Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  Westmoreland was even more pleased by an important change in the “rules.” No longer would American troops be restricted to defensive positions around major airfields and bases. Now they could strike at the enemy first, disrupting his attacks before they could be launched. It was the only proper role for infantry—and for a commanding general whose slogan was “Every Man A Tiger!” This was the kind of restriction that might have prompted Westmoreland to resign, but the issue was never drawn. Once the simple truths of combat and maneuver were explained, even the most pacific civilians could understand. Westmoreland never doubted his ability to make these truths self-evident.

  Now, he renewed his request for B-52 bombers and for the Army’s biggest guns, 175mm artillery pieces that had never before been used in combat. Western generals for more than two hundred years had believed that the best test of Asian troops was “a whiff of the grape.” The innocent phrase camouflaged carnage: the firing of cannonsful of lead balls, steel fragments, and junk metal—grapeshot—into massed troops at close range. It had come to mean, more generally, the application of massive firepower to enemy infantry. The big 175mm guns could fire shells over the horizon and the B-52s, flying so high that onboard computers considered the speed and direction of the turning of the earth to assure accuracy, could deliver twenty-seven tons of bombs. Each.

  In the first week of June, Westmoreland requested forty-four combat battalions, coolly warning his civilian superiors that these 200,000 soldiers would only provide a “stopgap” force—even with the B-52s. “We must be prepared for a long war which will probably involve increasing numbers of U.S. troops,” he said.

  Westmoreland now had the feel of his command, an understanding of his unique prerogatives. No military leader of consequence was closer to the action in Vietnam than Westmoreland, and none was prepared to question or criticize his judgments—not when young Americans were fighting and dying. The civilians in Washington, though occasionally seized by what Westmoreland sniffingly called “field-marshal psychosis,” knew the limits of their understanding of combat. General Taylor reported through State Department channels from the ambassador’s office that the war was being lost. Admiral Sharp in Honolulu and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington supported Westmoreland’s every request. Defense Secretary McNamara asked hard questions, but went right to work when he received quick, straight answers. Westmoreland knew now that he could ask for ten thousand tons of plastic explosive or a dozen chromium widgets and the answer would not be Why? but How soon do you need them?

  If there was a voice for deliberation in this torrent of men and supplies, it was Westmoreland’s own. “Full speed ahead types would be helpless in Vietnam,” he said. He had not yet completed the logistical base necessary to support a huge American force, and he shared President Johnson’s concern that the American people were not yet ready to commit themselves to war. He hoped for some form of national mobilization but opposed a call-up of National Guard or Reserve forces because he believed public support was critical to success in Vietnam. He had always invested some hours in building civilian-military rapport in every post where he had held command, and he once proposed a course for the Army War College on “The Influence of Public Opinion on U.S. Military Posture.”

  Even his superiors listened intently now, for Westmoreland had become “a forceful player who knew what he wanted, how much to ask for, and how much not to ask for.”

  When his request for forty-four combat battalions was approved, Westmoreland asked for twenty-four more. The American investment to date, he said, could only keep the war from being lost. To move from a holding action to “the win phase” of his strategy, he would need 275,000 U.S. combat troops.

  By the late summer of 1965, Westmoreland could look back on twelve months of remarkable progress and compare himself favorably, not with General Harkins, but with Eisenhower and Bradley. Hardly more than a year ago, a few thousand U.S. advisers had watched helplessly as the ARVN suffered weekly routs. American firepower had been leashed by rules that made a mockery of war. Now, 200,000 soldiers and Marines were in the Pacific pipeline or already ashore, poised for operation in the interior. Fighter bombers flailed the enemy homeland six hundred times a week and B-52 Stratofortresses filled the mountains with the thunder of bombs. Fifty-one thousand civilian contractors earned oilfield wages to build, faster than they had ever been built before, seaports and warehouse complexes and airfields and power plants and satellite communication systems. Westmoreland would grumble in retirement that “gradualism” had hobbled American power in Vietnam, but right now he could reflect that he had put his troops ashore in less time than it had taken the United States to enter the war against Hitler. In a single year, he had personally transformed the Vietnam war from a feeble losing struggle to the largest test of American arms since Korea.

  Westmoreland was utterly confident that American combat troops would do the job.

  It was not difficult to find American soldiers and officers in these early days, and later, who believed that racial superiority assured victory, who spoke with “a Caucasian arrogance about the Vietnamese ability,” who believed “that when pitted against American troops, the Vietnamese would have to give in. . . .”

  Westmoreland was not one of them. He knew the Viet Cong to be a tough and dedicated enemy, and it had been during his military maturation that Western armies had bowed in battle to Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese arms. No, Westmoreland’s confidence was rooted in richer soil: the absolute certainty that American troops would go into combat with overwhelming, unconquerable superiority in “firepower, mobility, and flexibility.” All of his planning and preparation focused on guaranteeing these advantages to U.S. forces in Vietnam.

  Enthusiasm about the arrival of “the first team” was infectious. American military officers shared an outspoken confidence in the outcome, and so Admiral Sharp was being dutiful, not doubtful, when he called Westmoreland from Honolulu to inquire about plans for the 1st Air Cavalry to move into the Highlands, the same region of mountains and jungle and narrow dirt roads that had swallowed an elite French armored unit eleven years before.

  Westmoreland was ready. He knew all about Groupement Mobile 100.

  A thumbed copy of Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy lay on the general’s night table, beside Mao Tse-tung’s musings on war and the translations of important articles by Vo Nguyen Giap clipped from North Vietnamese military magazines. Fall’s fine book about French military woes in Indochina was must reading for thoughtful American officers, and Westmoreland had studied the dramatic account of Groupement Mobile 100.

  Americans had written the first chapter in the story of the fated French unit. France had been able to spare only a single battalion for the United Nations forces in Korea because of its own costly war in Indochina. Fighting beside the U.S. Army’s 2nd Division, the battalion had “covered itself with glory” in the heavy battles at Chipyong-ni, Wonju, and Arrowhead Ridge. Very professional, very cool, seasoned with Algerian veterans, the battalion had once held the line against a Communist Chinese division for four days.

  At two o’clock one winter morning, with temperatures far below zero, the battalion shivered in foxholes hacked out of frozen rice paddies near Chipyong-ni. Suddenly, Chinese assault troops rushed across the creaking snow to the sound of bugles. Someone in the French lines cranked a World War II hand siren into a screeching yowl that obliterated the signal trumpets. A single squad of French and Algerian troops waited until the Chinese closed to within twenty yards, then leaped from their holes with long bayonets flashing at the end of their rifles, shrieked like madmen, and charged—a Berber banzai.

  The Chinese stopped in shock, turned, and fled back into the icy darkness. The French “went back to smoking and telling jokes.”

  After the fighting in Korea, the battalion moved to Saigon where it was greatly expanded by the addition of reserves, an armored cavalry squadron, an artillery group, a shock force of jungle combat veterans, and compan
ies of experienced Cambodian, Vietnamese, and other French colonial troops. Rechristened Groupement Mobile 100, the force numbered 3,498 men, but the steel core of the regiment was the proud Korea Battalion.

  The Viet Minh welcomed GM 100 to the Highlands on the first of February, 1954, with an ambush of a strong French patrol. Six months later, minced again and again in bloody roadside ambushes, GM 100 had ceased to exist. It had lost all of its artillery, eighty-five percent of its vehicles, and half its automatic weapons. It had even been forced to abandon its dead and wounded. At the finish, only fifty-four men of the Korea Battalion’s proud one thousand were still on their feet.

  Westmoreland had no intention of repeating French errors.

  There was much, much more than a decade of difference between GM 100 and the United States Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division, between the battles of 1954 and 1965. This was going to be an American war. It was actually difficult for U.S. officers not to be patronizing when they talked about the French effort.

  The French had tried to hold all of Indochina—Laos, Cambodia, and the two Vietnams—with 180,000 troops and limited logistical support. Westmoreland would be working one-fourth of the territory with 1.3 million troops, “a battlefield mobility heretofore unknown,” and a cornucopian commitment of supplies.

  Westmoreland would have jumped from a plane without a parachute before he would have sent an armored column like GM 100 down a dirt road in the Highlands. He would first defoliate and bulldoze a cleared strip one hundred yards deep on both sides of the road, pave vital sections to make enemy mining more difficult, provide a complete umbrella of artillery, aerial rocket and bomber support and, perhaps, peel back the topsoil and sow the earth with gravel mines and tear gas crystals.

  This was the American way of war.

  There had been a moment in the dying of GM 100 when a desperate commander, tanks and trucks burning all around him, had pleaded for a helicopter to evacuate his wounded so he could lead the fighting survivors on an attempted breakout on foot. The request so enraged the French zone commander that he went to the radio room himself to shout through the crackling static: “You carry your wounded like everyone else!”

  Westmoreland had decided early that one of the absolute guarantees of soldiering in Vietnam, for Americans, would be instant, first-class medical care. The French had a dozen helicopters in their war; the Americans had thousands. They whisked casualties from battlefield to operating room so swiftly that surgeons saved eighty-eight out of every eighty-nine wounded soldiers.

  Battle casualties, however, accounted for only seventeen percent of American hospitalizations. The real drain on combat manpower was malaria, and mysterious fevers, and respiratory diseases, diarrhea, funguses, leech bites, poison plants, and infections that flowered quickly in the oppressive heat and humidity.

  Disease had drained the Vietnamese people since the birth of the mosquito, but disease had also been an ally. Vietnamese history celebrates epic victories over superior Chinese forces in the tenth and thirteenth centuries—campaigns remembered in Chinese histories mostly for “the perpetual heat and malaria.” In 1789, a French expeditionary force marching toward Saigon simply “melted away, succumbing to the climate.” The French came again, to Da Nang in 1858, but sailed away eighteen months later after digging a thousand new graves for victims of “the pestilential harbor.” A Chinese army, “ravaged by malaria and other diseases,” pulled out of Vietnam’s northernmost provinces in 1870. Sickness forced two of France’s commanders in the First Indochina War to relinquish their commands. Now the beautiful, deadly land was sapping American strength with “the most formidable medical problems . . . in U.S. history.”

  Westmoreland demanded the most urgent research into medicines for malaria, which was exacting “an unacceptable drain on combat manpower.” Within months, his insistence on tougher field discipline, weekly chloroquinine-primaquine pills, and daily dapsone doses cut his malaria losses “to a militarily-acceptable level.” New miracle drugs foiled the fungi. To beat the heat, Westmoreland simply enclosed millions of cubic feet of Vietnam’s mugginess and cooled it to a comfortable seventy-two degrees with air-conditioning. The temperature was pushed below freezing in another 2.5 million cubic feet so that steaks and other foods from the United States could be kept fresh frozen.

  This was the American way of war.

  • • •

  SOLDIERING FOR THE world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation came naturally to Westmoreland. His father, who found banking “a gold mine” even in the midst of the Great Depression, had given his son a seventy-day tour of Europe when he was fifteen years old, a new, green Chevrolet for a high school graduation present in 1931, a personal checking account—with money—for his college years, and a new Oldsmobile to celebrate graduation from West Point.

  There were servants in the Westmoreland household, and thus the leisure to sculpt a more perfect Command Presence. In the soft South Carolina summers, the young cadet paddled to the far edge of a quiet lake in the hills and shouted commands at the shore until the authority in his voice made the very trees stand taller. He excelled at polo as a young lieutenant at Fort Sill, and donned a pink coat every Sunday to ride to hounds with the senior officers. Transferred to Hawaii in 1939 as an artillery officer, Westmoreland practiced his logarithms, polished his polo, and surfed from the flawless beaches as Poland and France and Norway fell to German arms. His wedding to an eighteen-year-old Cornell University freshman was so beautiful it made the front cover of Cosmopolitan.

  Westmoreland’s experience in war, like that of nearly all his contemporaries, was in Big War: fleets of ships and landing craft, four-hundred-mile fronts that rocked with the concussion of big guns, tens of thousands of paratroopers spilling from planes in continental assaults, armored columns fighting across the plains of Europe. He had won his first medal by pushing his 155mm guns through mountains and cold rain to help stem the German breakthrough at Kasserine Pass, and he won another decoration for rushing troops across the Rhine to exploit the capture of the bridge at Remagen. As an administrator in occupied Germany, he “oversaw almost every phase of life” among the Germans, sometimes riding regally through his domain in a two-horse barouche.

  Westmoreland had actually lived the fantasy of West Point cadets: battle ribbons from North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany; post-war command of an elite paratrooper regiment; instructor at the Command and General Staff College; secretary of the General Staff; qualified for command in nuclear warfare; student of helicopters; management courses at Harvard; youngest major general in the Army; and three unforgettable years as Superintendent of West Point itself, the shrine of the United States Army.

  He kept his body in excellent physical condition, always picked his parachute from the enlisted men’s table, kept current with weapons developments, exploited the vast improvements in modern communications, and understood how to tap into the innovative technology of American industry.

  He honed these military skills for use against Russia. Westmore­land’s generation of generals rehearsed wars with Germany and France and Panama and Egypt, and with Mexico and Canada, too, as part of their contingency planning; the general’s art is readiness. Westmoreland himself had twice begun preparations for actual combat missions into Venezuela and Cuba, but these ultimately false alarms never diverted attention from Russia.

  It was in Europe, against the Soviet Union, that the textbook and table wars were fought. The problems chosen for study in U.S. military colleges, the forward placement of American strategic stockpiles, the design of weapons and the direction they aim, the focus of intelligence, the destinations of airlift rehearsals, the programs inside the missile computers, and even the psychic justifications for war all centered on the Soviet Union U.S. Navy admirals wargamed with Japan in the 1920s and 1930s but never with such certainty as U.S. Army generals wargamed with Russia.

  Westmoreland was nearly killed once during a practice combat assault when a whipping steel buckle kn
ocked him unconscious in his parachute harness. Struggling to his feet, he saw the battle dress and concerned looks on the men gathered around him.

  “Are we fighting the Russians?” he asked. His men led him away for hospitalization for a severe concussion.

  Vietnam was not the plains of Europe and Viet Cong ambushes were not the same things as Warsaw Pact treachery, but Westmoreland knew only how to give his best. Westmoreland’s best would be war the American way.

  First, he limited the tour of duty to one year. The same limitation had agitated General George Washington so greatly that he turned in despair to those who made it and cried: “Good God, gentlemen, our cause is lost!” Westmoreland was justifiably more confident in the combat readiness of his troops. His concern, even in the earliest days, was popular support for the war: “I hoped the one-year tour would extend the nation’s staying power by forestalling public pressure to ‘bring the boys home.’ ”

  Each soldier had a Date of Estimated Return from Over Seas that was precisely 365 days after his arrival in Vietnam (except for Marines, who served thirteen months instead of twelve). Americans in Vietnam carried DEROS calendars like talismans, inking them on flak jackets, taping them inside helmets, tucking them in Bibles and tacking them on the walls of bunkers, but DEROS had really been designed as a time-certain guarantee for moms: “Your boy’ll be home in less than a year, ma’am.”

  Next, Westmoreland built a one-week vacation into the tour of duty to break the tedium, or terror, of a soldier’s year in Vietnam. Every American soldier could count on a week in Hawaii with his radiant wife and a baby daughter he’d never seen; or seven days of sensuality in the steamed and scented baths of Taiwan; or maybe an awed trip to the countryside of Thailand to see the great Buddhas; or, perhaps, long, languid evenings nuzzling sheilahs on an Australian beach. Ten romantic Asian capitals beckoned the warriors. Every combat battalion had travel agents to handle all the plane and hotel reservations for Hong Kong, Bangkok, Sydney, Tokyo, Manila, Singapore, Taipei, Kuala Lampur, Penang, and Honolulu. U.S. Army advisers groaned at ARVN’s inability to account for 7,000 AWOLs every month, but Westmoreland’s Rest and Recreation program took 7,000 U.S. soldiers from their units every week.