. The government’s control slipped to a dwindling third of the population, and the first intelligence reports came in with word that North Vietnamese troops might enter the war to hasten its end.

  Still, the South Vietnamese seemed more intent on barracks politics than battlefield peril. Westmoreland spent many valuable hours trying to find out who was in charge, and more hours pleading with malcontents not to kill the current incumbent. A teetotaler, he repressed disgust while applauding the imaginative American junior officers who helped preserve a semblance of order by drinking putative coup leaders under the table.

  General Harkins had dealt with these frustrations by not seeing the problems, a common defense mechanism in Indochina. Later in this war, Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk would pretend that the North Vietnamese were not building military bases in the regions of his country nearest South Vietnam, and then he
pretended that the United States was not bombing these areas. The North Vietnamese couldn’t complain because, after all, they were pretending they weren’t there.

  Westmoreland had not come to Vietnam to pretend.

  In January 1965, he junked the restrictive “rules” that forced his bomber pilots to carry South Vietnamese air cadets.

  In February, he insisted on the immediate deployment of the first American combat units in Vietnam. “The strength, armament, professionalism, and activity of the Viet Cong have increased to the point where we can ill afford any longer to withhold available military means,” he declared; only American combat troops could turn the tide of battle.

  Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, the Honolulu-based commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, and General Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strongly endorsed a proposal to ship three combat divisions (about 50,000 soldiers) to Vietnam, but Westmoreland more accurately sensed the uneasiness in Washington. “I hope[d] to keep the number of U.S. ground forces to a minimum,” he said, winning approval for “only two battalions.”

  In March, just before two battalions of Marines waded ashore to the whirr of TV cameras and the giggle of bikinied girls, West­moreland cabled a more detailed request to Washington. He urgently needed, he wrote, more planes, more helicopters, more engineers and logistics people, 50,000 foreign troops to bolster the sagging South Vietnamese, and most urgently, seventeen new battalions of U.S. combat troops.

  In April, Westmoreland won approval for his seventeen combat battalions, a force of 80,000 men in all—including the U.S. Army’s new 1st Air Cavalry Division and some of South Korea’s toughest troops. These were the best of the best. It was an excellent beginning, he felt.