by Robert Pisor
5.
“I DON’T WANT ANY DAMN DINBINFOO”
Captain Larry Budge reached inside his leather briefcase and pulled out a paperback book with a blood red cover: Jules Roy’s The Battle of Dienbienphu. The only sound in the small, upholstered cabin was the faint clean whine of the engines of Westmoreland’s executive jet. Across the aisle, the general was giving numbers to a newspaper reporter while the astonishingly green hills of Vietnam unrolled far below. During these stolen moments in brutally busy days Budge read accounts of one of the most extraordinary battles in history.
The guns had fallen silent at Dienbienphu only thirteen years ago, but the battle had already been accorded classic status.
Captain Budge, who was Westmoreland’s personal aide, had already read another brilliant work on Dienbienphu, Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. This book, too, was covered in red cloth. Like poppies, Fall and Roy bloomed on the khaki bookshelves of every thoughtful officer in the United States military—in the Canal Zone as well as in Saigon. Fall and Roy were textbooks at West Point, and they had been translated into German and Russian and Spanish. When the 304th North Vienamese Army division was first identified near Khe Sanh in early 1968, the intelligence report used a description lifted verbatim from the appendices of Hell in a Very Small Place. As soon as Westmoreland’s aide finished Roy’s book, he planned to read Fall again from the new perspective of The Battle of Dienbienphu.
Everyone read and thought about Dienbienphu.
On May 7, 1954, thousands of triumphant Vietnamese had rushed the shattered defenses of an isolated French garrison in the mountains to claim victory on the fifty-sixth day of a terrible siege. Against every prediction and in spite of all thoughtful analysis, Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap had managed to deliver enormous quantities of shells and supplies to the distant battlefield, and to pound 13,000 French defenders into submission. His peasant army had out-generaled, out-supplied, and out-fought France’s finest soldiers.
Americans fought today where Frenchmen had failed yesterday. Even the battlefields were the same; Colonel Lownds and his staff at the Khe Sanh Combat Base worked in an old French bunker. Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Dienbienphu, still commanded the enemy forces.
Only very stupid military officers ignored these parallels; most thought of little else. Dienbienphu had dominated American planning and tactics from the very beginning. On the day the French surrendered, in 1954, drill sergeants at Quanitco, Va. lined up Marine trainees and announced grimly: “Dienbienphu just fell. Your rifles had better be clean.”
Each year in Vietnam on the anniversary of Dienbienphu, American officers doubled the guard and put out extra listening posts and ambush patrols. In 1966, Lt. Col. Henry E. Emerson was sweeping draws and valleys in central Vietnam with a paratroop battalion, but feeling very edgy about being in the field in mid-May. His brigade commander, Brig. Gen. Willard Pearson, was also nervous, and so was Major General H.W.O. Kinnard, the II Corps commander. Again and again Kinnard had been warned, once by the admiral in Hawaii who commanded all U.S. forces in the Pacific:
“Remember, we don’t want any Dienbienphus, not one, not even a little one.”
It was hardly surprising, then, that American officers began to comment on the striking similarities between Dienbienphu and Khe Sanh, especially after January 21. Never had the specter of siege, and loss, loomed larger.
Every officer knew that if the North Vietnamese had put into Hill 861 and Khe Sanh Village the numbers of troops that the intelligence people had been predicting, both would have fallen. Two hundred Marines would have been snuffed out in a few short, vicious hours of combat.
Professional military men steel themselves for the moment when they might choose—or be forced—to stand and die. It is, after all, the final obligation of a military career. One essential consideration a soldier must make when he considers a life in the service is death in the service.
Westmoreland knew these rules, and so did Lownds at Khe Sanh; so did Dabney, and the great majority of the Marines—volunteers and draftees alike—who manned the hilltop outposts.
They would not choose to die, of course. They practiced the craft precisely to avoid the conditions in which death became inevitable. Still, the hurtling shells and hidden mines and sudden ambushes had made death a companion, and the professionals among them didn’t rage when he sat in a friend’s place at the table.
The Commander in Chief was not so philosophical. He lay awake at night worrying about a tidal wave of Orientals crashing over boys from Ohio and Virginia and Texas—and of long rows of flag-wrapped aluminum coffins.
Dienbienphu had already burned a place in Lyndon Johnson’s mind. In 1954, as a Senate leader and key member of the Armed Services Committee, he had listened to top-secret intelligence briefings about Vo Nguyen Giap’s use of thousands of coolies and bicycles to move guns and shells through impossible mountain terrain. He had heard how the Vietnamese, sensing a break point in their long colonial war with the French, had hurled themselves at Dienbienphu with unusual fervor. He had personally argued strongly, and successfully, against American intervention in the French bastion’s final hours—and he had seen the photographs of the heaps of dead, the shattered stares of wounded, and the abandoned faces of the losers as they were led away in chains.
Lyndon Johnson knew that his top military advisers envsioned Khe Sanh as a trap to kill 10,000, 20,000, perhaps even 30,000 enemy soldiers in a single stroke. But the President also knew, with the deep certainty of a lifetime in politics, that no quantity of North Vietnamese bodies—not even the highest pile of corpses in the entire war—could offset the loss of the Marine base.
It would not be enough to kill at favorable ratios of six to one or ten to one, or even twenty to one. Khe Sanh could not fall.
President Johnson was tortured by the war in early 1968. The rising costs, the dead, the endlessness of it, had finally broken one of his most steadfast lieutenants, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Now the Senate, once his private preserve, was beginning to wonder if the Tonkin Gulf incident might have been an American provocation—and not a North Vietnamese act of war. The President had lost more than thirty points in the popularity polls, he had become insecure, fearful, and unsure about his course, and he had begun to think about not seeking a second term.
The possibility of a battlefield defeat had haunted Johnson from the outset of the war, but he had grown more concerned in recent months. Even before he had fully savored the glowing reports from Loc Ninh and Dak To, he heard from Westmoreland that “the Communists are preparing for a maximum military effort, and will soon try for a significant tactical victory.”
In December, his security advisor, Walt W. Rostow, told the President that a newly captured document said the North Vietnamese “intend to reenact a new Dienbienphu.” Then came the reports of the enemy build-up around Khe Sanh, and Westmoreland’s warning that the North Vietnamese might be willing to make brief, terrible sacrifices for a significant political or propaganda gain.
The President began to make nightly visits to the Situation Room beneath the White House.
Johnson carried the fear with him when he flew to Australia on December 21 to attend memorial services for the prime minister, who had disappeared while swimming alone. Johnson told the Australian cabinet that he expected the North Vietnamese to use “Kamikaze tactics in the weeks ahead, committing their troops in a wave of suicide attacks.” He stopped in Rome two days before Christmas, on his way back to the United States, and he told the pope about his fear of “Kamikaze attacks.”
After January 21, the President began to demand more detailed information. He wanted to know how many planes were landing at Khe Sanh, how many tons of ammunition had been flown in that day—and how many more were needed. He wanted photographs, and maps, and he badgered his military aides for details on the battle.
JANUARY 22
Thick mists dimmed the dawn at the Khe Sanh Combat Base. Even before the su
n burned away the fog at midmorning, however, bombs began furrowing the plateau. Westmoreland had decided that Lt. Tonc’s gift of intelligence and the plight of Marines called for the undamming of Niagara.
The general assumed personal control over targeting for B-52s in southeast Asia. He wanted all of his hammer for this battle. His chief of air operations set up a special command post at Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon specifically to orchestrate aerial operations around Khe Sanh. Two of the Army’s more gifted tacticians, General Creighton Abrams and Lt. Gen. William B. Rosson, stood each day over an elaborate sand table model of the Khe Sanh area, studying the ridges and draws and folds in the earth, trying to surmise the enemy’s most likely routes of approach, encampment sites and supply points. Based on these thoughtful guesses, Westmoreland dispatched B-52s to Khe Sanh.
At the combat base, the first helicopter slapped the morning air with its blades. Immediately, enemy mortars coughed heavily in the near distance. The pre-aimed enemy scattered the American crews and damaged the ships. It going to be too costly to operate supply helicopters from combat base; from now on, they would fly from Quang Tri or Dong Ha, a half hour to the east.
Fighter bombers, reconnaissance planes, and communication laboratories were stacked past forty thousand feet over Khe Sanh, listening and looking and waiting for holes in the fog, when the first terrified cry for help came in on a radio sideband. Across the border, less than ten miles away, a friendly unit of the Laotian Army was being overrun. Two bomb-heavy B-57s and and a forward air controller went to assist.
Between heavy bursts of static, a Laotian radioman reported that armored vehicles had led a North Vietnamese infantry assault. His unit could hold no longer. The radio crackled with the sounds of panic and gunfire. Hoping for a shot at what might be the first enemy tanks in the war, the American bombers lingered long over the great, grey blanket that hid Laos. The clouds never parted; even million candle power flares winked out in the swallowing mists.
The sideband picked up a last cry for help, a few final blats of static—and the Laotians were gone.
Colonel Lownds was pleading for ammunition. Yesterday’s air deliveries had brought in only one-tenth of what he needed, and his need was critical.
General Cushman sat down to rethink an overland push to the combat base. The Millers used to drive this section of Route 9 in a few hours. Now it would take mine-sweeping, bridge-building, bulldozing—and fighting every foot of the way. Cushman shook his head. “Progress would be too slow,” he decided, “and casualties too numerous.”
Asking Lownds to march his people out on Route 9 was unthinkable: “Going down Route 9 would have been the Groupe Mobile 100 all over again. There was no way to get the troops out without a guaranteed one thousand casualties—fast.”
The Marines at Khe Sanh would have to live by airlift, and it was already proving difficult. The few transports that tried landing in the chaos of January 21 had run gauntlets of enemy machine gun fire. North Vietnamese mortar shells searched the runways for taxiing planes, and tried to catch helicopters on the ground.
As soon as the fog cleared on the morning of January 22, Captain Dabney and his men waved in the first resupply ship. The craft settled on the tiny pad atop Hill 881 South—and two 120mm mortar bombs bracketed the landing zone. Fist-sized chunks of jagged steel killed Marines more than one hundred yards away. The corpsmen found five dead, and fifteen so badly wounded they needed immediate evacuation to hospitals. The only way to get them out was by helicopter, and helicopters drew 120mm mortar fire—every time.
Dabney had lost forty-two men on the twentieth; on the morning of the twenty-second, he lost twenty more.
• • •
GENERAL WESTMORELAND WAS convinced the North Vietnames were trying to “create another Dienbienphu” at Khe Sanh, and he was beginning to believe that the Marines were not up to the task. For two years he had thought that the Marines routinely underestimated enemy capabilities; now he was certain. The setbacks at the combat base were dangerous, yet General Robert D. Cushman, a Marine and the commander of I Corps, seemed have no thoughtful plan for the Army reinforcements that he was sending north.
Westmoreland was already angry with Cushman.
Several weeks before, as he prepared to concentrate an aerial armada over Khe Sanh, Westmoreland had asked Cushman give up tactical bombers that were not actually supporting Marines in combat. Westmoreland wanted them under centralized Air Force control at his headquarters, available to “go where the targets are” rather than to be reserved solely for Marine support.
Cushman bristled instantly. He was “unalterably opposed,” he asserted, “to any fractionalization of the Marine air-group team.”
Marine units had fewer artillery pieces than comparable Army units because, in theory, Marines got artillery support from their Navy ships that had carried them to battle. When they got to far inland to get help from the sea, Marines relied on Marine pilots who had trained first as infantrymen. Marine air-ground cooperation in combat was between comrades, not branches of service—and Cushman could not give it up.
The issue had sharpened just a few months earlier, in the tough battles near Con Thien. The Marines had been taking heavy casualties, and they asked the Air Force for help. Afterwards, the Marines bitterly accused the Air Force of a halfhearted effort. General Chaisson, a Marine and the chief of Westmoreland’s operations center, actually confronted Air Force General “Spike” Momyer in the hallway in Saigon:
“There is no doubt in my mind. . . that the 7th Air Force is not putting the weight of effort in Con Thien it should be putting in there. There is no doubt the Air Force is not putting the amount of effort [needed] in there.”
Cushman appealed to Admiral Sharp in Honolulu. Sharp was a Navy man, and thus viscerally inclined to Marines, and he was Westmoreland’s superior. On January 18, just as he was putting the finishing touches on Niagara, Westmoreland received a cable from Sharp suggesting he withdraw his request for Marine air assets.
On the twenty-second, Westmoreland wired Sharp that he couldn’t back off; he needed those planes.
Westmoreland was wearying of the Marines. Back channel reports described the combat base “bunkers” as little more than teetering piles of sandbags. The general had been worried that the Marines had lost initiative in I Corps; now it appeared they were not even prepared to meet an enemy attack. His mind began to turn to the Army for solutions.
The five northern provinces of South Vietnam, I Corps, had been an exclusive Marine preserve just one year ago; now there were more than twenty battalions of Army troops there, and more on the way. Westmoreland began to think about putting the Army in charge in I Corps.
General Cushman sensed the pressure, and he decided to sacrifice Lownds. A dynamic new leader at the combat base might demonstrate a quality of Marine resolve that could cool Westmoreland’s rising heat. Lownds kept his job because his division commander, General Tompkins, argued that he “knew the terrain intimately.”
Everyone agreed that Khe Sanh needed more troops. Adding defenders would increase the logistical burden, but Lownds couldn’t wait for the supply problems to be solved; he needed reinforcements before dark.
Late in the day on January 22, the First Battalion of the Ninth Marines was airlifted from the other end of the DMZ to Khe Sanh. One Nine collected its gear, pushed through the milling crowd at the front gate, put out a point, and marched a mile across the almost flat, scrubby ground west of the combat base to the small hill that had served as a rock quarry.
The thousand rifles of One Nine now blocked the western approaches.
More importantly, the new defensive position put a strong Marine force on each side of a broad piece of ground that could serve as a drop zone. The defenders at Dienbienphu had lost critically important ammunition and supplies, and sometimes men, when the wind blew their parachutes behind enemy lines. The brooding French could hear the Vietnamese shout and laugh as they opened packages filled with mortar she
lls and machine gun parts and wine. Westmoreland planned to drop supplies smack on the table; One Nine would make it possible.
More than one thousand Vietnamese settlers and military stragglers, plantation workers, shopkeepers, and children were gathered at the gates to the combat base. They surged fearfully toward the barbed wire every time the bombs fell particularly close, and they parted and closed for the going and coming of military patrols. Lieutenant Stamper had come up the road from the village in late morning, walking beside his South Vietnamese counterpart and helping his unit’s walking wounded. Stamper had spent too many days and nights with these amateur soldiers to board a helicopter in the night and fly away; he had brought them out himself.
Colonel Lownds met Stamper near the gate. “We’re surrounded by two NVA divisions,” he explained. “We couldn’t send the [rescue] company. It would have been annihilated.”
To reduce the pressure on his perimeter from friendly civilians, Lownds began moving small groups of Vietnamese through the combat base to the airfield to fly them out on the planes that delivered One Nine. The Bru were terrified by the tremendous increase in bombing. When they saw the Vietnamese being lifted to safety, thousands packed their personal belongings and pots and chickens and children and hurried to the front gate, settling in along the dirt paths that led to the combat base, patiently waiting their turn to go.
Lownds was raging. Every time he cleared the ground around the base so that he could concentrate firepower on North Vietnamese assault troops, a couple thousand civilians showed up to screen enemy movements. The top Vietnamese government official for Quang Tri Province solved Lownds’ problem by declaring that only Vietnamese could be airlifted from Khe Sanh; the Bru, he ruled, were ineligible.