Siege of Khe Sanh
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No one in the American command could understand such madness, but everyone was impressed by the enemy’s numbers, weapons, and morale.
In the last two weeks, the 271st Viet Cong Regiment had ambushed a Big Red One battalion, the 88th North Vietnamese Army Regiment had attacked Song Be, and the 272nd and 273rd Viet Cong Regiments and the 165th NVA Regiment had taken the field at Loc Ninh. These were division-sized operations by an army that just six weeks before had been described as incapable of military action much above the battalion level.
The Viet Cong entered battle at Loc Ninh with impressive anti-aircraft weapons and two of the Communists’ largest field artillery pieces, the 120mm mortar and the 122mm rocket.
Enemy troops, pictured as sick and demoralized, pressed their attacks with elan. They had superb equipment, including brand new AK-47 assault rifles, flame throwers, the latest model grenade launchers, and new backpack field radios. They carried full pouches of rice slung over one shoulder, personal medical kits, and even a Chinese version of the vacuum-packed canned combat rations issued to Americans. The enemy soldiers wore canvas field packs, web gear to hold essential equipment, and new green uniforms that still showed creases.
Westmoreland did not care if the Viet Cong attacked in tuxedos, so long as they attacked. He considered Loc Ninh an extraordinary engagement that had shattered the best part of four enemy regiments.
Here, in a little rubber town an hour’s flight from Saigon, Westmoreland’s army had staged a classic demonstration of the principles of mobility and firepower. Enemy forces had launched their assault at 1 A.M. on Day One against a dozen Green Berets and several hundred Montagnards. At dawn on Day One, two U.S. combat battalions and their artillery air-assaulted into Loc Ninh. Two other battalions moved to a nearby base camp for instant reinforcement. On Day Four, two more American battalions rode helicopters from positions near Saigon to join the battle.
Loc Ninh, a very pleased Westmoreland declared, was “one of the most significant and important operations” of the war.
“I am delighted,” he told his commanders. “So far as I can see, you have just made one mistake: . . . you made it look too easy.”
It was during this battle that the American command announced it had finally reached the “crossover point,” the moment when Communist forces began to lose troops faster than they could be replaced. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had lost 60,000 soldiers in the first ten months of 1967, Westmoreland said, and had managed to recruit only 20,000 replacements.
“We see the situation getting steadily better,” observed Westmoreland’s assistant chief of staff, Brigadier General A. Brownfield. “We’ve gone into the enemy’s base areas . . . burned his rice, captured his weapons and medicine. I have doubts he can hang on.”
As Westmoreland’s command celebrated the unique success at Loc Ninh, a North Vietnamese Army sergeant walked down from the thickly jungled mountains of the Central Highlands, 220 miles to the north, and surrendered. Sgt. Vu Hong said he came from a reconnaissance unit of the NVA’s 66 Regiment, and that he had been selecting firing sites for rocket launchers—to support a major assault on the U.S. Special Forces camp at Dak To. And then, in the most extraordinary detail, he gave “the accurate positions and battle plans” of the largest gathering of North Vietnamese troops in the war: four infantry regiments and a rocket/artillery regiment.
Westmoreland decided to pour it on.
During his first year in Vietnam, enemy troops had nearly hacked the country in half where the mountains reach almost to the sea: the Central Highlands. He had reacted strongly to enemy threats in this region ever since.
“You can ring a bell and General Westmoreland will come out of the corner like a, like a pug,” said one of his closest aides, General John Chaisson. “And two of the bells you can ring that get this reaction are A Shau . . . and the Highlands.”
A single American battalion worked the hills above Dak To in the first days of November. By mid-month the U.S. 4th Infantry Division was at Dak To—and the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the first brigade of the 1st Air Cavalry Division, and six ARVN battalions, and “a myriad” of supply, communications, medical, and fire support units. Engineers dynamited the tops off a dozen mountains to build level artillery platforms, and chemical units bathed the steep slopes with herbicides to strip the foliage.
Helicopters flocked in such great numbers to Dak To that 895,740 gallons of special fuel had to be flown in to slake their thirst. Under the ceaseless pounding of 170,000 artillery shells, twenty-one hundred fighter bomber attacks and three hundred B-52 missions, the green jungle canopy trembled, split open, and finally hung in blackened tatters.
This was the very closest thing to Big War that Westmoreland could devise.
The battles at Dak To were much fiercer than the battles at Loc Ninh and, despite almost perfect knowledge of the enemy’s plans and hiding places, not nearly so one-sided.
On November 15, the North Vietnamese rocket regiment hurled its missiles at Dak To’s crowded airfield and base camp. Two C-130 cargo planes burned on the runway, and a thousand tons of ammunition exploded in a blast that rolled shockwaves across the valley. “Jesus,” said Lieutenant Fred Dyrsen amid the flattened wreckage of the American camp, “it looked like Charlie had gotten hold of some nuclear weapons.”
Before they left the field, the North Vietnamese mouse trapped a battalion of the 173rd Airborne Brigade on the steep tangled slopes of Hill 875. This was the same outfit that parachuted into War Zone C without a casualty, and the same that lost 76 killed in a Highlands ambush in June. Now it suffered its most terrible trial. Unable to advance or retreat, cut off from water and early reinforcement, and deeply shaken by an errant five-hundred-pound bomb that landed squarely on the aid station, the paratroopers fought alone for fifty hours. In the battles near Dak To, the airborne lost 124 killed and 347 wounded.
Dak To, a series of sharp engagements over 190 square miles of the most difficult terrain in Vietnam, was the biggest battle of the war. More than 1,200 enemy bodies were counted on the battlefield, and countless others were presumed dead. Two hundred eighty-seven Americans died, 18 vanished, and 985 were wounded.
“An overwhelming success of U.S. arms,” the Army concluded.
“In a classic example of allied superiority in firepower and maneuver,” the after-battle report declared, “fifteen U.S. and Vietnamese battalions beat the enemy to the punch and sent survivors limping back to their sanctuaries.”
Dissenting voices on Westmoreland’s own staff asked: “Is it a victory when you lose 347 friendlies in three weeks and by your own spurious body count only get 1,200?”
Even those who believed the North Vietnamese had suffered grievously at Dak To were concerned about pulling U.S. forces from pacification duties among the people and sending them to do battle in the mountains. Westmoreland had stunned Chaisson when he moved the 1st Air Cavalry brigade to Dak To from rice-rich Binh Dinh province, “the keystone of II Corps.” Peter Arnett, the veteran Associated Press correspondent, asserted, “The NVA is sucking large American forces away from population centers and bogging them down in . . . mountain fighting.”
Some critics pointed at the words of a Viet Cong strategist, framed and hanging on a wall of the U.S. Marine headquarters in DaNang: “The National Liberation Front will entice the Americans close to the . . . border and bleed them without mercy. In South Vietnam, the pacification campaign will be destroyed.”
Westmoreland knew these words. He knew the enemy strategy, and reminded himself of it by rereading Vo Nguyen Giap. “The primary emphasis of the North Vietnamese,” he said, was to “draw American units into remote areas and thereby facilitate control of the population in the lowlands [by the Viet Cong].”
But Westmoreland believed he could move his forces to distant battlefields without dropping his guard around the Vietnamese cities. “A unit might be ‘lured’ to the Highlands,” he said, “yet if that was to have any appreciable effect, the lur
e had to be maintained for a long time.
“A boxer faces problems of both defense and attack,” he continued, explaining his tactics. “As he jabs and probes with one hand, he keeps his defense up with the other. Only when he sees a clear opportunity does he attack with both fists. When he does use both hands offensively, he accepts a calculated risk by leaving himself momentarily uncovered.”
Using “both fists,” Westmoreland had thrashed the enemy at Loc Ninh and Dak To. These border battles weren’t diversions, he felt, but defeats—massive, bloody, demoralizing setbacks from which the enemy would not soon recover.
Westmoreland returned to the United States in mid-November feeling more optimistic than at any time in the past four years. Indeed, President Johnson was so impressed by his field commander’s glowing reports of progress that he had asked him to speak to the American people to ease growing doubts about the war.
“It was easy for me, for we were in fact making substantial progress,” Westmoreland said later. “In all three frontier battles, we had soundly defeated the enemy without unduly sacrificing operations in other areas. The enemy’s return was nil.
“The war was going well [and] I could foresee the possibility of a start on American withdrawal. . . .”
On November 21, Westmoreland told an attentive audience of news correspondents at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that “a new phase is now starting.”
“We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view. I am absolutely certain that, whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing. The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.”
The only reason that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese continued to fight, he asserted, was “the delusion that political pressure in the United States combined with the tactical defeat of a major American unit might force the United States to throw in the towel.” Westmoreland had voiced this same concern in April. It was no delusion. Political pressures in the United States were rising.
A month earlier, in October, President Johnson had received a letter from forty-nine young men and women who worked as volunteers in the South Vietnamese countryside. The American style of war, they wrote, specifically mentioning the use of napalm and herbicides and the forcible relocation of the rural population, was “an overwhelming atrocity.”
On October 31, the very day that heliborne assault troops from the Big Red One were drubbing the Viet Cong at Loc Ninh, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had resigned from the cabinet, telling President Johnson that the Vietnam war was “dangerous, costly, and unsatisfactory to our people.”
As Westmoreland spoke in Washington, an International War Crime Tribunal chaired by Bertrand Russell began to hear public testimony in Roskilde, Denmark. Among the early witnesses were American soldiers who had deserted, and who told of the torture of enemy suspects and the mutilation of enemy bodies.
Hairline cracks in the Army itself appeared. Respected non-commissioned officers of long service were caught transferring monies from Vietnam clubs to private accounts in Switzerland. Drug addiction was on the rise. American forces in Europe, drained of their best officers and soldiers and equipment, presented a fragile shell to the poised juggernaut of the Warsaw Pact nations.
The United States Senate, which had approved the Vietnam war resolution in 1964 with only two dissenting votes, had scheduled hearings on evidence that the North Vietnamese might not have been the aggressor in the Tonkin Gulf incident.
American casualties had risen from twenty-five hundred in 1965, to thirty-three thousand in 1966, to eighty thousand in 1967. “We are dropping $20,000 bombs every time somebody thinks he sees four Viet Cong in a bush,” said Representative Thomas P. O’Neill, a Boston Democrat who was moving from support of the war to opposition, “and it isn’t working.”
President Johnson’s long face told of the burdens he was carrying. His dream of a Great Society for America was coming undone. Black people had torched their own cities in the autumn; Newark, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Atlanta had bled, and burned. Mothers’ marches had become mobs, and the President’s dreams were haunted by the chants: “Hey, hey, LBJ, How many boys did you kill today?”
On November 28, the President told General Westmoreland that he doubted he could continue to take the pressure; he was considering not seeking reelection.
Westmoreland could see the national will unraveling before his eyes. Everything he had worked for was slipping away.
The general worked to assure that no trace of these worries rippled the perfect surface of his confidence. “A commander is the bellweather of his command and must display confidence and resolution,” he said. “Even the slightest pessimism on his part can quickly pervade the ranks. In Vietnam, I was confident, so no play-acting was involved in showing this confidence, yet . . . I was sharply conscious of the need to demonstrate it.”
The most powerful demonstration of progress, of course, would be a convincing battlefield triumph. Westmoreland was certain that Vo Nguyen Giap was looking for a Dienbienphu style victory—hoping to drive America out of the war as he drove France out in 1954. Why else had he sacrificed his forces at Con Thien, at Loc Ninh, and Dak To?
Westmoreland’s eyes ran up the map when he returned to Vietnam, pausing at the tiny dots with strange names, weighing each for its defensive strengths, its reinforcibility, its potential value as a propaganda piece. The last small dot was Khe Sanh. No other outpost in Vietnam looked more inviting. There, the enemy could count on “the advantage of nearby sanctuaries [in Laos], and short lines of communication to plan carefully and to strike with speed and strength.” It would surely be Khe Sanh.
Intelligence reports in December confirmed his judgment. The great southward flow of enemy troops and supplies through Laos began to slow, then eddy and pool in the jagged mountains west of Khe Sanh. Westmoreland sent in reinforcements—not enough to scare off the North Vietnamese but enough to ensure the camp’s survival. He wanted this battle. Khe Sanh would be his Dienbienphu, not Giap’s. This time, refining the aggressive tactics of Dak To, he would “lure the enemy to their deaths” and destroy them beneath a Niagara of bombs.
• • •
THERE COMES A moment on the eve of battle when a commander knows that he has done all he can do to prepare for the coming test. Westmoreland made his assessment with complete confidence: “In the face of American firepower, helicopter mobility, and fire support, there was no way Giap could win on the battlefield.” His certainty was shared at the highest levels in Washington, where it found expression: “In a few months everybody—even the most cynical and skeptical reporter in Saigon—is going to have to admit that we are definitely winning this war.”
Few knew of the general’s deep frustrations, or of the effort of will he had made to build U.S. strength in Vietnam, to quietly change his country’s policies until he could wage war the American way. These had been hard years, filled with “many frustrations, much interference, countless irritations, many disappointments, considerable criticism.”
If these burdens had been a test of his leadership, he had endured. He had built his striking force from two token Marine battalions in March of 1965 to almost 500,000 American fighting men on the eve of Khe Sanh.
Westmoreland kept a quotation from Napoleon beneath the clear glass on his desk top to remind him every day of his duty:
A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister, when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations. . . . It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army’s downfall.
Westmoreland never considered resigning; he had worked to change the plan. Now, he focused all of his considerable energies on Khe Sanh which he felt “could be the greatest battle” of the war.
Intelligence reports indicated Vo Nguyen Giap might be committing four divisions to this battle. Practiced from his many briefings, Westmoreland knew the 1967 numbers perfectly. The enemy had lost 88,000 slain in battle, 30,000 dead from wounds or forever crippled, 18,000 defectors, and 25,000 sick with malaria or other tropical diseases. Now, in a single stroke, he might be able to kill 40,000 more. It would be the perfect conclusion to his Vietnam years.
Westmoreland had been raised a teetotaler. In his mid-years he trained himself, just as he had trained the muscles of his eyeballs to pass the Air Corps’ optometric tests, to drink an occasional beer or watered Scotch—to be sociable, to soften the hard edge of his Command Presence.
He sipped his beer in the late evening, reflectively, when his work was done.
Khe Sanh, he believed, might be the turning point. He went over his preparations one more time. Checkers was done. Niagara was rehearsed. The relief force was in place.
Never, Westmoreland thought as the dark tropical night closed on Saigon on January 20, had he been more ready.
3.
IN THE TIME BEFORE THE WAR
The tiny deer picked its way delicately across the courtyard to lean against Felix Poilane’s leg and to stretch its neck for the caress of his fingers. The lean French planter chuckled at his pet’s pleading, and he introduced the deer, Bambi, to the American pilots visiting in his home. Madeleine Poilane served the guests clear glasses of mountain water and crème de menthe, a green coolness of a summer drink that perfectly mirrored the fresh greenness of Khe Sanh.
Jean-Marie and Françoise, the Poilanes’ young children, played in the garden, where old Bru women raked coffee beans on sun-warmed concrete slabs, turning them gently and drying them evenly.