Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  In September Westmoreland asked the Marines to wargame a North Vietnamese invasion from the western mountains. The Marine command staff studied the problem, and decided to pull back to The Rockpile.

  “I notice you haven’t . . . put a force in Khe Sanh,” Westmoreland observed. “What are your reasons for this?”

  “Well, we think it would be too isolated. We think it would be too hard to support . . . and we’re worried about the weather. The weather shuts down pretty badly there. . . .”

  “Nonetheless,” Westmoreland said, “I think we ought to have a larger force out there.” He recommended a battalion.

  The Marines resisted.

  “We didn’t want a force that size out there . . . because you had to hold those outlying hills with something,” one Marine general said. The assistant commander of the 3rd Marine Division was less diplomatic:

  “When you’re at Khe Sanh, you’re not really anywhere. It’s far from everything. You could lose it, and you really haven’t lost a damn thing.”

  The Marines bowed to Westmoreland’s judgment reluctantly, and ordered a battalion to Khe Sanh “just to retain that little prestige of doing it on your own volition rather than doing it with a shoe in your tail.”

  The first large American unit to arrive at Khe Sanh for an extended stay brought unique pressures to the plateau, and the first to feel them were the Special Forces, who were shouldered out of their snug French-built bunker at the airfield. Marine officers enjoyed this demonstration of the privileges of rank; there was little camaraderie between the Army’s “Green Beanies” and the Marines’ “grunts.”

  Crewcut Marine Corps officers thought of the Special Forces as ill-disciplined rabble—bearded soldiers with foreign accents who lived casually with Bru women, drank rice alcohol, ate rats, and had little respect for rank or rules. The Special Forces troopers thought of the Marines as stupid innocents who blundered about in too-large units with too-little understanding of just how tough things could get in the mountains near Laos.

  The small “A” team and its Montagnards moved in December from the airfield, west along Route 9 to Lang Vei, a Bru hamlet about four miles west of the Marine combat base.

  There were other difficulties.

  Marines liked to lean out of the back of trucks and tip the conical hats of Vietnamese peasants. A mortar round hit in the Millers’ side yard, exploding clods of dirt against the house. Artillery shells crashed randomly in the countryside as the Marines fired harassment and interdiction rounds into the gathering grey clouds of the monsoon.

  The Millers received a formal visit from a delegation of Bru elders who assumed the Marines were a part of the Millers’ larger family: “Will you please tell your friends to be more careful when they shoot their big guns. Some are exploding in our fields and villages, and we’re afraid someone will be hurt.”

  The Marines sent medical teams into the Bru hamlets, shared food and clothing with the village orphanage, donated money to the schools and churches, and built playgrounds for the children. They helped buy a new large-type typewriter for the Millers’ language classes. The base commander even sent a squad to dig up the mortar shell in their yard. “It won’t happen again,” he promised. Some Americans, homesick for their own families, stopped by to play with the Miller children; Margie got a very fancy doll from the commander of the Special Forces team.

  Contact with enemy forces was rare in the final months of 1966, but one visitor to Khe Sanh looked at the great bustle of activity and construction at the airstrip, and said: “It’s like setting out honey to attract flies.”

  In the first days of the new year, a flight of U.S. fighter bombers appeared over Khe Sanh one morning, circled once to get on the proper line for attack—and then roared in on Lang Vei with high explosives and Cluster Bomb Units. It was a slaughter. American soldiers in the new Special Forces camp across the road tried desperately to reach the pilots by radio, but could not find the frequency. Bru soldiers in the camp cried out as the planes rolled in for a second pass; their families lived in Lang Vei. More than one hundred Bru civilians were killed in the mistaken bombing.

  In the last week of April, a Marine platoon lost twelve killed and two missing in an ambush near Hill 881 South. A second platoon that rushed to help was also mauled. The Marines air lifted a battalion to Khe Sanh the next day, and before dark it was locked in combat on Hill 861. Another battalion flew to Khe Sanh, then an artillery battalion.

  The Hill Fights were underway.

  The North Vietnamese Army’s 18th Regiment resisted “with great fury,” and the Marines found the going very tough: “The NVA are excellent troops whose marksmanship, fire and camouflage discipline, and aggressiveness are outstanding.” On May 1, the battered 18th Regiment slipped away as the NVA’s 95th Regiment counterattacked to cover the withdrawal. The vicious fighting drew every eye to the hills four miles northwest of the combat base.

  In that moment, North Vietnamese soldiers slashed through the defensive wire at the new Lang Vei Special Forces camp—and penetrated all the way to the command bunker. The Green Beret commander and his executive officer were killed by satchel charge through a window. The enemy force killed twenty defenders and wounded thirty-six, then retired before dawn.

  The Marines withdrew the bulk of their forces from Khe Sanh after the Hill Fights, but sharp clashes continued.

  On June 6 the NVA attacked a communications relay station on top of Hill 950. The enemy force knocked out a machine gun in the opening minutes and pushed into the gap. A rocket grenade looped into the radio bunker and killed three defenders. Sgt. Richard W. Baskin rallied the survivors and threw the enemy off the peak, but only five Marines were firing weapons at the end.

  The very next day, Marines killed sixty-six enemy soldiers on Hill 881 North, losing eighteen dead.

  No single battle during the summer approached the savagery of the Hill Fights, but the Marines’ scorecard from mid-May to late July was: 204 North Vietnamese dead, 52 Americans dead, and 255 Marines evacuated with wounds.

  On July 21, the Marines at the combat base buzzed about the prediction made by Jeane Dixon, a Stateside stargazer, that 1,200 would soon die at Khe Sanh.

  Westmoreland decided it was time to prepare Khe Sanh for its role as the launch point for an invasion of Laos. The airfield had been badly damaged during the Hill Fights—not by enemy shells but by friendly planes. The big C-130s, with a landing weight of almost sixty tons, had pumped water up from the soggy earth as they rolled across the pierced metal planks. The runway had collapsed in a number of places.

  On August 17, the airfield closed for repairs. Work crews stripped the old metal plates from the surface while three fifteenton rock crushers began eating a small mountain a mile and a half from the base. Trucks shuttled stone from the quarry to the airfield, where bulldozers smoothed the runway. C-130s flew more than two thousand tons of building materials to the base.

  General Westmoreland experimented with two aerial delivery techniques during the rehabilitation of the Khe Sanh airstrip—parachute drops and Low Altitude Parachute Extraction—because air was the only way to support the thousand Marines at Khe Sanh. A convoy with 175mm guns that could fire into Laos had set out for the combat base early in August, run into “one horrendous ambush,” and turned back to avoid a GM100-style destruction. Route 9 was closed.

  Even without the big guns, Westmoreland was ready for a strike into Laos. On September 4, he cabled Admiral Sharp with a proposal for a U.S. assault across the border—to be launched from Khe Sanh.

  • • •

  THE MUTUAL DISLIKE between Marines and Green Berets grew worse through the summer and fall of 1967. The Green Berets had decided to move away from the ghosts of the short-lived camp at Lang Vei, now a litter of blackened timbers, blowing paper, rusting wire, and scavenging rats—with startling sculptures of gleaming, white toilet bowls standing in the ruins. They chose a spot a half mile farther west, atop a long, gentle rise that provided excelle
nt fields of fire and overlooked both Route 9 and the border with Laos.

  This time, relying on their fabled scrounging abilities and the professional help of Navy Seabees, the Special Forces built a fortress.

  “They built the most magnificent bunker you ever laid eyes on,” groused Major General Rathvon McCall Tompkins, commander of the 3rd Marine Division and a daily visitor at Khe Sanh.

  “There is no lumber like that available in Vietnam,” Tompkins said as he watched large helicopters carry cargo nets full of 8 × 8 beams over Khe Sanh on the way to the new Lang Vei fortifications. “It all came from out of country.”

  The Green Berets built reinforced-concrete bunkers, ringed their new camp with a chain-wire cyclone fence, installed powerful generators and electric lights, and soon sipped Chivas Regal in their club house. The Marines dug holes with their pack shovels, and fought rats in dark bunkers made of sandbags and sagging timbers. Tompkins despaired as he watched locally cut lumber “go to pieces . . . between the rot and the termites and the bugs.”

  But the dispute between the Marines and the soldiers went deeper than jealousy over building materials. General Tompkins said he thought the hollow-eyed soldiers at the Special Forces camp were “hopped up.” That is, drugged. “There was something mysterious about those wretches,” he said. “Those wretches were a law unto themselves.”

  Tompkins knew his Marines would be asked to help if the Green Berets got in trouble. The new camp was seven miles from the combat base on a road that was little more than a series of eroded gullies, potholes and mud ruts, broken occasionally by bits of the old French asphalt. Racing down this road to rescue some wretches, the general believed, would mean “getting a battalion of Marines chopped up for no possible reason.”

  The Special Forces soldiers were also upset. They survived behind enemy lines because they traveled with Montagnard guides in small columns that could move quickly. Operating beyond the edge of the American artillery umbrella, they relied on stealth. Now, they had to hide themselves as carefully from Marines as they did from North Vietnamese because Marines tended to call airstrikes on anything that moved and wasn’t wearing Marine green. Hypertense Green Berets threatened to shoot down the next Marine aircraft that circled one of their patrols, broadcasting map coordinates in the clear to the combat base to determine if they were “friendlies.” Didn’t the Marines know, the soldiers asked, that the North Vietnamese also had radios?

  The combat base showed so many lights at night that the Special Forces troopers at Lang Vei called it Coney Island.

  • • •

  ENGINEERS COMPLETED REJUVENATION of the Khe Sanh airfield on October 27, and Westmoreland began stockpiling supplies and ammunition for a multi-division strike into Laos.

  In November, the American intelligence web trembled with tiny vibrations from the strands that stretched to the west, across the Xepone River. Some of the Montagnard villages nearest the border began to evacuate and move closer to Khe Sanh—a sure sign of increasing enemy pressure. A Special Forces patrol found fresh elephant feces along the river, as well as other evidence to indicate that an NVA pack train with heavy weapons had recently visited the area.

  On November 10, Colonel Lownds helicoptered to Hill 881 South for ceremonies marking the 192nd birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps. “We at Khe Sanh are going to be remembered in American history books,” he said.

  The colonel was deeply frustrated by the tangled underbrush and the meadows of tall, dense grass that blinded his recon teams.

  “We don’t have our eyes!” he complained to his regimental staff in mid-November. “We must be more alert. The enemy knows where we are; we don’t always know where he is.”

  Snipers began to harass the hilltop outposts more frequently. Perimeter guards at the combat base discovered cuts in the defensive wire that had been fitted back together and smeared with mud to hide the break. SOG helicopters flew deep into Laos and returned with air samples and radio intercepts that could only mean a great massing of enemy troops.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon of December 13, General Tompkins picked up the voice-secure scrambler telephone on his desk in Dong Ha and listened to the words of Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman Jr., commander of all the Marines in Vietnam.

  “I’m getting worried about the enemy buildup at Khe Sanh,” Cushman said. High-level intelligence reports indicated it might be a good idea to send another Marine battalion to the base.

  Tompkins conceded the Marines at Khe Sanh were “pretty thin” as a result of having to defend the airfield and the hills but he thought the Camp Carroll artillery base looked more vulnerable than Khe Sahn—and he said so to General Cushman.

  “You’ll just have to take my word for it,” Cushman said. “Move the Third Battalion of the 26th out there.”

  Tompkins sensed pressure from higher up the chain of command. “Westmoreland has always been sensitive about Khe Sanh,” he thought. “It may go back to that early incident when the Special Forces camp in there got overrun. He was always sensitive about Khe Sanh.”

  The Third Battalion, already aboard helicopters for an assault mission elsewhere, was diverted in midflight. Within five hours of Cushman’s order, the battalion was at Khe Sanh.

  Never before in the history of warfare had it been possible to move one thousand men and their equipment sixty miles through impossible terrain with such speed—and no casualties at all. In western Quang Tri Province, unfordable rivers appeared where maps showed dry land, unclimbable precipices jutted from the maps’ smooth valley floors, and the double and triple layers of jungle canopy trapped the gloom of night eternally. Now, the Marines soared over the whole mess.

  The arrival of the Third Battalion sent rumors racing through the combat base: “We’re going to Laos!” Westmoreland was preparing for such an invasion, but very carefully. He knew how important it was to lead politicians gently toward difficult decisions, and he did not want to force this issue prematurely:

  “Frankly, if I had gone in and said: ‘I want x number of troops to go into Laos—well, it would have rocked Washington and it would have set us back. [We] had to play this thing very delicately.”

  As the general and the Joint Chiefs of Staff worked to lift the political constraints that leashed an American assault into Laos, heliborne “people sniffers” suddenly detected “many, many groups of North Vietnamese, five soldiers or so [in each group], moving into the Khe Sanh region.” The enemy started to jam Marine radio communications. It was possible to click down the dial in the communications room at the combat base and hear the chatter of North Vietnamese military traffic on several frequencies.

  “Things are picking up,” Lownds said.

  • • •

  KHE SANH VILLAGE seemed immune to the rising tension. The little town had grown to more than 1,500 people, and it was bustling with preparations for Christmas. Laundries and whorehouses and souvenir shops had sprung up to service the Marines. One entrepreneur had opened a small Vietnamese restaurant on the main street, just across from the district headquarters, and Americans weary of combat rations flocked to “Howard Johnson’s” for the excellent soup and noodle dishes. Shoppers in the black market, conveniently located next to the regular market, could find Schlitz beer in cans, and hand grenades, at bargain prices.

  There were children everywhere.

  The shrill voices of eighty-seven children at the Buddhist pagoda and day school filled the hours of 1st Lieutenant Thomas Stamper, who worked next door in the advisers’ office at the South Vietnamese district headquarters. Most of the Vietnamese in town sent their children to Khe Sanh’s public school, but thirty had enrolled in Father Poncet’s parochial classes. Pastor Loc had dozens of Bru children in his classes at the Protestant compound on the east end of the village.

  The July census had counted 8,930 Bru in the Khe Sanh district, but more than 10,000 were crowded into resettlement areas near the village by the end of the year.

  Father Poncet had borrow
ed some of the Millers’ new trained Bru teachers and, with some Vietnamese nuns recruited in Hue, opened a school in a Bru hamlet. Zipping along on his motor scooter in an open-necked white shirt and blue bloused trousers, the bearded priest was a familiar figure from the Bru hamlets near Lang Vei to the front gates of the combat base.

  Felix Poilane’s coffee groves were slowly giving way to the military needs of the Marines. Tanks and bulldozers and heavy trucks rumbled up and down his farm roads; power saws cleared fields of fire. The Marines had already filled one of the gullies on the plantation with garbage, and they were scouting for a second site.

  The French farmer could hardly protest. Many Marine officers made it clear that they believed he must have made some “arrangement” with the enemy to be able to live at Khe Sanh.

  “Felix would be treated with great respect as a leader and economic mainstay of the whole area,” Carolyn Miller said, “but at the flip of the coin he would be regarded with great suspicion—not to say rudeness—as being, at best, someone who paying off the Communist guerrillas and, at worst, a spy them.”

  But the Poilanes—and the Millers and Father Poncet and Pastor Loc and the great majority of civilians in and around Khe Sanh Village—had never seen an enemy soldier.

  Madeleine Poilane had lived in Khe Sanh for almost ten years without fear; now she was growing concerned. “The base installed on our concession . . . is certainly very tempting for the Viet Cong,” she worried.

  Felix Poilane had driven coffee convoys through the mountains of Laos as his father told stories about the hills. He had been born in Khe Sanh, and now he’d labored to build a plantation of his own.

  “If I ever had to pay protection money, I’d leave,” he declared.

  Deeply engrossed in their translation work, the Millers had no time for military concerns. The Marines had finally stopped bringing Bru prisoners to the Miller house for military interrogation. The Millers were rarely home, anyway. They now had six schools operating in the Khe Sanh area, and almost every day they drove their sturdy Land Rover over the rutted roads to deliver new teaching materials or to review class lessons.