by Robert Pisor
But why had Tonc defected? Why betray his comrades?
For fourteen years, the lieutenant said, he had served in the field with an army at war. He had distinguished himself in battle, constantly courting death as he challenged American control of the air. Now his superiors had chosen an officer with less service and, he believed, fewer qualifications, for promotion to captain. Bitterly disappointed, Tonc decided to defect.
The Marine interrogators could understand such disappointment.
It was inconceivable to this generation of American officers that a man could spend fourteen years in service and fail to make captain—especially in an army that had to be suffering heavy casualties in its officer corps. Under Westmoreland’s one-year policy, American officers spent six months in the field with a U.S. unit, then six months on staff or advising Vietnamese. The effective service time for most officers, because of casualties, Rest and Recreation leaves, and transfer lags, was about five months, but the program gave a boost to the career of ambitious military men. The Marines who listened to Lieutenant Tonc’s tale realistically aspired to be on the list for colonelcy when they had fourteen years of service. They regarded Tonc with genuine sympathy.
The defector described in detail the assembly areas and attack routes of two regiments of the 325 Division. He gave the battle plans of the 304 Division, especially its role in the attack on the combat base.
The 68th Regiment (artillery) was digging into the face of Co Roc for the coming battle, he said, and both the 308 and the 341 North Vietnamese Army divisions had crossed the DMZ in recent days, near Con Thien, and Gio Linh. The 320 Division was poised for an attack on Camp Carroll to silence the big guns that supported Khe Sanh. The 4th Battalion of the Van An Rocket Artillery Regiment and the Vinh Linh Rocket Battalion were even now crossing the DMZ to attack the Marines’ rear bases at Dong Ha and Quang Tri City.
“He willingly gave a wealth of information to his interrogators with more detail than would be expected of an officer in his position,” the Marines reported. “He was able to give extensive details of the forthcoming Tet Offensive, the plans for besieging Khe Sanh, and preparations for an imminent attack [on the hilltop outposts].”
Deception, decoys, and misdirection were North Vietnamese trademarks. The Marines struggled briefly not to believe the defector, but Lieutenant Tonc’s information dovetailed perfectly with the intelligence gathered by radio intercept equipment. The “materializing” of enemy units all along the DMZ suddenly became real.
Few commanders in history have possessed perfect knowledge of their enemy’s plans before battle. In the recorded instances when a commander has received the precise time and route of attack, he has almost always refused to accept the evidence on the grounds that it must be false. Russia’s supreme commander, for example, knew the hour and strength of Germany’s massive assault into the Soviet Union in June of 1941 but refused to believe the information.
Lownds believed.
Lieutenant Tonc was a hundred times more valuable than the five riddled bodies of January 2. The defector’s news just might be the most timely and important intelligence of the war. This latest Marine coup rocketed up the chain of command.
General Tompkins believed. General Cushman believed.
Westmoreland believed. His intelligence chief telephoned his wife in the United States and told her that “a tense operational situation” made it impossible for him to join her in Honolulu for a planned week of Rest and Recreation. Late on the twentieth, Westmoreland cabled Washington: “the enemy will soon seek victories essential to achieving prestige and bargaining power.”
General Wheeler believed, and so did the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even President Johnson.
Lieutenant Tonc’s news was so hot it bubbled out of the back channels of the Pentagon and into the Washington Star within twenty-four hours. “The North Vietnamese Army has moved two new divisions south for what American military leaders think could be the greatest battle of the South Vietnamese war,” the paper’s military correspondent wrote. Senior American officers, he said, found the battleground at Khe Sanh to be “reminiscent of Dienbienphu.”
The Marines at the combat base registered their guns one more time, fine-tuning so they could deliver instant, accurate artillery support to the hills. Individual Marines picked their way out into the tangles of barbed wire to affix a few more trip flares—intense bursts of white light to illuminate intruders—and to set additional Claymore mines.
As dark closed over the plateau, short bursts of machine gun fire and the hard cracking of M-14 rifles could be heard around every perimeter as the Marines cleared their weapons for the coming battle. They were forewarned, armed, alert, ready.
• • •
AT EXACTLY THIRTY minutes past midnight, North Vietnamese gunners pounded Hill 861 with hundreds of rockets, mortar shells, and rocket-propelled grenades. Heavy machine guns lashed the hilltop, the bullets sometimes clanging insanely inside the open fifty-five-gallon drums that Company K had installed to drain away the monsoon floods.
At one o’clock, 250 NVA soldiers climbed the steep southwest slope of the hill under extremely heavy artillery fire and plunged unhesitatingly into the Marines’ “interlocking bands of grazing machine gun fire.” The enemy’s elite combat engineers, the dac cong, led the attack. They breached the defensive wire with Bangalore torpedos and blasted pathways with satchel charges. Some threw bamboo ladders across the wire and leaped into the forward Marine trenches. Assault troops followed them through the gaps.
Captain Jasper was hit once trying to rally his men, then wounded again. A third bullet knocked him down, and his executive officer took command. The company’s gunnery sergeant was killed, and the Marines pulled back to a slightly higher piece of ground on Hill 861’s crest. Enemy troops overran the helicopter landing zone and began searching through captured bunkers and trenches for Marine survivors. Company K’s senior surviving sergeant was still on his feet, but he had to pinch together a gaping wound in his throat to keep from bleeding to death.
Dabney’s Marines, waiting their turn in the maelstrom of battle, strained their eyes into the black mists while they listened to the crash of shells and rifles only a thousand yards away. Deep in the command bunker with Dabney were most of the top officers of his battalion. They had helicoptered to the hilltop the previous afternoon to get a good close look at India’s fight on 881 North, then been stranded when the weather closed down like wet velvet curtains.
They waited, and waited, and waited.
Not a single mortar shell fell on 881 South that night. Not a single dac cong crept forward in the harsh white light of trip flares.
Finally, it was decided to join the fight on Hill 861. Rationing the shells twenty at a time, just in case the enemy did come, India Company’s mortars hammered the North Vietnamese over the next few hours with 680 rounds.
Company K hung tough.
The mortarmen on Hill 861 never stopped firing, just tilting their tubes a tad to drop bombs on their own lines after the North Vietnamese overran the trenches on one half the hilltop. Sergeant Stephen L. Goddard found one mortar crew at the height of battle bellowing stanzas from “The Marine Hymn.” Captain Jasper’s radioman, blinded by an explosion, relayed target coordinates to gunners on 881 South “as calm, cool and collected as a telephone operator in New York City.”
At 5 A.M., Company K attacked back down the trenchlines, shouting and shooting. Individual Americans and North Vietnamese grappled and stabbed in “vicious hand-to-hand fighting.” Some Marines engaged in brutal, short-range grenade duels, curling up fetally to absorb the blasts of shrapnel in their flak jackets and steel helmets. At 5:15 A.M. the defenders radioed the combat base that they had cleared Hill 861 of enemy soldiers—except for fourteen bodies left behind in the rush to escape.
Colonel Lownds, General Tompkins, and Westmoreland himself breathed more easily when the defensive perimeter was restored.
It had been a near thing. Marine of
ficers believed the battle could have gone the other way if the combat base artillery had not so thoroughly churned the slopes as to make it impossible for enemy reserves to exploit the breakthrough.
Lownds was thinking about getting replacements to the hilltop as soon as the fog cleared, lifting out the casualties, and finding reinforcements to strengthen the position. The battle for Hill 861 had been sobering: several hundred enemy soldiers had actually cracked one of the hilltop fortresses—and their attack plans had been known. No great exercise of imagination was necessary to predict the outcome of an assault by five thousand North Vietnamese.
• • •
THE MARINES HAD only a few minutes to celebrate the success of Company K’s counterattack.
At 5:30 A.M. a great swarm of rockets ignited on the south-facing slopes of Hill 881 North, streaked almost directly over Dabney’s position and slammed into the combat base.
The first of the rockets hit inside an earthen bunker on the eastern perimeter of the base. In a colossal explosion that bathed the Khe Sanh plateau in the glaring white light of Apocalypse, the bulk of Lownds’ fifteen hundred tons of stored ammunition detonated.
The shock wave tumbled helicopters like toys, swept away tents and buildings, collapsed the walls of the post office and the PX, curled up steel matting on the airfield and knocked out landing lights and radio antennas.
Tar drums and barrels of aviation fuel ignited, then flooded into the ammunition dump in rivers of flame. Unexploded shells began to cook off in the roaring petroleum fires.
Choking clouds of tear gas, released from the Marines’ own stores, swirled across the combat base so thickly that even gas masks didn’t work.
The cauldron boiled hottest at the eastern end of the airstrip.
Bravo Company, basking in praise after its live capture of Lieutenant Tonc, was waiting here for the enemy’s main assault. Among the many gifts brought by the defecting North Vietnamese officer was the news that the enemy’s 304th Division would send an assault regiment at this very place. As chance would have it, this was the sector that included the petroleum-oil-lubricant storage depot and all of the ammunition.
Second Lieutenant John W. Dillon held his platoon in the line, primed for the attack, even though tons of ammunition were going off within fifty yards. Blinding explosions rocked the base, and the eruptions threw up hundreds of unexploded but partially fused or dangerously heated shells. Some exploded on impact. Some hurtled out of the blast furnace and bowled over Marines as they searched for better cover. So many hundreds of artillery shells, half-baked LAW canisters, 106mm recoilless rifle rounds, and mortar bombs cascaded down from the sky that Dillon’s trenches literally filled to the brim with unexploded rounds in some places.
Bravo Company’s command post moved three times during the morning to try to escape the skittering, tumbling American shells, all the while dodging enemy rockets and shells. After one tremendous explosion, some of Bravo’s stunned officers looked down at themselves to discover steel darts sticking in their flak jackets, shirt sleeves—and the skin of their hands and faces. The flechette ammo had blown.
The expected infantry assault never came, but five of the ten men in Bravo Company’s command group that night were evacuated from Khe Sanh with “extreme combat fatigue.”
At 6:30 A.M., with fire still eating one-hundred-ton chunks out of the ammunition dump, North Vietnamese troops crashed into the western edge of Khe Sanh village.
They cut their way through the defensive wires, penetrated the government compound, and seized the dispensary building. Lieutenant Stamper, who could hear enemy shouts in the schoolyard where children had sung the day before, called Lownds for assistance.
The colonel was dealing with a tactical emergency in his ammunition supplies. He expected the enemy’s main assault on the combat base at any minute. It just wasn’t possible to send relief force to the village, Lownds told Stamper; he would try to help with artillery.
Working under extremely hazardous conditions, the Marine artillery and mortars had been firing at phantoms in the mist while glowing duds from their own ammo dump rained down all around them.
Every few minutes another enemy rocket or shell would crash inside the combat base perimeter. These were big 122mm rockets, each of them six feet long, weighing more than one hundred pounds, and they hit like the sledgehammer of God. High velocity shells from enemy artillery pieces deep inside Laos screeched out of the sky with such force that no bunker on the base was immune. The 26th Marines’ mess hall was demolished.
The Marines ached to answer, but they had no targets.
They could blast the sides of Hill 861 and they could smash the enemy force in the village, but they could not find the enemy guns.
Most of the North Vietnamese mortars were hidden beneath the thick fog blanket of the early morning; some sounded tantalizingly close, but could not be located precisely enough to hit. The enemy artillery was simply too far away in Laos to be reached by anything at Khe Sanh. One of the reasons Westmoreland had wanted the Army’s big 175mm guns at the combat base was to answer the enemy’s long-range 152mm and 130 artillery in the mountains of Laos. One of the reasons the North Vietnamese had ambushed the artillery convoy in August was to guarantee this weapons overmatch in January.
Desperate for information that could give his guns targets, Major Ronald W. Campbell ran from one fresh shell hole to another to finger the hot fragments, measure the depth of the crater with a practiced eye, and orient the splash of shrapnel on the earth. From these clues he guessed at the caliber, distance, and direction of the enemy weapon, translated the estimates into firing coordinates, then raced to his guns to shoot back down the arc in the hope of silencing the North Vietnamese weapons.
It wasn’t much, but it was better than shooting shells into the fog.
On this first morning of the siege at Khe Sanh, the Marine gunners learned a bitter lesson:
“We were never able to silence the heavy artillery and rockets that could bear on the Khe Sanh Combat Base.”
• • •
SHORTLY AFTER 8 A.M., Lieutenant Stamper and a few Marines on civic action duty rallied the Vietnamese forces in the village and drove the North Vietnamese out. The victory surprised everyone, especially the ragged force of South Vietnamese regional troops, which was ill-equipped and anxious to avoid serious combat with professional soldiers from the north.
An uneasy calm settled over Khe Sanh. The Marines still battled heavy fires in the ammunition dump, and irregular shellfire plowed the airstrip to discourage landings. At 10 A.M. a half ton of plastic explosive went off with an earth-shaking concussion that almost entombed the command staff of the First Battalion—the chief defenders of the combat base. The blast cracked the timbers in the command bunker, and the beams sagged under the great weight of piled sandbags. Dirt showered down, but the beams held and work continued as new posts were wedged into the bunker to hold the ceiling.
Late in the afternoon, several hundred North Vietnamese soldiers renewed the attack on the government headquarters. This time the defenders held the assault troops in place with heavy machine gun fire and called in one thousand rounds of artillery fused to explode in the air just above the defensive wire. Lieutenant Stamper asked the guns to hit the pagoda, which overlooked his defenses. The Buddhist steeple collapsed with the third volley. An air strike leveled Howard Johnson’s. A Marine fighter-bomber came in very low to rip the enemy ranks with explosive shells, claiming one hundred kills. The enemy attack was easily repulsed.
Colonel Lownds decided in the late afternoon to abandon the village. Because he believed the road between the combat base and Khe Sanh might be held by enemy forces, he sent helicopters to pick up the Americans. South Vietnamese government officials and regional troops would have to walk to the combat base. Lownds shrugged; he had too much on his mind right now to practice diplomacy.
The colonel was struggling with serious problems as dark began to thicken in the jungled gorges ar
ound Khe Sanh. He had lost ninety-eight percent of his ammunition in the explosion and fires of the morning. In a secret message to Tompkins, he complained bitterly that he had to use his remaining shells to suppress enemy anti-aircraft fire—otherwise U.S. pilots refused to deliver urgently needed ammunition. Only six cargo planes landed at Khe Sanh on January 21, bringing in a microscopic 24 tons of supplies. Lownds needed more than 160 tons a day to maintain the status quo—and the status quo was terrible. The ammunition shortage was “critical, to say the least.”
The combat base was a shambles.
Fires burned everywhere. Even solid bunkers smoldered fitfully: the Marines had soaked the sandbags in fuel oil hoping it might repel rats. Pools of gasoline flamed in the dark. The base was littered with duds from the ammo dump, ruined building parts and torn tents, pieces of shrapnel and hundreds of thousands of steel darts, everywhere.
Enemy shellfire had reduced usable runway from thirty-nine hundred feet to two thousand feet, and knocked out the landing lights.
Hill 861 needed replacements and reinforcements as soon as possible; the base artillery would not be able to provide the same quality of support if the enemy came again tonight.
Khe Sanh Village was lost.
More than 1,000 terrified Vietnamese civilians had arrived at the gates of the combat base. Felix and Madeleine Poilane were there, too, with their children—and with five nuns from the Catholic school. They pleaded to be let in, but Lownds would let only a very few through the gates; he feared the introduction of a Trojan horse into his battered fortress.
• • •
JANUARY 21 FRIGHTENED the American Command.
The North Vietnamese had committed fewer than 1,000 troops. Their plans had been hopelessly compromised, but the enemy had taken the village, destroyed the Marines’ ammunition, and nearly overrun one hilltop. American casualties had not been serious, even in the bitter fighting on 861, but it was now much more difficult to be certain about the outcome if 10,000 or 20,000 enemy soldiers emerged from the swirling fog.