Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  And, to a much greater degree than American soldiers, the bo doi had “an unshakable conviction that their cause was just.” U.S. soldiers inked DEROS calendars on their helmets to keep track of the exact number of days remaining in their Vietnam tour; the soldiers of the People’s Army painted “For Nation—Forget Self” on their hats.

  Giap never believed valor would be enough.

  “In a war against the United States, you need time,” he said, repeating the word for emphasis. “Time. This isn’t a war that you can resolve in a few years. The Americans will be defeated by getting tired, and in order to tire them, we have to go on—to last—for a long time.

  “A long time,” he said again. “A long time.”

  All through 1966 and 1967 the top military theoreticians in North Vietnam had struggled with how best to fight the United States. Giap counseled patience—a protracted war—but he was criticized for his “conservative spirit” by younger bloods in the People’s Army. Heavy battles with powerful American forces had finally convinced most of the doubters, however, and by early 1968 North Vietnam was settling in for a long, hard war.

  The formal decision of the political and military councils was to conduct battlefield operations “that would sustain a credible military threat, [yet] prolong the war until political, military, and psychological factors combined to produce a favorable solution.”

  Some years later, a declining heavyweight boxer would give the strategy an unpretty name: “rope-a-dope.” Facing younger, stronger fighters, Muhammad Ali would fall back on the ropes of the ring, cover his head and abdomen with his gloves and forearms, and absorb punch after punch after punch—an armadillo in Everlast shorts. He used the ropes to drain the shock, as Giap used the jungle to blunt American firepower, and he waited, peeking, planning, taking heavy hits, looking for the first sign of tiring, the first faint opening, and then . . . . . . Bam! He didn’t have knockout power, but he impressed the judges with his patience and persistence—and the solid authority of his counter-punches. It wasn’t pretty, but it extended Ali’s career; he even won some important fights when his foes pounded themselves into weariness.

  Giap, of course, could not be limited to fifteen rounds, or fifteen years.

  “We are in no hurry,” he said.

  • • •

  VO NGUYEN GIAP reviewed his preparations for the General Offensive. He had not originally endorsed this idea, but no one could accuse him of holding back.

  He had spent young North Vietnamese soldiers by the hundreds—by the thousands, according to Westmoreland—to draw the strongest American forces to the border country and mountains. He had hit their bases with artillery attacks across the DMZ, and greatly increased their security problems with his new, longer-range rockets. He had completely reorganized his considerable forces inside Laos, and he felt quite sure an American attack at the Ho Chi Minh Trail could be absorbed—and savaged. Preparations for an American invasion of North Vietnam had been complete for months.

  He had sent recruits south to fill the holes in the Viet Cong ranks, so their units would be at full strength for the assault on the cities. He had multiplied the flow of supplies to the Viet Cong by ten times in recent months, and moved artillery/rocket regiments to support the attack. His regular People’s Army divisions would not lead the way, but they would be standing by to exploit any Viet Cong breakthrough.

  Giap was utterly contemptuous of ARVN, the government soldiers of South Vietnam. Fighting at the side of foreigners would destroy their combat spirit as surely as acid, he believed; besides, the mutual suspicion between American and ARVN soldiers was so great “the puppet army [ARVN] has become impotent.”

  If Vo Nguyen Giap was concerned in early 1968, it was by his total dependence on the Chinese for rifles and bullets, and by the Russians’ diplomatic delays in delivering the most modern war equipment.

  Giap had found sanctuary in China during some of the hardest years of his life, and China had generously nourished his army for a quarter century—but China was an historic enemy. The Americans would sooner or later go away; China was forever. Yet without the Chinese, Giap’s army would wither and die, and so the general put on his most winning smile and joined toasts to eternal friendship with his neighbor to the north.

  The Russians were also generous—Giap’s small but fine air force, his forests of anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles and his sophisticated radar tracking equipment had come from the Soviet Union—but the Russians seemed to be playing some Big Power game with the United States rather than pouring themselves into the fight. The Russians counseled restraint, and transmitted backchannel messages from the Americans, and never would provide the very best equipment until it fit their purpose.

  Giap could have shot down a great many more U.S. airplanes with the superior third-generation missile called Super SAM, but the Russians could not find enough of them to share until American B-52s rattled the windows in Hanoi. And the deadly Strela, a shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missile that could sweep helicopters from the sky, or the Styx, an over-the-horizon rocket that could sink a destroyer in a single blow, were not available to the People’s Army until after American helicopters and ships had left Vietnam.

  Still, Giap was encouraged by growing signs that the Americans would not stay the course, and by the strains he could see in their military resources.

  “If small reinforcements are sent, it will be impossible to remedy the situation,” he decided, analyzing what he thought was the American dilemma, “and if large reinforcements are sent, it will greatly influence the American people’s political and economic life, and U.S. strategy in the world.”

  In either case, Giap was prepared to fight on—even if it meant starting again at the beginning. He had already prepared positions in the northern mountains. The stakes were too high to think of bowing to a few more bombs or bullets: “Fighting against U.S. aggression and for national salvation is the great, sacred, historic task of the Vietnamese people,” he wrote. “Our soldiers and people are united . . . and fear no sacrifices, no hardships. We are ready to carry on the resistance for five, ten, twenty or more years. . . .”

  • • •

  GENERAL GIAP HAD grown heavier in recent years, and had started wearing medals and dress uniforms on formal occasions. His forehead still climbed “like the brow of a Roman orator” to a thick mat of black hair high on his head, but now it showed tiny purple blood vessels. Some visitors found him not pleasant to look at, but he could still command a room with black eyes “sharp, shrewd, laughing, cruel . . . two drops of black light that convey utter sureness . . . authority.”

  And calm.

  It would happen, several years later, that Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk would come to visit on the very day that a huge South Vietnamese military force launched an invasion of Laos from Khe Sanh. Sihanouk apologized for keeping the appointment on such a day, but Giap waved him to a chair. The general put a record on the phonograph, and music played as the two shared a leisurely meal and talked about the problems of Indochina. Sihanouk apologized again, and this time Giap assured him that the visit was not an interruption. He had been quite prepared for this thrust at the Ho Chi Minh Trail, he said, and he invited the prince to note the unfolding of events. It was timing that was so critical in warfare, he said.

  And camouflage. And deception. And surprise.

  “Surprise is very important,” Giap said. “We must practice the art of catching the enemy by surprise as to the direction, targets and time of attack, and the forces fielded and the forms of combat used by our side. We must use skillful strategems to deceive the enemy, and cause him to make a wrong assessment of our intentions.

  “We must create surprise in the most varied ways.”

  Giap had watched Westmoreland move troops to the north in late 1967 and the first weeks of 1968. Now, on the night of January 30, Giap knew the Viet Cong had successfully infiltrated many towns and cities in South Vietnam.

  It seemed unbeli
evable. The Americans had captured the order for the General Offensive in early January and actually distributed a translation of it to the news media in Saigon. They just didn’t believe it was true.

  Giap was fifty-five years old now, and he had been at war or on the run for more than half his life. He had prepared carefully for the General Offensive, and he had helped choose the time for maximum effect: the first hours of Vietnam’s most revered holiday, Tet.

  Giap didn’t really think the surprise attack would work and he believed the war would continue for years—but he loved the boldness of it.

  7.

  THE TET OFFENSIVE

  General Westmoreland was jolted awake at 3 A.M. by the rocket artillery of three enemy divisions in the suburbs of Saigon. Three thousand Viet Cong soldiers and commando teams were already in the city—striking toward the radio station, the airport, the Presidential Palace, the South Vietnamese military headquarters, the port facilities, and other key targets.

  Enemy anti-aircraft guns—big ones, on wheels, with seats for two gunners—jabbed the night sky with green tracers. They had been towed hundreds of miles by hand to be parked at the gates of Tan Son Nhut.

  Reports flooded Westmoreland’s command center. Hue was under heavy attack—and so were thirty-six of the forty-four provincial capitals in the country. Every major airfield was being hammered by mortars and rockets, and some were fighting off infantry assaults. Soldiers were battling in five of the nation’s six autonomous cities, in sixty-four district capitals, and scores of smaller towns. A strong enemy force had hit the Delta city of My Tho, where South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu was spending the Tet holidays with his family.

  The U.S. ambassador had been rushed to a secret hiding place. The U.S. Army’s military police, outnumbered and outgunned, were taking heavy casualties in the streets. A Viet Cong sapper team had blasted its way into the U.S. embassy compound, killed four guards, and was now trying to batter down the four-inch-thick teak doors with shoulder-fired rocket grenades.

  The shockwaves rippled almost instantly into the Situation Room in the basement of the White House, where President Johnson’s assistant for national security affairs, Walt W. Rostow, was giving a late afternoon tour to several Washington Post reporters. He had hoped to show them that the war was going much better than the skeptical Post was reporting. They were looking at the photomural of Khe Sanh when the first printer chattered out its urgent message. Then another printer spoke, and another. Aides began hurrying in and out. The phone from the Oval Office rang.

  The President of the United States wanted to know what the hell was going on.

  • • •

  WESTMORELAND WEIGHED THE hundreds of reports and juggled his forces—especially to meet the threat on the capital city. But his ear was most attuned for news from the north—from Khe Sanh.

  At 9:20 in the morning, the general motored through tense, empty streets to the recaptured embassy compound. A helicopter had put thirty-six 101st Airborne paratroopers on the embassy roof just as MPs and Marines battered down the main gates with a jeep and went in shooting. Nineteen Viet Cong commandos, and three embassy chauffeurs who had waved their identity cards in a futile bid for life, lay crumpled along the wall or beside the round concrete planters on the embassy lawn. The rivulets of blood on the embassy steps were still bright red, and the crump of mortars and swish-BAM of rockets sounded occasionally in the near distance. The embassy compound’s high walls offered excellent protection, but even soldiers in the crowd of reporters, MPs, paratroopers, and embassy officials flinched as overrounds and richochets careened overhead.

  Westmoreland stood perfectly erect. He was clean shaven, and wore a pressed, starched fatigue uniform with his four stars stitched into the collars. The mud of the scarred lawn was everywhere, but not a mote marred his gleaming boots.

  “The enemy has very deceitfully taken advantage of the Tet truce,” he said, but even so, “the enemy’s well-laid plans went afoul.” The attempt to take the embassy had inflicted superficial damage to the building’s lobby and left all the attackers dead, he reported. The assault on Tan Son Nhut, still continuing, had caused “no damage of consequence.”

  The general reported that a large store of aviation fuel and two airplanes had been lost at Bien Hoa airbase, not far from Saigon, and that enemy troops had attacked airfields and cities and towns all across the country to “create maximum consternation.”

  “In my opinion,” he said, “this is a diversionary effort to take attention away from the north, [from] an attack on Khe Sanh.”

  In the meantime, he was glad for the opportunity to apply maximum firepower to an enemy who had become “more exposed, more vulnerable” by his attack on cities.

  “When I left the office yesterday, we had accounted for almost 700 enemy killed over the country just yesterday,” Westmoreland said. “My guess is that the death toll today will be comparable.”

  Westmoreland was certain the attack on the cities was a trick. While there was some very hard fighting going on inside Saigon and eight or nine other cities, the total enemy force didn’t look much larger than maybe 30,000 Viet Cong soldiers across the whole country. He had 492,000 American servicemen under his command—325,000 Army, 31,700 Navy, 78,000 Marine, 55,900 Air Force and 500 Coast Guard. He had 62,000 Koreans and Australians—and more than a half million South Vietnamese under arms. “It did not occur to us that the enemy would undertake suicidal attacks in the face of our power,” he said. He decided in the earliest hours that the enemy offensive was doomed to failure.

  Just about the only place in South Vietnam of any significance that had not been attacked in the Tet Offensive was Khe Sanh; none of the five North Vietnamese Army divisions that had “materialized” in the DMZ region had joined the fighting.

  It was now clear to Westmoreland that the enemy’s 1967–68 winter-spring campaign would unfold in three separate phases: first, the border battles at Con Thien, Loc Ninh, and Dak To; then a lunatic raid on the cities by the Viet Cong to divert attention; and finally a Dienbienphu-style assault by large North Vietnamese forces against Khe Sanh and other I Corps targets. Phase Two was “about to run out of steam,” he told news reporters in Saigon on February 1; the enemy had already suffered more than 6,000 casualties.

  News that the enemy’s hardest blow was yet to come stunned an already sobered Washington. Simultaneous attacks against one hundred cities was an extraordinary military showing for an enemy force that had been described by Westmoreland in recent months as scattered and demoralized. The general had seen “dismay and incredulity” on the faces of reporters in the embassy yard; and now he discovered that the South Vietnamese leadership was paralyzed by the surprise attack. “The government, from President Thieu down through the various ministries, appeared to be stunned.”

  Shock was also etched on the faces of Westmoreland’s own staff. “Saigon was in desperate trouble,” said General Chaisson who, as director of the combat operations center, sat at the nerve center of U.S. military communications in Vietnam. “The enemy was in the city. There were three divisions around the city.”

  Because enemy sappers failed to destroy key bridges, one American armored cavalry unit was able to rush to Tan Son Nhut through the dark, following flares dropped from a helicopter by its commander. Another deciding factor in the fight at the airport, where both the South Vietnamese and American general staffs were headquartered, was an accident. Two of South Vietnam’s best-equipped combat battalions had been scheduled to fly out the night before to augment the quarter million Allied troops in I Corps, but a scheduling error had left them on the runway. Thus a thousand ARVN paratroopers and Marines were able to join the fight.

  “By the skin of our teeth,” said General Chaisson, “we were able to keep the major enemy elements out of Saigon.”

  U.S. troops in the Highlands were on “good alert status—with patrols out,” but still they were shocked by the enemy assault. “We did not expect to encounter four
teen powerful, highly synchronized attacks” on every major government center and military installation in the region, the II Corps commander said later. The enemy, he conceded, had shown “exceeding cunning and keen deception.”

  The fighting continued in a dozen cities into the early days of February, and Viet Cong forces launched new attacks in some regions. The estimate of enemy forces engaged now rose to 60,000, perhaps 70,000.

  Even though the 7th North Vietnamese Army division and the 5th and 9th Viet Cong divisions were close enough to Saigon to pose a second-strike threat, Westmoreland was more concerned about the unstruck blow in the north, at Khe Sanh.

  The apprehension was even greater in Washington, D.C. The story of the Tet Offensive—the rubble and the bodies in the embassy attack, the low-level bombing and raging flames in a score of Vietnamese cities, and especially the sharp increase in American death tolls—dominated the front pages and evening newscasts in the United States. The nation, fed on increasingly optimistic military reports all through 1967, inhaled a collective gasp of astonishment.

  And according to Westmoreland’s daily report to Washington, the “maximum effort” was still to come.

  The Commander in Chief dreaded what the next message might bring.

  On February 2, he asked General Wheeler if there was a chance that nuclear weapons might have to be used in Vietnam. Wheeler had pooh-poohed the idea in secret testimony before the Senate Armed Forces Committee that day, but at the President’s request he asked the question of Westmoreland.

  “We should be prepared to introduce weapons of greater effectiveness,” COMMUSMACV replied. The general was now very concerned about the North Vietnamese Army’s uncommitted divisions along the DMZ; he felt I Corps positions were “seriously imperiled,” especially if the enemy launched massed infantry attacks as he expected.