Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  It wasn’t enough.

  That same day, the President asked retired General Maxwell Taylor to go over to the CIA and to make an independent assessment of the intelligence information on Khe Sanh. Taylor’s credentials were impeccable: he had preceded Wheeler as chairman of the Joint Chiefs and he had served as ambassador to South Vietnam. He had been friend and mentor to Westmoreland. The general studied the photomurals of Khe Sanh and the secret reports of the Central Intelligence Agency—and he came back worried.

  There were haunting similarities between Dienbienphu and Khe Sanh, General Taylor told the President. The bad weather, the difficulty of supplying the Marines, and the possibility that Vo Nguyen Giap might deliver overwhelming artillery support to the battlefield as he had done at Dienbienphu, had convinced the general that Khe Sanh could be placed in jeopardy. Besides, he told the President, it was an adage of infantrymen that a commander can take any defensive position if he is willing to pay the price.

  It was true that both Khe Sanh and Dienbienphu had been established to lure an elusive enemy to a killing ground, and it was true that both were remote outposts with little obvious connection to areas of strategic importance. Both could be shelled by direct observation, both depended on aircraft for supplies, and both were garrisoned by elite troops who disdained to construct stout defenses. And both had been attacked by troops under the command of Vo Nguyen Giap.

  Westmoreland knew all of these arguments; he had been over them again and again. He was resentful that a soldier he greatly admired would second guess his efforts from afar, and he was disdainful of critics who had even fewer credentials.

  “None of us was blind to the possibility that the North Vietnamese might try to make of Khe Sanh another Dienbienphu,” Westmoreland said, “yet we were aware of marked differences in the two situations, [most notably our] tremendous firepower.

  “Lest I overlook any possible peril,” he continued, “I carefully studied parallels between Dienbienphu and Khe Sanh.”

  The French, he decided, had doomed themselves by choosing a valley position with the enemy holding the surrounding high ground. In contrast, the combat base sat on a plateau, with reinforced Marine infantry companies holding key hilltops. The French had no artillery that could support them from the outside, while the Marines could call on the Army’s powerful 175mm guns at Camp Carrol. The French position was unusually isolated, with no hope of overland relief, while Westmoreland believed he could reopen Route 9 to Khe Sanh “if it turned out to be essential—and adequate troops were put to the task.”

  The French had two hundred planes of all types for their battle, and no way of supplying Dienbienphu except by parachute drops. Westmoreland had two thousand attack planes, three thousand helicopters, a fleet of B-52 transcontinental bombers—and a recently rebuilt, crushed rock and pierced steel plate, all-weather airfield at Khe Sanh that could handle even the big C-130 cargo planes.

  It was the numbers, the huge numbers, that gave Westmoreland his greatest satisfaction. He had fifty times the mincing power that the French had had at Dienbienphu. He wanted the North Vietnamese to attack.

  Because of the continuing criticism and doubt in civilian forums in the United States, because of the Joint Chiefs signed guarantee, because of General Taylor’s concerns, and because he thought he might learn or relearn an important lesson, Westmoreland decided to order one more formal study. He asked Colonel Reamer Argo, his command historian, to look at Dienbienphu again, and other historic sieges, too, “to discern tactics or methods the enemy might use” at Khe Sanh.

  The general was quite confident of Argo’s conclusions. He believed with utter certainty that his enormous firepower resources and the helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry Division gave him the edge that the French never had. “I knew Khe Sanh was different,” he said.

  Westmoreland met on January 29 with the highest ranking officers in his command to discuss continuing intelligence reports that Viet Cong troops were on the move, and that Saigon itself might be a target. Was it possible the enemy might actually attack Vietnamese cities? Police in Qui Nhon, a large coastal city in II Corps, had captured a half dozen Viet Cong the day before, confiscating tape recordings that called on the Vietnamese people to join in a general uprising.

  The general made a few minor adjustments in U.S. deployment and asked the Vietnamese to cancel or reduce homes leaves for Tet, but in the end Westmoreland and his staff rejected as unbelievable a major enemy assault on Saigon and the cities. It would be much too costly: “Why would the enemy give away his major advantage, which was his ability to be elusive and avoid heavy casualties?”

  No, it was clearly Khe Sanh and I Corps that faced the greatest threat. It was possible, of course, that Giap was planning something more ambitious, but Westmoreland was now certain that Giap wanted Khe Sanh. He was equally certain that Giap’s best opportunity had passed—and that American firepower could destroy any enemy thrust. The mood in Westmoreland’s headquarters was clear:

  “[We] might be able to do at Khe Sanh what the French had tried and failed to do at Dienbienphu.”

  Westmoreland was positive the Marines could hold, even if they wavered. He had absolutely no intention of losing the combat base; he was prepared to use nuclear weapons to save it.

  “Because the region around Khe Sanh was virtually uninhabited,” he reasoned, “civilian casualties would be minimal.” It might be an excellent place to demonstrate American resolve in Vietnam.

  “If Washington officials were so intent on ‘sending a message’ to Hanoi,” Westmoreland thought, “surely small tactical nuclear weapons could be a way to tell Hanoi something, just as two atomic bombs had spoken convincingly to Japanese officials during World War II and the threat of atomic bombs induced the North Koreans to accept meaningful negotiations during the Korean War.” He understood that nuclear weapons would be so shocking to the world that their use would have to be a political rather than a military decision, but he would have been “imprudent,” he said, “if I failed to acquaint myself with the possibilities in detail.”

  Unknown to Colonel Argo and to most of Westmoreland’s staff, a small secret group in the Saigon headquarters was studying the terrain at Khe Sanh, the location of Marine outposts, wind velocities and radiation yields, blast patterns and delivery systems. Westmoreland wanted to be ready.

  JANUARY 30

  The quality of intelligence, the continuing good weather at Khe Sanh, the lull in enemy attacks, and the smooth transition from Marine to Army control in I Corps had given Westmoreland a feeling of momentum again. The Korean crisis was cooling; his key base at Da Nang would be secure. The forward headquarters he was sending to Phu Bai was even now loading desks and file cabinets and communications equipment onto planes at Tan Son Nhut.

  Two of the 1st Air Cavalry Division’s most aggressive battalions had already moved west from Quang Tri City, and were hacking out fire bases on the way to Khe Sanh. One whole brigade of the 1st Cav was thrashing through the woods south and west of Quang Tri City, acclimating itself to new terrain and preparing for the push to Khe Sanh. Pegasus was underway.

  Now Westmoreland decided to strike the first blow at Khe Sanh. For more than a week, he had personally picked the targets for B-52 raids in South Vietnam, and he had directed most of them to the Khe Sanh region. He decided to concentrate his bomber forces for a single paralyzing blow.

  The most famous photograph of Vo Nguyen Giap, familiar to military professionals around the world because it had been taken during the battle at Dienbienphu, showed the North Vietnamese commander standing at a map table in a cave. In recent days Westmoreland’s radio spooks had detected heavy radio traffic from a place inside Laos that might be the mouth of a cave complex. The sophistication of the enemy’s radio equipment and the great flow of messages convinced Westmoreland that he had discovered “the North Vietnamese headquarters controlling forces around Khe Sanh, if not the entire northern region.” It was believed inside Westmoreland’s headqu
arters that Vo Nguyen Giap himself had visited this Front headquarters in Laos—and that he might be there now to take personal charge on the eve of battle.

  On January 30, then, thirty-six B-52s—in the largest air strike of the war—came around the arc of the earth, far above sight or sound. One thousand tons of high explosives cascaded out of the sky into the green jungles of Laos. The biggest air raids of World War II had not delivered these tonnages on so small target. After dark, nine more B-52s hit the same place again to catch troops and medical personnel cleaning up after the first raid.

  The radio signals ceased.

  Westmoreland unlaced his boots on the night of January 30 with a feeling of real accomplishment. He was pretty sure he had destroyed the entire command structure of the enemy force at Khe Sanh. The airfield at the combat base had been reopened to C-130s, and the supply inventory was building in sixteen-ton loads. The 1st Cav was on the way; thank God for the helicopter. If push came to shove, he could put ten thousand very tough soldiers on the plateau in a very short time.

  He had even thought to have the jet airfields in North Vietnam nearest Khe Sanh rebombed and recratered to eliminate any chance of aerial surprise over the combat base. A staggering number of planes circled over Khe Sanh waiting for a role in a turkey shoot.”

  If anything went wrong, he had a secret group working on nuclear weapons.

  The weather had been beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

  Westmoreland felt very good as he turned out the lights.

  There was going to be no Dienbienphu in his command.

  6.

  GIAP

  When the B-52 Stratofortresses opened their bomb bay doors high over the jungled crags of Laos, General Vo Nguyen Giap was in his command headquarters in Hanoi, hundreds of miles to the north, attending to the final details of the coming General Offensive.

  He had been preparing this bold strike into the heart of South Vietnam for more than six months. In just a few hours, the troops would go forward.

  The general was almost certain that the Americans would invade his country within the next few weeks—or perhaps strike at the Ho Chi Minh Trail from their forward base at Khe Sanh. Stooped slightly, his rumpled uniform jacket buttoned tightly at the neck, Giap seemed utterly calm. His broad forehead, which had impressed Western visitors as “Beethoven-like,” was smooth. He had a fierce personal commitment to his task and he could utterly dominate meetings with his intensity, but Giap preferred to present a placid countenance to the world. The French had negotiated with him, and had nicknamed him “Volcano Under the Snow.” It was not a mask, he insisted; it was the outward sign of his readiness, his certainty that he would prevail.

  He had prepared his people and his armed forces for invasion. Nearly 300,000 soldiers of the People’s Army were at home, arrayed in depth to receive the Americans. Every hamlet and village had dug bunkers, trenches, and fighting positions. Even schoolgirls took bayonet drill.

  The enemy’s most seasoned troops—Giap was sure that Westmoreland would send Marines and paratroopers—would have to fight first with the schoolgirls and farmers, organized in a million-member Self-Defense Militia, then with regional security forces, and, finally, with the People’s Army of Viet Nam and its heavy artillery, armor, anti-aircraft guns, and surface-to-air missiles. Never in the Second Indochinese War had Giap been able to bring the full range of his supporting arms to bear on American forces; he believed he could make an invasion the single most costly campaign the Americans would ever launch in Vietnam.

  For now, his attention was elsewhere.

  While Westmoreland was moving tens of thousands of American soldiers north in the series of shifts code-named Checkers, Vo Nguyen Giap had been moving tens of thousands of North Vietnamese soldiers south for the most daring gamble of the Second Indochinese War: the Tet Offensive.

  The general loved the boldness of the idea—sixty-seven thousand valiant “soldiers of the just cause” against more than one million of the enemy in a surprise attack on a revered holiday—but he was skeptical about the chances for success. He planned to risk only ten percent of his forces in the south; most of the People’s Army units would stand by to support the Viet Cong attack on every major city and town in South Vietnam.

  Vo Nguyen Giap believed the war with the Americans would be long and difficult. Five hundred U.S. fighter bombers hammered his country every day, the economy was in ruins, the population scattered to the countryside, and the army completely reliant on the fraternal socialist spirit of the Chinese and Russians. He had been at war too long to believe there was a shortcut to victory, especially against a vastly superior force.

  He was an ardent student of his country’s rich military history and he often sought lessons for the present by reading accounts of the past. He believed it was possible under certain conditions of combat to compress twenty years into a day; he just didn’t believe January 31, 1968, was going to be the day.

  On the eve of the Tet Offensive, Vo Nguyen Giap was unique in all the world as a military commander. He had personally chosen the first 34 soldiers of the People’s Army—and led them into combat carrying two muskets, seventeen rifles, fourteen flintlocks, and a Chinese pistol. Today, twenty-three years later, he was commander in chief of one of the finest, best-equipped fighting forces in the world: 480,000 men, a complete array of modern weapons, and an air defense system more sophisticated than Germany had fielded in World War II.

  He had been a scholar, a journalist, and a teacher of history, but he was famed now as one of the world’s most gifted military leaders. He had been present at the founding of his country’s independence movement, and he had kept the flickering dream alive in the chill rain forests of southern China’s fantasy mountains. Now he was minister of defense, third-ranking member of the ruling council—the most influential voice in all the country after President Ho Chi Minh and Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. His writings, and accounts of his battles, were studied in most of the military colleges of the world.

  Giap believed victory lay many years in the future. He knew the history of his people, and he had fought French troops, and Japanese troops, and Chinese troops, and foreign legionnaires, and the troops of South Vietnam, and now, for three years, Americans . . . and Koreans, and Australians.

  Years of sacrifice would still be necessary, he warned, before the United States withdrew. Sacrifice was both heritage and destiny in Vietnam; few nations of the world have a longer history of invasion, occupation, and wars of liberation.

  For Giap, war was a chromosomal memory—a legacy of his race. Always the enemy had been stronger by ten times, or twenty times, and always the Vietnamese had prevailed. Once, it took a thousand years. The stories of ancient Vietnamese heroes were still told in rural villages. As a graduate student, Giap had matched some of these oral history tales with long-forgotten archeological ruins. As a general, he searched for inspiration in his country’s twenty centuries of resistance. Vietnamese partisans had retreated into the mountains to avoid battle with a large Chinese force as early as the 3rd century B.C. “The Viets are extremely difficult to defeat,” a report to China stated. “They do not come out to fight, but hide in their familiar mountains and use the jungle like a weapon. . . .” In 111 B.C., the Chinese came in great numbers and reached into the most distant villages to destroy all relics and records so the people of the South, the Viets, could be more thoroughly assimilated into the culture of China.

  One hundred fifty years later, in 39 A.D., a young widow outraged by the callous execution of her husband enlisted first her sister and then thousands of peasants in a war of rebellion. The Two Sisters Trung drove the Chinese back for four years, then threw themselves into the Hat Giang River rather than accept defeat. Main thoroughfares in both Hanoi and Saigon commemorate the sisters’ courage to this day.

  Giap had written studies of ten important insurrections during the thousand years of Chinese occupation, including one in 238 A.D. led by “Dame Trieu.” She was a fearless p
easant woman whom legend endows with breasts one meter long—a detail still mentioned proudly by farmers in her home province.

  The Chinese were finally expelled in a thirty-year war that ended in a brilliancy. The Vietnamese commander retreated up the Bach Dang River in the face of a huge Chinese battle fleet, then attacked at the turning of the tide. The Chinese maneuvered confidently to meet the threat when suddenly their boats were holed or capsized by sharpened, iron-tipped bamboo poles buried in the river bottom before the battle. Fire arrows destroyed the helpless fleet, and the river drank the enemy soldiers.

  During the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan, grandson of ­Genghis, tried three times to reimpose Chinese rule. His Mongol hordes overran an emptied Hanoi in the first campaign, but retreated in the face of “an abundance of tropical diseases.” General Tran Hung Dao was the Vietnamese hero in these campaigns. Giap thought his small book, Summary of Military Strategy, could be compared with the works of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. Giap was deeply impressed by Tran Hung Dao’s readiness to abandon his capital city (“the importance of not trying to defend ‘prestige positions’ ”), and by his argument that a strong enemy could be weakened by lengthening a war from months to years, from years to decades.

  “When the enemy is away from home for a long time and produces no victories, and families learn of their dead, then the enemy population becomes dissatisfied,” Tran Hung Dao had written. “Time is always in our favor. Our climate, mountains and jungles discourage the enemy. . . .”

  The Chinese came again in 1787. A charismatic Vietnamese leader named Nguyen Hue held his armies in hiding for more than a year, then infiltrated Hanoi on the eve of Tet in 1789—and caught the Chinese in the full relaxation of New Year celebrations. A superior Chinese force was sent reeling back across the border.

  Then came wars against the French, the Japanese, and the French again. And now the Americans. “Our history through the centuries,” said Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, “is a perpetual struggle with nature and invaders.”