Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  Westmoreland was elated. He praised his commanders for a job well done, and he called the operations “a serious defeat” for Vo Nguyen Giap, “a disaster that forces the enemy high command to make basic revisions in his tactics. . . .”

  Still, a worm of doubt nibbled at the edge of Westmoreland’s confidence. He knew he not truly destroyed the enemy’s forces, but merely scattered them to deeper jungle or into Cambodia. The Viet Cong were like Bartholomew’s hats; every time he killed one, another sprang up in his place—and sometimes two.

  “The ability of the Viet Cong continuously to rebuild their units and make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this war,” General Taylor had observed, shortly before he became ambassador. “Not only do the Viet Cong units have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale.”

  “I never thought it would go on like this,” said Secretary McNamara as the enemy body count rose past 100,000. “I didn’t think these people had the capacity to fight this way . . . to take this punishment. . . .”

  News reporters, politicians in the United States, and even high-ranking officers on Westmoreland’s own staff began to question an “official” body count that approached the number of enemy troops believed to be in South Vietnam. The general had no doubts. He had personally visited some of the most sanguinary killing grounds to see the piles of dead for himself. He insisted that his subordinate commanders exert every effort to insure accuracy. “If anything, the count probably erred on the side of caution,” he said later. “Any American commander who took the same vast losses as General Giap would have been sacked overnight.”

  Nevertheless, American commanders found it almost impossible to make the enemy stand still long enough to be destroyed by supporting arms. The megadeath nightmare of every American infantry officer was the sudden arrival on the battlefield of countless Asian automatons in dark uniforms—Oriental fatalists who would sacrifice themselves in human wave assaults for the chance to close with American troops in the field. In Vietnam, the problem proved to be exactly the opposite: it was hard to find the enemy at all.

  “The Viet Cong,” Westmoreland conceded, “are uncommonly adept at slithering away.”

  He was most frustrated by the difficulty of finding and destroying enemy soldiers in the midst of millions of rural Vietnamese. Killing Viet Cong in large enough numbers to do real damage in this setting meant killing a great many civilians, too. Yet killing sixteen-year-old guerrillas two or three at a time on the mud paths of tiny hamlets was penny ante stuff for an Army prepared to do battle with the legions of Lenin.

  The best place to find large concentrations of enemy forces, Westmoreland decided, and the best place to employ his superior firepower, were the jungled mountains near Cambodia and Laos:

  “[With] their large airmobile capability, their extensive communications and flexible logistics support systems, [but] above all, with their tremendous firepower, it was vastly more desirable that [Americans] fight in the remote, unpopulated areas if the enemy would give battle there.”

  Westmoreland planned to force the enemy to give battle there by thrusting huge forces into the very heart of enemy base areas. Otherwise, he believed, the war would go on forever. Seek the enemy aggressively, Westmoreland ordered, hold him in place with aggressive, infantry tactics, and then crush him with firepower. Find him, fix him, finish him.

  Important American military leaders disagreed sharply.

  “Digging the guerrillas out of the populated and fertile lowlands is more important than going into the mountains after big North Vietnamese units,” said General Victor Krulak, commander of Marine forces in the Pacific. “It is our conviction that if we can destroy the guerrilla fabric among the people, we will automatically deny the larger units the food and intelligence and taxes and the other support they need. The real war is among the people, and not among the mountains.”

  A short, round, gruff, bespectacled U.S. Army historian named S. L. A. Marshall questioned Westmoreland’s mountain tactics for quite different reasons.

  “Rattling around the . . . border held nothing good for our side except in the most extraordinary circumstances where sheer luck or some fluke made things break our way,” Marshall wrote. He had just spent several months following the 1st Air Cavalry Division and other troops who were probing the heavy jungle in the Central Highlands.

  “The enemy was ever scouting, measuring, and plotting the countryside. He had every possible landing zone tabbed and taped and he knew where to set his mortars to zero in on them. We were literally engaging the Charlies on the maneuver ground where they did their training exercises. Our average line infantry unit was almost as foreign to this countryside as a first astronaut landing on the moon.”

  Westmoreland knew the difficulties and dangers of operating on the enemy’s ground, but he believed that aggressive sweeps of the enemy turf were infinitely more productive than sitting around waiting for the enemy to strike first. It was inconceivable to him that the North Vietnamese should be allowed to operate freely in the mountains.

  “Do that,” he warned, “and you allow [the enemy] to push his base areas ever closer to the centers of population so that in the end you would be fighting among the population you were supposed to protect.

  “If we avoided battle, we would never succeed,” he said. “We could never destroy the big units by leaving them alone.”

  Pleased with the success of Cedar Falls and Junction City, Westmoreland met with President Johnson and Secretary McNamara in March of 1967. He described in detail the many achievements of his command—the soaring body count, numbers of villages secured, miles of road opened, Viet Cong base camps destroyed—but then he touched on the real difficulty of smashing an enemy force that had an uncanny knack for slipping away. Unless the Viet Cong would stand and fight, he said, “the war could go on indefinitely.”

  Johnson and McNamara were old hands in a hard political world, but neither could mask the shock he felt at Westmoreland’s words. The President somberly asked Westmoreland to put together a list of what he needed to get the war over in less time than “indefinitely,” then McNamara suggested that Westmoreland begin to think about a suitable replacement. Not right away, of course, the secretary said, but soon enough so the new man could be ready to take over in a year or so.

  For the first time, Westmoreland had a DEROS of his own. He knew it would be nearly impossible to achieve his nation’s goals during his command. It was with a strong sense of urgency, then, that Westmoreland flew to Washington, D.C. in April to give his list of needs to President Johnson.

  “I see the possibility, if considerably more American troops can be obtained, of stepping up operations and thereby speeding an end to the American role,” he told the President. What he had in mind was an “optimum force” of 670,000 American soldiers—and permission to invade Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam.

  The greater weight of munitions and the difficulty of defending bases throughout Indochina should grind down the enemy’s capacity for war in three to five years, Westmoreland predicted. Whatever the President decided, he added, he should know that a “minimum essential force” of 550,000 American troops would be required to maintain U.S. momentum in Vietnam.

  General Westmoreland basked in the warm applause of a joint session of Congress on this trip. The South Carolina legislature greeted him with ovations, and the cadets at West Point sat hushed as he talked to them of war and leadership.

  Not all his listeners were so respectful. For the first time, Westmoreland had to consider entering buildings by the back door to avoid protestors. His own children, because they were his children, heard angry questions from their college classmates. Campus demonstrations against the war and flag burnings were no longer rare.

  Westmoreland told a group of newspaper executives that the enemy continued to fight in the face of terrible losses because the enemy believed the American will to win was fragile, that “our Achilles he
el is our resolve.” Westmoreland believed it. His worst fear, that homefront political pressures might recall his Army at the threshold of victory, was becoming a reality.

  The general returned to Vietnam with the certain knowledge that the clock was running. He had one year, perhaps a year and a half, to cripple the enemy, to kill so many Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers that Giap would no longer have the young men, or the heart, to continue.

  With more troops in hand and more on the way by mid-1967, Westmoreland increased the tempo of combat. American battalions hacked their way into the border country to disrupt enemy plans. More and more enemy soldiers stumbled out of the jungle, blood streaming from their ears and noses—victims of new detection devices and the hammer of B-52 bombs. Captured documents told of food shortages, malaria losses, and morale problems in the enemy ranks. Viet Cong desertions rose sharply.

  These achievements were not without cost.

  More Americans began to fall in battle, almost always in the sudden, shocking terror of an ambush. A roadside ambush on Dec. 22, 1961 had claimed the first American soldier to die in Vietnam, Specialist 4 James T. Davis of Livingston, Texas. Now, trying desperately to avoid Westmoreland’s terrible swift sword—firepower—the enemy had refined ambush to an art form. With careful camouflage, rigid fire discipline, and proper timing, even small enemy units could inflict heavy casualties—and then run before the bombs and shells arrived.

  In early June of 1967, two battalions of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division lunged by boat and helicopter toward a suspected enemy base camp in the Delta, south of Saigon. A Viet Cong force in concrete bunkers held its fire until the point men had actually passed through its lines, then began shooting at a U.S. infantry company mired in waist-deep water and mud. Enemy machine guns killed 50 Americans, wounded 143, and shot down three helicopters.

  On June 22, North Vietnamese soldiers lay perfectly still while a company of paratroopers—the same ones who had parachuted into War Zone C during Junction City—walked through their position in the Highlands. On signal, the enemy force opened fire, pinned the unit down, and overran it, killing seventy-six men in the assault.

  In July, a weary column of U.S. Marines marched back from a DMZ raid on the same road it had taken on the way in. Sappers detonated a mine under the lead Marine vehicle. When the column paused, North Vietnamese soldiers swarmed out of trenches along the road, chopped the column into pieces, and inflicted nearly 200 casualties before falling back.

  A nine-man patrol from the U.S. 9th Division disappeared in a rubber plantation not far from Saigon. It was found two days later, sprawled in death in the eye of an L-shaped ambush.

  The hard-luck paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne caught it again in the Highlands, losing twenty-six killed and forty-nine wounded in a few minutes.

  Then it was the 1st Infantry Division’s turn, and the Army’s society of officers winced when the names were posted. Sixty-one Americans were killed and fifty-eight wounded in a brief, savage fight at very close quarters in scrub jungle not far from the Iron Triangle. Among the dead was the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Terry de la Mesa Allen Jr., whose dad had led the Big Red One through the campaigns in Tunisia and Sicily. Major Donald W. Holleder, the executive officer and an Army football hero who made All America in 1955, was killed as he moved forward to take command.

  The Viet Cong’s 9th Division, battered in Junction City, had answered General Hay’s taunting leaflet with a hard slap.

  The very concept of ambush so deeply offended Westmoreland’s sense of professionalism that by his order such actions were announced to news reporters as “meeting engagements.” Ambush by dictionary definition meant surprise, and surprise by military definition meant carelessness; therefore, ambushes were not ambushes.

  The general constantly prodded his officers on proper field precautions against surprise attack. He printed and issued more than a million wallet-sized cards instructing soldiers how to avoid ambushes. Boot camps in the United States added ambush detection courses to the training of new soldiers. Some units in Vietnam required replacements to attend a refresher school on ambush before going into the field. A number of outfits used tracking dogs to sniff out ambushes, and some tried a backpack model of the “people sniffer.” The Marines, and some Army units, swore by Kit Carson Scouts, enemy soldiers who had deserted and now earned top wages by leading American troops into dangerous boobytrap and ambush country.

  The enemy countered with a bewildering variety of surprises, and one favorite was the decoy. Two or three soldiers baited the trap by standing innocently in the open, looking off to the middle distance like so many birdwatchers. American soldiers would cut the decoys down, and rush over to see what they had shot. The suicides’ comrades waited until they had a cluster of excited G.I.’s in the kill zone.

  Aggressive American tactics “lead inevitably to dramatic, costly battles” in the border regions, Westmoreland said, but it was the enemy who paid the highest price. Enemy death tolls rose through the summer of 1967 to record levels. It hardly mattered anymore what statistic was used—enemy deaths, enemy desertions, weapons captured, miles of roadway cleared, canals opened, tons of rice harvested, citizens under government control, percentage of voter participation in free elections, bomb tonnages—the war was going very badly for the Viet Cong.

  Westmoreland called senior news correspondents to a briefing in the early autumn. “A sense of despair” pervaded the enemy ranks, he said. “After only little more than a year of fighting relatively sizable numbers of American troops, Communist losses are mounting drastically—with nothing to show for it.”

  The Army chief of staff, General Harold K. Johnson, predicted that American troops could probably start home in another year and a half. “We are very definitely winning,” he said.

  Still, Westmoreland’s soldiers were growing weary of the “seemingly never-ending searches” in the countryside and mountains. He wanted something decisive, something crippling, but he seemed unable to force it even with the most massive search and destroy operations. Grinding down the enemy was working, but it was working too slowly.

  Then, in September, the North Vietnamese boldly crossed the DMZ to attack a small, muddy, treeless hill named Con Thien. U.S. Marines were holding the hill as one position in a line of a half dozen strongpoints that stretched from the South China Sea all the way to Khe Sanh. For the first time in the war, the enemy used hidden long-range guns and rockets to support an infantry attack. During one nine-day period, North Vietnamese guns put three thousand shells on Con Thien.

  Westmoreland answered with twenty-two thousand tons from B-52s alone. “Marshalling the entire spectrum of heavy fire support—B-52s, fighter bombers, naval gunfire, massed artillery and local ground fire,” Westmoreland transformed the gently sloping, brushy plain surrounding Con Thien into a tortured landscape of craters and ashes.

  The firepower deluge, first proposed by Air Force General William W. Momyer, was code-named SLAM, an onomatopoetic acronym that stood for Seek, Locate, Annihilate, and Monitor. The Marines had earlier removed 13,000 villagers from their homes along the Ben Hai River so the guns could fire without restriction into the DMZ. Of the 830 B-52 flights over Vietnam in September, 790 put their bombs “right in front of Con Thien.”

  “It was Dienbienphu in reverse,” Westmoreland declared, estimating enemy casualties at 2,000 or more. The important lesson of Con Thien, he said, was its demonstration “that massed firepower [is] in itself sufficient to force a besieging enemy to desist.”

  • • •

  AT ONE O’CLOCK in the morning on October 29, the 273rd Viet Cong Regiment emerged from the green sea of rubber plantations seventy miles north of Saigon and overran the government’s district headquarters at Loc Ninh. Another large force tested the Loc Ninh Special Forces camp, defended by a dozen Americans and several hundred Montagnards. These “A” camps, as they were known, were heavily armed and fortified because of their exposed placement at the very edge of
enemy sanctuaries.

  “We killed some of them as they came over the top,” said a shaken defender the next day, after the bodies had been cleared. He was hard at work with other Green Berets rebuilding the fort’s minefield, restringing barbed wire, repairing breaches in the foot traps and resetting machine guns. Neither he nor any of his comrades had ever seen the Viet Cong press an attack for four and a half hours into the teeth of a firestorm, and they were deeply impressed.

  Westmoreland had reacted instantly. While the battle still raged, he ordered combat troops and artillery batteries from the 1st and 25th U.S. Infantry Divisions to move to Loc Ninh. Mercenary troops reinforced the Green Beret camp, and an ARVN battalion prepared to retake the district headquarters. B-52s and fighter bombers were diverted from other targets to work the Loc Ninh perimeter.

  The general had lost a Special Forces camp in 1966 at A Shau, a narrow, foggy valley far to the north—near Laos. The weather, the terrain, and panic among the native troops had turned the fort’s desperate defense into a disastrous retreat that still rankled. Fewer than half the defenders had made it out.

  He had no intention of losing Loc Ninh.

  The Viet Cong tried again the next night to take the Special Forces camp. Six U.S. Army artillery pieces at one end of the camp airstrip fired beehive rounds into the flank of the attacking force. Each of these special-purpose shells contains eight thousand winged steel darts called flechettes. They hummed and sang insanely as they sped from cannon mouth to soldier. Here was a true whiff of the grape. When the artillerymen ran out of beehive rounds, they lowered the barrels of their guns and skipped high explosive shells off the runway to scythe the Viet Cong with shrapnel.

  The most conservative estimate of enemy dead during the week-long battles around Loc Ninh was 852. Most American officers believed the true count was 2,000. Never before in the war had the enemy sacrificed soldiers with such abandon—feeding them like cordwood into a furnace.