Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  Vo Nguyen Giap husbanded his military resources while the political foundation for the People’s Army was laid. The first principle was doc lap: independence. The French Army, even in 1950, refused to take him seriously—perhaps remembering the ridiculous little figure in the trilby hat.

  In September of 1950, Giap massed his forces at Cao Bang—a provincial capital quite near his own bases and far from French support. The French commander ignored orders to destroy all equipment and force-march his 2,600 soldiers and 500 civilians to Dong Khe. He tried to drive out. Instead of a hard, heartless God-save-the-hindmost dash to the fort at Dong Khe, the Cao Bang garrison pushed a painful, much-ambushed nine miles in the first day. A Moroccan task force of 3,500 men held Dong Khe until the exhausted survivors from Cao Bang arrived, but Giap’s hungry legions followed them in. Three French paratroop battalions leaped into the battle in the final days—and vanished like twigs in a fire.

  When it was over, on October 7, the French had lost 6,000 soldiers, 13 artillery pieces, 125 mortars and more than 8,000 rifles—enough to equip a Viet Minh division. Giap ruled the northern frontier, and had secured his supply lines to China. The war would continue for four more years, but the initiative was now with the Viet Minh.

  Giap learned his trade by trial—and error. Once he left the mountains to try his massed infantry attacks against the French in the open; he lost 6,000 men in a single day. In a 1952 campaign against an isolated but powerful French base, Giap lost 9,000.

  Because of these sanguinary tactics, Giap was judged by his Western military contemporaries as “indifferent to heavy losses.” Yet these were not appallingly costly campaigns in the annals of war—not even by American standards. During the Civil War in the United States, at Shiloh, on a Sunday and Monday in early April of 1862, more than 13,000 Union soldiers and 11,000 Confederates died in the battle of Pittsburg Landing. McClellan and Lee met in the Seven Day Battles later that year—and 36,000 were killed. The U.S. Marines’ 26th Regiment, the one defending at Khe Sanh, had participated in an island assault against the Japanese in 1944 in which the Marines suffered battle losses of 26,000.

  Giap parceled his casualties in the early 1950s, slowly building his forces and improving their equipment, stretching out the French defenses with surprise thrusts and distant raids—always probing for an opening where he could strike with effect.

  The opportunity came at Dienbienphu. Giap’s mobilization order went out on December 6, 1953:

  You must repair the roads, overcome all obstacles, surmount all difficulties, fight unflinchingly, defeat cold and hunger, carry heavy loads across mountains and valleys, and strike right into the enemy’s camp to destroy him and free our countrymen. Comrades, forward!

  The French intercepted the order, but found it impossible to trace accurately the vast movement of men and supplies toward the distant base at Dienbienphu. Thirty thousand Viet Minh soldiers crossed the Black River on underwater bridges that could not be seen from the air; one regiment marched 250 miles through the mountains. Thousands of porters pushed bicycles hung with artillery shells along narrow paths hacked out of impossible terrain.

  “After opening the first breach,” Giap had written in his manual on how to assault a fortress, “immediately penetrate into the interior of the enemy’s fortified system and hold that penetration to the bitter end. . . .”

  After one hundred days of preparation and reconnaissance, Giap stunned the French defenders with an artillery overmatch, filled the sky with anti-aircraft fire—and hurled his People’s Army at Dienbienphu. To the bitter end. During the fifty-six-day battle, Giap returned French casualties and refused his own, knowing their agonies would trouble the defenders. The awful scenes and sounds at Dienbienphu gave Fall his title: Hell in a Very Small Place. When his losses grew grievous, Giap put thousands of civilian laborers into the front lines to dig trenches to the very face of the French bunkers—“gnawing away,” he called it—so his assault troops could literally leap into the defenders’ positions.

  Dienbienphu fell on May 7, 1954, and France decided almost immediately that Indochina was no longer worth French francs or blood.

  General Vo Nguyen Giap, thrust onto the world stage by his spectacular victory, stayed in the mountains until October, when the 308th Division, the spearhead of the Liberation Army, marched proudly into Hanoi. Most of these soldiers had not seen or communicated with their families for eight years—not since the night of December 19, 1946, when they had whispered a quick goodbye and disappeared into the darkness. Giap walked into the Hanoi power station two days later and began discussing technical problems with the French engineers; there was much to learn in the sixty days of transition from French to Vietnamese rule.

  • • •

  BY JANUARY, 1968, Giap had fought the Americans for three full years. Most of the cities and towns in his country—and nearly all of the masonry buildings—had been bombed to rubble. The Vietnamese, xenophobic in every pore, blamed themselves for some of the early deaths of school children. They had adopted the French style of stately two-story brick buildings for their schools rather than a more modest one-story Vietnamese structure—and the American bombers went for big buildings first.

  In the year just past, American bombers destroyed 11,763 boats and barges and sampans, 2,511 rail cars and rolling stock, 5,587 trucks and buses and cars, 30 power plants, and 179 railroad switching yards. The supersonic planes leveled only 3,547 buildings, down from more than 8,000 in 1966 because, outside of Hanoi and Haiphong, there weren’t too many buildings left in North Vietnam. And U.S. jets had taken out the thermal plant, a railroad repair shop, and tobacco, soap, and hosiery factories in Hanoi itself.

  Yet Giap had increased the flow of men and supplies to the south and, more importantly, the people seemed rock steady One thousand civilians died under the bombs every week, Hanoi was a bleak and cheerless place, and shortages were common. Still, the North Vietnamese seemed to respond to the bombing raids with the same hardy, angry stoicism that had marked British reaction to German air raids. One hundred thousand North Vietnamese worked full-time on bomb damage, another 500,000 worked at bomb repair two or three days a month.

  “It is a sacred war—for independence, for freedom, life,” asserted Premier Pham Van Dong. “It stands for everything, this war—for this generation and for future generations.

  “We are preparing for a long war,” he continued. “How many years would you say? Ten, twenty. . . . What do you think about twenty? The younger generation will fight better than we. . . .”

  Slowly, Giap had collected the weapons to make the skies of North Vietnam extremely hostile to American bombers. In the bravado of the early days of the war, before Giap had installed eight thousand anti-aircraft guns and carved out more than two hundred surface-to-air missile sites, American pilots liked to carry business cards with their name and rank on one side and these words on the other: “Yea, though I fly through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.”

  By late 1967, the air defenses in the Red River Valley were awesome. U.S. losses were more than three times as great there as elsewhere in North Vietnam. Two F105 Thunderchief wings had lost more than two hundred planes on the run to Hanoi; in one four-month period, twelve of twenty-two air crews were lost in action. Giap had 125,000 soldiers of the People’s Army in air defense roles, and just about every farmer and militiaman with a rifle popped away at the raiders. His surface-to-air missiles had claimed ninety American planes, and last October his new MIGs from Russia had shot down six of the U.S. planes.

  Giap’s chief deputy, General Van Tien Dung, was certain the Americans would invade out of frustration.

  “We would welcome them,” Giap said. “They will find themselves caught in people’s war; they will find every village a hornets’ nest.”

  The defense minister had issued instructions for the military training of citizens more than a year before. Every village, hamlet,
city block, factory, commune and secondary school had a Self-Defense Militia whose members received weapons, light training, and regular assignments in damage repair, camouflage freshening, missile site construction, and even defusing time bombs.

  “Every citizen is an enemy-killing combatant,” Giap declared. “Every house is a combat cell; every village or factory a fortress.”

  Twenty-three years earlier, Ho Chi Minh had looked sadly at the French commissioner for Indochina, Jean Sainteny, and regretted aloud that Vietnam and France were on the threshold of war. “If we must fight, we will fight,” Ho had said. “You will kill ten of our men, but we will kill one of yours, and in the end it is you that will tire,” Ho Chi Minh’s mobilization order in 1966. “Prepare for the Worst,” pledged a fight to the end: “Johnson and his clique must know that they may send five hundred thousand or one million or more troops, they may use thousands of aircraft to intensify their attacks on North Vietnam. The war may last for five, ten, twenty years or longer. Hanoi, Haiphong and a number of cities may be destroyed but the Vietnamese people are not afraid.”

  General Giap believed the American political commitment to the war was fragile, and he thought the war was progressing in the manner that he thought it should.

  Years before, addressing the political officers of the 316th Division, he had predicted the course of the war with the French—or with any army not prepared for protracted struggle “The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive,” he said. “The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war to win it, but he does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war.” The people would soon tire of the high costs and useless bloodshed of a winless army, he predicted, and call the army home.

  But what might happen, a French television interviewer asked him in 1966, if the Americans used firepower instead of manpower? Giap had arrived before the camera in an open-necked khaki shirt, relaxed and joking. When the French director asked him to sit differently, Giap had retorted, laughing, “I’m the one who usually gives the orders around here.” Now his face grew hard, and his voice took on a harsh, forceful edge.

  “Whatever methods the Americans employ, they will never be able to change this irreversible truth . . . our liberation war is a just war. We will win!”

  He raised his fist to slam the table, but was restrained by the director who feared the tape recording might be distorted by the bang.

  Giap had learned an important truth about the Americans by 1966: “they overestimate their strong points.” Even with 500,000 troops in South Vietnam, it was a rare day when as many as one-tenth of them aggressively searched the countryside for Giap’s soldiers. The Americans had stupendously large base areas and only small combat units.

  For example, the U.S. Marines had put together a major assault force for a 1966 operation in Quang Tri Province, in the rolling, savannah country of the midlands, between Quang Tri City and Khe Sanh. More than 1,500 North Vietnamese soldiers had moved across the DMZ, it was believed, and to meet the challenge the Marines formed Task Force Delta—a regimental headquarters, an artillery battalion, and four infantry battalions—more than 4,000 men on paper.

  The task force was formed at Phu Bai, and it flew first to Dong Ha, and then to a fire support base near the target area. One of the infantry battalions was left at Dong Ha to secure the major transshipment point for Task Force Delta ammunition and supplies. A second battalion guarded the artillery base and headquarters for the operation. A third battalion air-assaulted into the enemy valley with only three companies because its fourth company had been left to guard the perimeter at Phu Bai. Fifteen Marines were killed and 10 seriously injured in helicopter crashes on the first day, so one of the companies secured a landing zone to evacuate casualties. The other two companies, each down to about 130 men because of malaria, heat exhaustion, combat losses, and vacation leaves, set out to look for the North Vietnamese.

  The fourth battalion landed by helicopter a two-day march away. It, too, had left a company at Phu Bai for base security.

  Thus Task Force Delta was actually searching for the North Vietnamese with just five companies—hardly 700 men.

  One of the American units in which General Westmoreland took considerable pride was the 173rd Airborne Brigade, yet a hard-charging lieutenant colonel decided it was a paper unit: “By the time you subtracted support roles, pizza huts, clubs, headquarters, mess, artillery, and engineers,” the 10,000-man force was down to 3,000. Applying the “ass in the grass” test—by counting paratroopers actually on combat patrol—the colonel determined his brigade had fewer than 800 men in the field at any one time.

  “His forces remain insufficient,” Giap had concluded after a late 1967 analysis of American strengths and weaknesses, “even though they are numerous.”

  The North Vietnamese general respected U.S. firepower, but he did not hesitate to match his soldiers against the Americans in the field. “We cannot compare our weapons to theirs,” he said, “but if we consider the infantry—the principal force determining victory or defeat on the battlefield—U.S. forces are not superior to ours.

  “They are greenhorns, not to be compared with the French in their time. They have no idea of jungle fighting. . . . They walk into traps that wouldn’t fool a baby.”

  One of Giap’s colleagues on the general staff derided U.S. forces for running from combat if air and artillery were not immediately available, yet another thought the Americans had developed excellent fighting methods against the Japanese and Germans and North Koreans. If the People’s Army fought in the same manner, spread across front lines, the Americans would surely win, he said. By choosing a different form of combat, the North Vietnamese had caused the huge American military operations to become “only punches in the air.”

  “We have forced the Americans to eat soup with forks,” he declared.

  Because of the many frustrations, Giap said, “the morale of American soldiers is lower than grass.” He believed his soldiers were “clearly superior in high fighting spirit and good fighting methods.” It was true that Giap’s veterans rarely faced experienced American soldiers: the one-year tour and rapid rotation of officers guaranteed rookie Americans in the line in almost every battle.

  By late 1967, Vo Nguyen Giap believed he could fight this kind of war against the Americans indefinitely, and he thought he saw strategic and political strains developing inside the United States that would undermine American commitment.

  Still, Giap did not expect the Americans to go home soon. “It will be a combination of grueling, protracted war of attrition and morale-shattering attacks on urban centers” that would finally force the United States out of Vietnam, he said. To survive in the American meatgrinder during the years of waiting would take a special quality of commitment:

  “We must have not just great determination, but we must . . . have a good fighting method.”

  In every article, speech, and manual, Vo Nguyen Giap talked about camouflage, deception, surprise, and misdirection, and he reached frequently into Vietnam’s past to provide uplifting examples of “few against many” victories. Always he emphasized “high quality,” and he and Ho Chi Minh underscored the nation’s dependence on soldiers of exceptional quality by attending graduation ceremonies for dac cong. These elite soldiers took a year of intensive commando training and learned the many uses of explosives; Ho Chi Minh called them “our answer to the B-52s.” Dac cong had cracked the defenses on Hill 861 at Khe Sanh on January 21; they would lead infantry assaults in the General Offensive.

  Camouflage had special meaning for an army without air cover—especially when the enemy flew a Vigilante reconnaissance plane whose cameras stop the action so dead, even at one thousand knots airspeed, “that you can see the worried expressions on the faces on the ground.” Hardly anyone in North Vietnam traveled without first donning a broad hat decorated wit
h leaves and twigs; every moving vehicle was covered with a rope fretwork into which boughs and branches had been woven. Camouflage could be a companion more worthy than a flak jacket; the armored vest might stop bullets or shell fragments, but camouflage could keep the bullets from coming at all.

  The constant freshening of camouflage was only one of dozens of differences between the bo doi, the soldiers of Giap’s People’s Army, and their American peers.

  The bo doi’s most important piece of equipment was a thirty-inch straight shovel with a hand-hewn hardwood handle worn smooth and dark from steady use. It was his only defense against B-52s—and his protection from American air strikes and artillery. Walking into an empty enemy field fortification was a revelation for Americans: the straight-sided, well-drained fighting trenches zigged and zagged for blast protection, the bunkers were airy and dry, the regimental cooking stoves carefully shielded to avoid infrared detection from the sky, and not so much as a single shovelful of red earth showing to give away the position. North Vietnamese fighting positions were sometimes invisible until you stood in them; U.S. positions could be seen from space satellites.

  The North Vietnamese soldier lived with the land. He farmed its fields, cut his bed and his fighting place into it, walked paths, drank its water, used its leaves to hide his movements, and tunneled in its depths. The Americans bulldozed the land, dynamited it, burned it with napalm, and dosed it with chemicals and pesticides.

  Thousands of cans of Hamm’s and Coke and 7-Up and steaming kettles of mashed potatoes and gravy and aluminum barrels of peaches so enriched the urine of American soldiers that the needles on “people sniffers” banged the right side of the meter when helicopters flew over U.S. installations; the bo doi fought without luxuries, often without necessities, and chemical detection was more difficult.

  Giap discussed the special problems of moving an entire infantry division—10,000 men—into an enemy city by breaking it down to squads, moving them into place under rigid camouflage discipline, then reassembling the division moments before the attack. When Westmoreland talked about moving a division he worried about airfields and seaports, miles of paved road and thousands of barrels of aviation fuel.