by Robert Pisor
The Montagnards, ordered away from the gates, began to move uncertainly back towards hamlets that had already been severely jarred by the first bombs of Niagara. Some drifted east on Route 9, walking the broken road that was impassable to Marines. A few tried for Laos, moving deeper into the mountains, away from the coming fire storm.
It had not been Westmoreland’s best day. Only 130 tons of supplies had reached Khe Sanh, and the Commander in Chief wanted to know why. Army reinforcements were on the way, but they were not yet in place. And now, intelligence reports of enemy movements throughout South Vietnam had become so alarming that West-moreland believed the enemy might attempt a countrywide “show of strength” before Tet.
It was about to get worse.
JANUARY 23
Westmoreland woke to crackling radio reports and coded teletype messages that called urgently for aircraft carriers, heavy bombers and cargo ships, and airlifts of troops prepared for combat. The flurry of communications had all the earmarks of war, and the war wasn’t in Vietnam.
North Korea had captured the USS Pueblo during the night, and American sailors were being paraded through the streets as prisoners and spies.
At the very moment the enemy was poised to strike at Khe Sanh, at the moment of his greatest need, Westmoreland felt his country’s attention shift from Vietnam to Korea. Suddenly it seemed possible—even likely—that a significant share of his resources might be taken for action in North Korea.
He couldn’t afford it. He felt that he had already stretched himself thin in the Saigon region and the central Highlands so that he could concentrate American forces in the northern two provinces.
Now came worse news. The South Koreans, who had been flattened by a North Korean armored juggernaut in a 1950 surprise attack, had no intention of rolling over this time. They had learned a great deal in the eighteen years since their humiliation, and ROK troops were now very tough soldiers equipped with the finest American weapons. Their government wanted them home, immediately, to deal with the new crisis.
Westmoreland prized the Koreans so highly that he had given them a critical role in Checkers: the securing of Da Nang, the largest military air base and port complex in the northern part of the country. He did not trust the South Vietnamese to do this job. Just two years before, ARVN officers and soldiers in Da Nang had joined students and dissidents in the streets to protest government policies. Americans had risked their lives to confront rebellious ARVN commanders and keep open critical lines of military communication. As he prepared for a showdown Khe Sanh, Westmoreland wanted his vital rear area protect by Koreans—not Vietnamese.
Checkers, a carefully planned, orderly movement of troops to the north, was now a fast-clacking game of great urgency. Pulling the Koreans out would leave a gaping hole in the alignment of pieces; Giap would strike immediately at such an opening.
The strains in the north were beginning to show. The Cavalry Division had been scheduled to fit itself into the defense ring around Hue, a city of considerable symbolic importance to the Vietnamese. The 1st Cav’s headquarters had arrived at Phu Bai, fifteen miles from Hue, just yesterday, but Westmoreland now needed the Cav to relieve the Marines at Khe Sanh.
Westmoreland was waging an interservice battle for resources, trying to stir the Marines into a more aggressive stance in I Corps, struggling with serious supply problems at Khe Sanh, wondering at the next move of an enemy who had suddenly become very active—and now it looked as though he might lose his Koreans.
The general grew more intense. A finer pencil now drew the line where his lips joined. He now met twice a day with his intelligence officers, and he began to demand fewer hypotheses and more hard facts. He pushed his staff for innovation. He wanted proposals for action, not plans for reaction. Westmoreland wanted to strike first rather than wait for Vo Nguyen Giap to pick the time and place for battle.
• • •
COLONEL LOWNDS WAS also taking stock. He knew that he was not going to be getting any more Marines. It was going to be difficult to supply the men already at Khe Sanh; it would be impossible to sustain a larger force.
The Marine officers on the hilltops played word games with the combat base during Lownds’ census. The radio shackle codes were in enemy hands, captured when the recon team was ambushed on 881 North on January 18, and the Marines had not worked out a new code to secure message traffic. Because they were announcing into an open radio the exact number of men in each outpost, officers tried to conceal the truth with tricks. Captain Dabney asked for replacements, for example, by giving cheery reports of robust good health and high spirits—and then whistling the open bars of Stouthearted Men: “Give me some men who are stouthearted men, who will fight for the right they adore.”
By the end of the day on January 23, Lownds had his head count: 244 Marine officers and 5,528 Marine enlisted men, 21 Navy officers and 207 Navy enlisted, 2 Army officers and 28 enlisted, and 1 Air Force officer.
Half of these men were inside the perimeter of the combat base. A thousand held the Rock Quarry one mile to the west, and another thousand sat on top of Hill 558, plugging the Rao Quang River valley to the north. This last battalion was also supposed to support K Company on Hill 861, but the map readers had missed a rocky shoulder between the two positions. The intervening ridge was discovered on January 21, when K Company was nearly overrun. On the twenty-second, Lownds moved two hundred men from Hill 558 to the ridge, and named the new position 861 Alpha. K Company had been reinforced to a strength of three hundred men, Dabney had close to four hundred on 881 South, and a single platoon—about fifty men—held the peak of Hill 950 to the north.
And that was it: 6,053 men in seven positions, some of them miles apart.
Colonel Lownds did not include in his count the soldiers at Lang Vei, or the 400 troops under U.S. Army control who held the southwest perimeter of the combat base, beside the front gate. This was almost a separate compound within the Marine base; it held Montagnards, Vietnamese, Nungs, hill people from Laos, and other indigenous troops under Green Beret leadership. Lownds was not completely comfortable with this complement of irregulars inside his perimeter. He stationed his six tanks immediately behind their lines.
The Marines were spread thinly on the perimeter of the combat base, and Lownds had fewer than 200 men in his emergency reserve. It didn’t seem like enough, but Lownds’ role was to draw the enemy in. Supporting arms—B-52 bombers, the circling planes with cluster bombs and napalm, and the long-range Army artillery from Camp Carrol and the Rockpile—would do the killing.
JANUARY 24
In the first hours after dawn, the shattered remnants of the 33rd Laotian Elephant Battalion stumbled down Route 9 to Lang Vei. The Lao soldiers’ wives and children, camp followers in the long tradition of poor armies in the field, walked along the sides of the road with their men—2,300 civilians in all. They seemed quite pleased to find friendly faces inside the Vietnamese border and, while the battalion commander went inside the Green Berets’ fenced camp to consult with the Americans, the women and children pitched tents, drew water from nearby streams, and began preparation of a midday meal.
A few miles to the north, an Air Force fighter bomber took four hard hits, made a half roll to the left, and began shaking itself to pieces. The pilot punched out, and was picked up minutes later by a rescue chopper. It was the third day in a row that an American plane had been shot down over Khe Sanh. Lieutenant Tonc’s rival, the new commander of the 14th Anti-aircraft Company, was doing OK.
Shells shrieked in from Laos at odd intervals, smashing buildings at the combat base and punching through sandbags and bunkers like fists through paper. Incoming shells and rockets were counted in dozens, not hundreds, but the Marines began to move in a hunched half-run called the Quick Step.
General Westmoreland, wanting to strike first, proposed to Washington that a force of Marines, paratroopers, and air cavalrymen strike suddenly from the sea at North Vietnam, just above the DMZ. A surprise landing on t
he enemy coast might disrupt enemy plans for attacks in the south.
President Johnson was meeting with his military advisers to discuss the possibility of war with North Korea. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were deeply concerned about the quality of American units available for combat, and about the tiny reserve of regular troops still left in the United States. A B-52 had crashed the night before in Greenland, and emergency teams were now combing the ice for missing nuclear weapons. Defense Secretary McNamara told the President’s inner council that laboratory analysis had identified the powder in the bullets for the M16 rifle as one of the several causes for battlefield jamming incidents. In the next few days, he said, the government would begin to replace the gunpowder used by most American soldiers in Vietnam.
Westmoreland’s proposal for an invasion of North Vietnam was considered seriously, but briefly; there were too many other problems to consider expanding the war to a new battlefield at this time.
THE LAST DAYS OF JANUARY
“I couldn’t stand it any more. I knew that one of my boys must have been killed. . . . I jumped out of bed, put on my robe, took my flashlight, and went into the Situation Room.”
Dreams of Dienbienphu had made an insomniac of President Johnson. He could be found at 3 A.M. in the basement of the White House, reading cables, studying aerial photos, and asking for numbers. The military staff had constructed for him a sand table model of the Khe Sanh plateau and combat base, much like the one in the hangar in Saigon.
He wandered from map to teletype, from message desk to sand table, wondering, worrying, about the Marines.
Every day the President asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about the decision to stand and fight at Khe Sanh, and every day General Wheeler, as confident as Westmoreland, assured the President that Khe Sanh could hold.
The Marine base in these last days of January became the symbol of American determination in Vietnam, just as Dienbienphu had become the symbol of French commitment in 1954. Critics argued that the political and military similarities to Dienbienphu were too great to be ignored, and that the risks were therefore too appalling to consider. Precisely because of such criticism, military tacticians restudied every eventuality, knowing it was imperative that Khe Sanh not fall.
Westmoreland shaped his justifications for the defense of Khe Sanh during these days of debate. He saw many important uses for the remote mountain air strip, especially as the launch point for an invasion of Laos, but the single greatest attraction of the combat base right now was as a killing ground for North Vietnamese troops.
The general had become more politic since the previous spring when, during a visit to the United States, he had rather baldly described his strategy for winning the war. Attrition would do it, he had said, a steady, bloody, grinding-down of the enemy until he quit. “We’ll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for generations.” Westmoreland had been stung when military critics asserted that attrition was not a strategy but rather one of the signs of loss of initiative.
Westmoreland, therefore, used other reasons to support his decision to defend the combat base. “Khe Sanh commands the approaches to Dong Ha and Quang Tri City,” he said. “Were we to relinquish the Khe Sanh area, the North Vietnamese would have an unobstructed invasion route into the two northernmost provinces. . . .”
The general knew in late January that thousands of enemy soldiers already were operating in the interior of the two provinces, especially near Hue. In April of 1967, an enemy regiment had slammed into Quang Tri City, spiked ARVN artillery, fought its way inside a moated citadel to dynamite government offices, freed hundreds of prisoners from the provincial jail—and vanished into the night. It was not really possible to think of Khe Sanh as a cork in a bottle because there was, in truth, no bottle. Still, it was one way to describe a difficult war so that Americans at home, with memories of the maps of World War II and Korea, might understand the why of Khe Sanh.
Westmoreland would have preferred to use mobile forces, as he had done at Dak To, but he had nowhere near as many troops available for battle at Khe Sanh as he had at Dak To—and the looming monsoon would immobilize heliborne troops, anyway.
He had already considered the arguments for withdrawal. Weather was foremost: the monsoon mists would make it difficult to get supplies to the Marines, and also hamper close air support. The enemy’s supply lines were shortest at Khe Sanh, which was just a few miles off the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, while American supply lines might depend on parachute drops.
It was the enemy’s seemingly steadfast commitment to battle that convinced Westmoreland to reinforce—and to fight. “Judging from the size of his buildup, and from his own statements, he was hoping to achieve a military-political victory similar to the one fourteen years earlier at Dienbienphu,” Westmoreland said later.
“The question was whether we could afford the troops to reinforce, keep them supplied by air, and defeat an enemy far superior in numbers as we waited for the weather to clear, built forward bases, and made preparations for an overland relief expedition. I believed we could do all these things.”
And so did the Marines:
“In the last analysis, Khe Sanh was defended because it was the only logical thing to do. We were there, in a prepared position and in considerable strength. A well-fought battle would do the enemy a lot more damage than he could hope to inflict on us.”
President Johnson talked personally with Westmoreland about the decision to defend Khe Sanh. He had been pressing General Wheeler every day for more information, and finally he told Wheeler he wanted to hear the words from Westmoreland himself. It was the only time the Commander in Chief broke the chain of command to Westmoreland. At the end of the conversation, the President said he wanted to be the first to know if Westmoreland decided the Marines had to be evacuated from Khe Sanh.
Johnson was still worried. His political consensus was fraying badly. Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy had entered the New Hampshire presidential primary, and was trying to make the tiny mountain state a focus for dissent on the war. A week ago, during a formal luncheon in the White House, Eartha Kitt had bitterly denounced U.S. policy in Vietnam, humiliating Lady Bird before friends and guests. The protest marches were getting larger. If he called up the reserves, or began to feed National Guard units into Vietnam, he was certain the nation would turn against the war.
The President asked tougher questions now. He wanted more details about this battle at Khe Sanh, especially reports on the critical shortage of ammunition at the combat base. If one goddam plane landed with six tons of ammo, he wanted to know about it.
A detailed photomural of the Khe Sanh plateau, showing trenches, bunkers, gun positions and ammunition storage areas went up on the walls of the Situation Room. Messages with arcane bits of information about the combat base began to arrive at the White House message desk, sometimes as often as every fifty minutes. Every day, Westmoreland personally prepared a report on supplies and events at Khe Sanh for transmittal to the President.
On January 25, Westmoreland decided he could no longer trust the Marines to do the job in I Corps. He ordered the establishment of a forward post of his own headquarters in the northern provinces—the first step in a transition to Army control.
“Absolutely a slap in the face!” fumed General Tompkins, who was flying by helicopter every day from Dong Ha to Khe Sanh to consult with Lownds. “The most unpardonable thing Saigon ever did!”
Westmoreland pressed ahead. He initiated planning on January 25 for Operation Pegasus, the relief of Khe Sanh. He had decided it would be an Army operation, mounted by the flying horses of the 1st Air Cavalry Division, and he ordered the 1st Cav to move from Phu Bai to Quang Tri City.
Westmoreland’s commander in III Corps, the zone that included Saigon, had put together “various bits of tenuous but disturbing intelligence” that the Viet Cong were leaving their sanctuaries in War Zones C an
d D and moving toward the capital city. He suggested the enemy might attempt some demonstration of strength just before the traditional Tet truce imposed a temporary halt in military operations.
Westmoreland’s attention was further diverted when critics noted that the South Vietnamese had apparently been written out of plans for the biggest battle of the Vietnam war. Was this, after all, an American war in Vietnam?
The general was unusually attentive to such political niceties. It was perhaps a sign of his preoccupation with details in this battle that he had overlooked the absence of an ARVN unit in a critically important test of arms.
On January 27, the 37th ARVN Ranger Battalion—all 318 men—was flown to Khe Sanh to be fitted into the defenses. These cocky soldiers, who wore red berets to proclaim their toughness, were marched out to the far east end of the combat base, through the lines of the Marines’ First Battalion—to trenches two hundred yards outside the Marine perimeter. The Marines had prepared these positions for the new arrivals; it was an arrangement not unlike the five tanks behind the irregulars in the Green Beret compound.
The weather continued clear over Khe Sanh, and enemy activity dropped off to almost nothing in the final days of January. The airstrip was repaired, and the supply shortages grew less critical. Reinforcements were in place, and a relief force was organizing at Quang Tri City.
Still, President Johnson was near a crisis of confidence with General Wheeler and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The vulnerability of the combat base was all too clear to him. “I don’t want any damned Dienbienphu,” the President told Wheeler. He insisted that each member of the Joint Chiefs individually assess Khe Sanh’s ability to hold.
On January 29, General Wheeler gave the President a written statement of confidence in Westmoreland’s plans for Khe Sanh. It was signed by every member of the Joint Chiefs. The Commander in Chief now had a written guarantee from the nation’s highest-ranking military men that the Marines would prevail at Khe Sanh.