Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  Westmoreland ordered a generous distribution of medals and decorations and combat badges, because he believed with Napoleon that “a bolt of ribbon wins many battles.”

  American troops enjoyed nickel beer, a radio station with the latest hit records, telephone calls to home, high-interest savings accounts, and even prime-time TV, but Westmoreland was most satisfied with his efforts to make life easier on the fighting line.

  “Combat units knew that mail from home would arrive on a scheduled basis and could be read while enjoying hot meals,” he said. “The men did like it, I’m sure.”

  Providing these amenities in an undeveloped, tropical country more than ten thousand miles from the United States required an unusually elaborate complex of logistics installations. Westmoreland had found only a single deep-water port and three small airfields when he came to Vietnam in 1964. In a little over three years he built seven deep-water ports with thirty-two berths and eight major airports with fifteen jet runways. The countryside had been smoothed for airfields in many hundreds of places so that men and supplies could be moved quickly to almost any corner of South Vietnam. Eleven million cubic feet of covered storage provided protection from the monsoon rains.

  Ships full of hand grenades, corn on the cob, napalm, wristwatches, artillery shells, pigs, plastic explosive, lawnmower engines, rifle ammunition, tank parts, and C-rations were unloading one million tons a month by late 1967.

  It was expensive. The United States had been spending about a half billion dollars a year in Vietnam when Westmoreland arrived to replace General Harkins; Westmoreland’s tab for 1968 would run closer to thirty billion dollars.

  The tidal wave of American dollars swamped the Vietnamese economy. Whores earned more than cabinet ministers, and shoe­shine boys more than veteran ARVN sergeants. In an attempt to soak up the U.S. dollars before they reached the local economy, Westmoreland stocked post-exchange shelves with an extraordinary range of luxury items:

  It was a stroll down Fifth Avenue, a gaudy combination of Saks, Bonwit Teller, Hammacher Schlemmer, and Abercrombie and Fitch. The shelves were crammed with sheer panty hose, lingerie, imported perfumes, diamonds and rubies, fine china, radios, portable and console television sets, liquor, mink stoles, sable wraps, and nearly everything the American soldier fighting a tough guerrilla war could possibly require, including Napoleon’s favorite brandy, Courvoisier, at $1.80 a fifth.

  But firepower, not fine china, was at the center of Westmoreland’s philosophy of war. It was the foundation of his tactics in Vietnam, and he came to believe that his particular applications of firepower had established immutable principles of warfare as important as the ones written in Clausewitz. It was because of his confidence in firepower that he looked forward to a North Vietnamese assault on Khe Sanh.

  From the bellies and bomb racks of thousands of American planes fell 250-pound bombs, 500-pound bombs, 750-pound bombs, 1,000-pound Swimming Pool Maker bombs, rockets, napalm cannisters, impact-activated Destroyer mines, Cluster Bomb Units that burst open in midfall to scatter hundreds of softball-sized bomblets over a wide area, and the incredible Daisy Cutter—a 15,000-pound leviathan bomb that drifted silently down by parachute to explode with obliterating force a few feet above ground level. Long before Khe Sanh loomed as a battle, bombing tonnages in Vietnam had surpassed bombing tonnages against Germany in World War II.

  Westmoreland was also using bullets faster than any previous military commander in history.

  The Huey “Hog,” a no-passenger helicopter stuffed with linked ammunition for its flexed machine guns and underslung with pods of rockets and belts of 40mm grenades, entered battle “with the most hellish firepower ever assembled on so small a machine.” Chopper pilots joked that their ships actually backed up in midair when they fired all guns, but on the eve of Khe Sanh Westmoreland was beginning to replace the Hog with faster helicopters named Cobras that carried seventy-five percent more firepower.

  The most spectacular expenditure of ammunition spouted from the side doors of recycled C-47 cargo planes that had been fitted with electric Gatling guns. There was not a soldier in Vietnam who had not stood open-mouthed in awe while watching this plane hose the earth with curving streams of redgold fire—eighteen thousand bullets at a burst. It was called “Spooky.”

  Soldiers themselves had become firepower machines. The American practice of aimed fire had died in Korea, where analysts discovered that an astounding number of young soldiers never fired their weapons at all—even in life-threatening combat crises. During the last decade, U.S. training procedures had concentrated on encouraging soldiers to shoot, and the recent changeover to the fully-automatic M-16 rifle was one more step in the multiplication of the American foot soldier’s firepower.

  Westmoreland’s way of war was costly, but because it was designed to reduce American casualties it found ready acceptance in Washington. “The thing we value most deeply is not money, but men,” said Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. “We have multiplied the capability of our men [with firepower]. It’s expensive in dollars, but cheap in life.”

  If it had been possible, Westmoreland would have removed Americans from the field of fire altogether—and fought the war with technology and firepower. He was fascinated by the potential of the automated battlefield where the enemy was detected by unmanned sensors and destroyed by distant guns; he knew the names and effects of exotic chemicals; and he had a technician’s curiosity about new battlefield equipment.

  Westmoreland seeded the clouds over Laos to try to make it rain more heavily on enemy road systems. He experimented with the chemical alteration of mud molecules in the A Shau Valley to make the footing more gooey in the enemy’s main supply depot. Converted cargo planes flew nineteen thousand defoliation missions for Westmoreland—spraying Agent Orange to denude hardwood trees and mangrove forests, Agent White to clear the underbrush around American bases, and Agent Blue to kill young rice plants. He used nausea gas, tear gas, and pepper gas in fog form to fill enemy tunnels, and in pellet or crystal form to make parts of the countryside uninhabitable.

  Battlefield adaptations of space-age inventions gave Westmoreland overwhelming advantages in his search for elusive enemy soldiers. Starlight scopes provided almost daylike vision in the night. Particle detectors tracked invisible carbon trails through the sky to tiny, smokeless, cooking fires. Heliborne “people sniffers” tested the air for concentrations of urine or sweat molecules to find hidden enemy camps. Mountaintop searchlights illuminated the countryside, and acoustic and seismic detectors concealed in the jungle broadcast enemy troop movements to U.S. intelligence. Radio-intercept equipment, of such extraordinary sophistication that it was wired for demolition, eavesdropped on the enemy’s most secret conversations.

  Aerial photographers snapped night pictures by the light of electronically fired flashbulbs with the power of 4.5 million candles. Photographic analysis was so advanced that good technicians could locate wire antennas from great altitudes. One special film pinpointed camouflage by detecting chlorophyll loss in the cut foliage. Another was so sensitive to heat emanations it could photograph warm truck engines through double thicknesses of jungle canopy. Three million feet of film and prints moved through the development trays in U.S. laboratories in Saigon each month.

  Polaroid cameras, tape recorders, Xerox copiers, and printing presses greatly improved American psychological warfare skills. Within hours of the capture or defection of an enemy soldier, psywar experts could print and airdrop twenty-five thousand safe conduct passes to the soldier’s comrades—and include a photograph and testimonial about the deserter’s fair treatment in American hands. Westmoreland even haunted the dreams of enemy soldiers with airborne tape recordings of children crying for their fathers, and the ineffably mournful songs of Vietnamese war widows.

  Westmoreland’s way of war—with 300,000 American soldiers—reversed the tide of battle in South Vietnam. In the closing days of 1966, he met with Secretary McNamara and set new goals that
would see U.S. troop levels rise to a half million over the next year.

  Confident in his growing strength, Westmoreland moved to the offensive in the first days of 1967 with the huge military operations called Cedar Falls and Junction City.

  Cedar Falls was aimed at the Iron Triangle, a featureless patchwork of woods, scrub jungle, and paddyland that lay in a fold of the Saigon River just thirty miles northwest of the capital city. It seemed incredible to American civilians that enemy military forces could establish base camps so close to the cities, but American soldiers knew it to be true. Combat troops in the U.S. Army’s 25th and 1st Infantry divisions shook their heads from side to side when they talked about The Triangle, as though massaging a bad memory. The woods were honeycombed with tunnels and bunker systems, and the roads and trails rigged with boobytraps and ambush sites. Casualties on Iron Triangle patrols were as predictable as malaria incidence, yet even the most persistent efforts failed to dislodge the enemy. “No one has ever demonstrated more ability to hide his installations than the Viet Cong,” Westmoreland said. “They were human moles.”

  Westmoreland decided it was time to clean house—permanently. He had traveled to New York City before he left for Vietnam to consult with the Army’s fallen and fading hero, General Douglas MacArthur. The old general was unhappy about Americans fighting in an Asian land war, and he had told Westmoreland that “scorched earth” tactics might be the only road to victory.

  The centerpiece of Cedar Falls was the removal of 6,000 villagers and the destruction of their towns. Westmoreland had finally despaired of establishing rapport with these South Vietnamese people. “Having undergone long foreign occupations, Chinese, French, Japanese, the people are strongly xenophobic,” he explained. Sometimes, “the only way to establish control is to remove the people and destroy the village.”

  At precisely 8 A.M. on January 8, 1967, sixty helicopters popped up from behind the tall trees of the Cachua Forestry Reserve, thrummed in over the ripples of the Saigon River and spilled 420 heavily armed infantrymen on three sides of Ben Suc.

  There was no resistance. The people seemed stunned. The few who did not hear or did not obey the squawked commands from a helicopter-borne loudspeaker were shot and killed. The rest of the villagers shuffled toward an old schoolhouse in the center of town.

  Interrogation teams sorted through 5,987 men, women, and children and found 28 they believed might be Viet Cong. The others were loaded on boats with “anything they could carry, pull, or herd” and shipped downriver to fenced compounds where they could be guarded by ARVN troops.

  Bulldozers and demolition teams moved into Ben Suc, pushing over the old school and leveling the houses, sheds, stores, and shrines. A tunnel system was seeded with thirty-pound dynamite charges, sealed, pumped full of acetylene gas, and blown up. Ten thousand pounds of explosives were stacked in a crater in the center of the ruined town, covered with earth, and tamped down by bulldozers to cork the blast. A chemical fuse triggered the five-ton coup de grace and “the village of Ben Suc no longer existed.”

  Engineer units flattened the other three small hamlets and then clanked noisily into the surrounding scrub jungle to scrape the ground clean of cover. M-48 tanks with bulldozers blades ripped through thickets. Huge bulldozers crashed through the woods with a 4,600-pound spiked curl of hardened steel called the Rome Clearing Blade that could splinter the largest trees. The Army would soon employ a 97-ton transphibian Tactical Crusher so huge that it simply rolled over jungle trees, chopping and pulping the debris beneath giant cleated drums it dragged along behind it.

  “If the U.S. has its way,” Time magazine reported, “even a crow flying across the Triangle will have to carry lunch from now on.”

  “We’re winning the war,” exulted Brigadier General William DePuy, who commanded the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. “We’re killing Viet Cong, guerrillas and main forces, destroying their bases, destroying their caches of food and weapons. . . . What we need [to win] is more bombs, more shells, more napalm.”

  More, more of everything, was the essence of Junction City, the gigantic military operation that crashed into War Zone C on February 22. Westmoreland’s only admonition to planners had been “Think big!”

  Nine U.S. infantry battalions air-assaulted into a horseshoe of blocking position near the Cambodian border about sixty miles northwest of Saigon. Simultaneously, an even larger number of mechanized infantry troops, tanks, and armored cavalry rolled north to complete the seal on one of the Viet Cong’s most vital base areas. Thirteen separate artillery bases, the largest commitment of big guns in the war, ringed the operational theater to provide instant fire support.

  As a special gesture to COMMUSMACV, Junction City planners included a parachute assault by the 173rd Airborne Brigade. At exactly 0900 on D Day, sixteen C-130 transport planes roared over a drop zone just three miles from Cambodia. When the green light in the lead plane blinked on, Brigadier General John R. Deane Jr., by tradition the first man out, jumped through the open door. In an instant, 845 parachutes blossomed in the sky and the first combat assault by American paratroops in a generation was underway.

  This was the American way of war, what the British call the “national style” of the United States.

  The great Junction City horseshoe found no enemy soldiers on Day One and, by ill luck, Westmoreland missed the only American parachute assault of the Vietnam war. His command ship had hovered over the wrong drop zone, a victim of mistaken map coordinates.

  On Day Two, the largest military operation of the war began to uncover a treasure of enemy supplies, documents, ammunition, and food. Over the next several weeks, the American soldiers who trudged the dangerous cart trails of War Zone C found a sandal factory, commodious underground bunkers and base camps with shower facilities, dining halls, lecture halls, ping-pong tables and volleyball courts, miles of communication wire, extensive tunnel systems, an information office with 120 rolls of motion picture film and numerous still photographs of previously faceless Viet Cong leaders, loudspeaker systems and, just two hundred yards from Cambodia in reinforced concrete bunkers fifteen feet under the ground, two Chinese printing presses with cutting and folding attachments and a capacity of ten thousand sheets an hour. The presses had been built in Shanghai less than two years before.

  American soldiers tear-gassed tunnels, dynamited bunkers, burned storage sheds, destroyed hospitals, bulldozed the brush on both sides of the roads, constructed bridges over rivers and streams, and leveled the land for new airfields in the heart of the enemy’s base area. Rome plows growled in the undergrowth, clearing square miles of thick jungle.

  In the few instances that enemy troops chose to fight rather than run, they were crushed by American firepower.

  In the battle called Prek Klok II, for example, two battalions of Viet Cong soldiers tried to attack a wagon train circle of U.S. armored vehicles by charging across ground ripped by heavy machine guns, more than five thousand artillery rounds, and the bombs, rockets, and cannonfire of one hundred Air Force fighter bombers. Helicopters shuttled sixteen tons of fresh supplies to the defenders during the midnight fight, and Spooky arrived to brighten the dark with magnesium flares and to pour molten fire on the Viet Cong. Three Americans died at Prek Klok, and 197 enemy soldiers.

  Lieutenant Colonel Alexander M. Haig, commander of the Blue Spaders Battalion in the 1st Infantry Division, provided another firepower demonstration three weeks later. Haig’s soldiers were dug deeply in Y-shaped bunkers at Landing Zone George when Viet Cong soldiers attacked an hour before dawn on April Fool’s Day—punching a hole one hundred yards wide and forty-five yards deep in the American position. Haig pulled back, but “the Viet Cong walked right through our mortar fire and artillery fire, they just kept coming.”

  The colonel threw his reserve platoon at the breach at first light, when pilots could see the target clearly. “The main Viet Cong attack began to falter under the heavy volume of fire. Light and heavy helicopter fire t
eams were firing rockets and mini guns on the woodline . . . artillery was massing fire along the east flank . . . the jets began striking within thirty meters, littering the entire area with enemy dead [including] one string of 29 enemy dead in a line 150 meters long; Cluster Bomb Unit had literally curled them up.” Haig’s soldiers reported 491 enemy dead.

  During Cedar Falls and Junction City, American troops counted 3,748 dead bodies. Psychological warfare teams snapped photographs of the piles of corpses, turned the negatives into leaflets, and airdropped 9,768,000 invitations to surrender. One leaflet, addressed personally to the commanding general of the Viet Cong’s 9th Division, was a taunt from the Big Red One’s new commander, General John H. Hay Jr:

  “[Your] commanders disgraced themselves by performing in an unsoldierly manner . . . [they] failed to accomplish their mission and left the battlefield covered with dead and wounded. . . .”

  Westmoreland would complain after he left the Army that he had been “forced to fight with but one hand” in Vietnam, but there were few signs of fetters in these huge search and destroy operations. The numbers of troops committed to battle, the tonnages of bombs and shells, and the heaps of enemy dead approached those of World War II campaigns.

  Americans destroyed six thousand structures and bunkers during Cedar Falls and Junction City, captured four thousand five hundred tons of rice, forty tons of salt and dried fish, seven thousand five hundred Viet Cong military uniforms, a half million documents including vital information on enemy organization and plans, more than one thousand weapons, and tens of thousands of grenades, rifle rounds, mortar shells, and rockets. All three regiments of the enemy’s 9th Division had been “trounced,” and officials of the enemy’s clandestine government forced to flee.