by Robert Pisor
The Marines resorted to area fire. Fire coordinators at the combat base would arrange for the Marine and Army artillery to fire on a timed schedule so that every shell arrived on target at the same instant. By assigning each gun a slightly different map coordinate, it was possible to rain shrapnel on a wide area. With practice, the artillerymen could produce a “micro-Arc light”—for a target five hundred meters square—in just ten or fifteen minutes; it took closer to an hour to ready the guns for a “mini-Arc Light,” which concentrated explosive airbursts on a target a half mile long by five hundred meters wide.
Even with the sensors, much of the targeting was guesswork. So much time elapsed between the sensor report and the big guns’ readiness that fire control officers had to estimate the speed and direction of enemy marches—or risk shooting shells into the past.
In the early hours of February 4, several sensors northwest of the combat base started broadcasting urgent signals. A large body of men—soldiers, or perhaps porters—was moving toward Hill 881 South.
That night the sensors came alive again. Marine Captain Mirza M. Baig, sitting in the bunker that housed the Fire Support Control Center at the combat base, decided to believe what the sensors appeared to be saying: that hundreds of enemy soldiers were moving into positions to attack India Company. Baig pictured several NVA assault battalions crossing the border from Laos under cover of dark, then moving in a two-stage march to jumpoff points west and south of Hill 881 South. Officers in the Fire Support Control Center figured out how fast a North Vietnamese soldier might be able to move in the dark in this terrain, how the attackers were most likely to line up for the assault, and where the reserves were most likely to wait. Poring over their maps, the FSCC planners picked a five hundred meter by three hundred meter target box and, on signal, fired five hundred high explosive shells into it.
Nothing happened. No terrified shouts were heard on the sidebands of the radio. No secondary explosions marked a hit on ammunition supplies. Still, Baig thought the preemptive artillery strike had disrupted enemy plans.
When the hands on the bunker clock moved past 3 A.M., Baig and other officers in the Fire Support Control Center cheered, then applauded themselves. The prime hour for enemy attack had come and gone; the artillery strike must have scattered the assault forces.
Five minutes later, enemy artillery, rockets, and mortars pounded the combat base and hilltop outposts. More than 6,000 Marines squinted into the thick mists for the first thickenings that would herald the enemy attack.
At five minutes after four, dac cong slipped Bangalore torpedos into the barbed wire barricades on Hill 861 Alpha—and blasted pathways into the interior of the Marines’ newest hilltop position. The hill was covered with tall, coarse grass but bald of trees, and the 201 men of E Company had been forced to improvise overhead cover. Seven Marines died in the opening mortar barrage.
North Vietnamese soldiers crept through gaps in the wire. Rocket-propelled grenades—fired in volley at single targets—knocked out the Marines’ machine guns and recoilless rifles. When the platoon that received the brunt of the assault began to fall back, Captain Earle G. Breeding ordered his men to don gas masks. Seconds later, the hilltop was shrouded in choking clouds of CS gas—but still the North Vietnamese pressed the attack. All of the heavy weapons at the combat base were now firing shells in a tight ring around Breeding’s embattled company, but by 5:08 A.M. the enemy had taken one-fourth of the hilltop.
Captain Breeding was now coordinating supporting fires from the 175mm guns at Camp Carroll, the artillery and heavy mortars at the combat base, radar-guided jet bombers, and mortars and recoilless rifles from Hill 558, Hill 861, and Hill 881 South—which alone fired eleven hundred rounds from just three heavy mortars. When the tubes began to glow in the dark, Dabney’s mortarmen poured precious drinking water on them, then cans of fruit juice; finally, they stood in tight little circles urinating on the metal to keep it cool.
Breeding fed three-man fire teams into the flanks of the enemy penetration, then launched a counterattack. Shouting Marines followed a shower of grenades into the captured trenches—and discovered the North Vietnamese had stopped to look at magazines and paperback books. One Marine nearly tore the head off a slightly built NVA soldier with a roundhouse right, then leaped in to finish him off with a knife. Another Marine saw his buddy grabbed from behind; he jammed his M-16 rifle between the combatants and fired a whole magazine on full automatic—ripping chunks from his friend’s flak jacket but cutting the enemy soldier in half. Using knives, rifle butts, and fists, and fighting short-range grenade duels in the swirling fog and lingering clouds of tear gas, the Marines threw the North Vietnamese off the hill.
“It was like watching a World War II movie,” Captain Breeding said. “We walked all over them.”
Helicopters lifted 42 replacements to the hilltop in mid-afternoon, while E Company repaired the gaps in the barbed wire barriers, dragged 109 enemy bodies down the slopes to reduce the inevitable stench, reset machine gun positions, and installed more Claymore mines. Steadiness—and enormous firepower—had prevailed, but the Marines wanted to be ready if Mr. Charles came again.
Forty-eight hours later, enemy tanks overran the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei.
• • •
LANG VEI HAD dangled alone at the end of the line since Khe Sanh Village was abandoned on January 21. It was seven miles by road to the combat base, through a town captured by the North Vietnamese, but the Green Berets did not feel unusually exposed; their calling required them to live and work on the edge.
Besides, Lang Vei had stouter bunkers, more defenders, better fields of fire, and more immediately available firepower support than any other Special Forces camp in Vietnam. Captain Frank C. Willoughby, the camp commander, could even summon B-52s.
An attack on the camp seemed inevitable. Patrols from Lang Vei had been the first to detect the growing North Vietnamese presence at Khe Sanh, and now they bumped into enemy forces almost every day. Artillery shells arced in from Laos and from Co Roc at odd intervals. Every night tentative probes triggered flares in the defensive wire or set the pebble-cans dancing on the cylone fence.
On January 30, a patrol discovered a heavy-duty road built into a stream bed less than a mile from the camp. Boulders and stones had been rolled to the edges so vehicles could pass easily while water erased the tire tracks.
That afternoon, a young North Vietnamese soldier walked out of the scrub and surrendered. He said his name was Luong Dinh Du and that he served with a badly hurt battalion of the 66th Regiment, 304 Division. He had participated in the attack on Khe Sanh Village, and now his battalion—down to just 200 men—was preparing to attack Lang Vei. He couldn’t take it any more, Luong Dinh Du said; he had decided to quit the war.
On February 6, the day after the attack on E Company, enemy mortars pounded the Lang Vei camp for one hour after dawn. A direct hit wounded eight South Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers, but the heavy log bunkers—especially the reinforced-concrete command bunker—provided excellent cover for defenders. In the afternoon, the North Vietnamese snapped an ambush on a patrol just seven hundred yards from the camp, and an American was led away as a prisoner.
At 8 P.M., when an outpost reported that it could hear engines idling, Captain Willoughby called the combat base and asked the big guns to test fire the defensive patterns one more time. Just to be sure.
Lang Vei was the northernmost of sixty-four Special Forces camps along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. The next two camps to the south, A Shau and A Loui, had been overrun and abandoned in 1966. Panic had added to the hard losses of that battle; one marine rescue pilot shot South Vietnamese and Montagnard soldiers off his skids so he could get his helicopter airborne. Since then, the heavily jungled A Shau Valley had become a major transshipment point for North Vietnamese weapons and supplies.
Captain Willoughby could call on considerably more support than his counterparts had enjoyed at A Shau—including America
n reinforcements. The First Battalion of the 26th Marines had been assigned eight combat missions at Khe Sanh, one of which was: “Be prepared to execute the contingency plans for the relief/reinforcement of Lang Vei. . . .” Colonel Lownds had rehearsed the plans two months earlier, ordering a rifle company to cover the five miles to Lang Vei without using Route 9 or obvious trails. The relief column had taken nineteen hours to reach the camp.
General Westmoreland had a special affection for the U.S. Army paratroopers who wore green berets. On January 14 he ordered General Cushman, the Marine commander in I Corps, and Colonel Jonathan F. Ladd, commander of U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam, to review together the plans for fire support and reinforcement at Lang Vei. The Marines, it was agreed, would keep two rifle companies ready to move by foot or helicopter to Lang Vei, and the Special Forces would keep a Mobile Strike Force in reserve at Da Nang, ninety-five miles away.
Captain Willoughby usually had twelve Americans in his camp, and about 300 indigenous troops—“Sidge,” they were sometimes called, after the acronym for Civilian Irregular Defense Group, Cee Aye Dee Gee, CIDG. The captain had asked for six more Green Beret medics after 2,700 sick and wounded Laotians settled in at old Lang Vei, a little more than a half mile east on Route 9, toward Khe Sanh. Some 8,000 civilians and demoralized stragglers, hoping to find a bomb-free zone, had set up housekeeping within a mile of the Special Forces camp; a typhus outbreak would be disastrous.
As the enemy pressure increased, Da Nang dispatched a 161-man Mobile Strike Force of Hré Montagnards to Lang Vei, with six more Green Beret advisers. Willoughby sent forty of these diminutive soldiers and two American sergeants to a fortified listening post eight hundred meters west on Route 9 to provide early warning of an attack from Laos.
The captain counted heads at dark. He had very close to 500 defenders, organized in four small companies of Vietnamese, one company of Bru Montagnards, three combat reconnaissance platoons—hardened veterans of the Ho Chi Minh Trail watch—and the Mobile Strike Force from Da Nang. More than 500 Laotian soldiers, disorganized but still armed, were camped a half mile away. Six Americans were with the Laotians, two at the outpost and the rest inside the camp—including a distinguished overnight visitor, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel F. Schungel, commander of U.S. Army Special Forces in I Corps. As “a gesture of diplomacy,” he had helicoptered in during the day to greet the discouraged Laotian lieutenant colonel who had been forced to flee from his own country.
Lang Vei, built in a dog-bone shape atop a long, gentle rise that provided unusually good fields of fire for the defenders, was packed with weapons—many more than the garrison could possibly use at one time. The catalogue of arms included two 4.2-inch mortars with 800 rounds of ammunition; seven 81mm mortars with 2,000 rounds of ammunition; nineteen 60mm mortars with 30,000 rounds of high explosive shells; two 106mm recoilless rifles with 40 high explosive rounds; four 57mm recoilless rifles with 3,000 rounds—most of which were anti-personnel canister shot; one hundred Light Anti-tank Weapons (LAWs); two 50-caliber machine guns with 17,000 rounds of ammunition; thirty-nine Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs) with 200,000 rounds of ammunition; and two new M60 machine guns with 5,000 rounds. Most of the CIDG troops carried M-1 and M-2 rifles, for which the camp had stores of 250,000 rounds.
Willoughby also had one thousand fragmentation grenades, 390 Claymore mines—and a matched pair of 12-guage shotguns. All he had to do was speak numbers into the radio and the combat base would ring his camp with pre-arranged defensive fires.
He felt pretty good about his preparations, and he told a visitor that Lang Vei had been “built to take a regiment.”
• • •
FEBRUARY 7 WAS forty-two minutes old when the radio in the command bunker crackled to life with the shocked cry:
“We have tanks in the wire!”
Schungel raced up the steps, looked out—and saw a fifteen-ton tank parked in a shredded tangle of wire and cyclone fence firing pointblank at the sandbagged bunkers of Company 104 in the southeast corner of the camp. Two platoons of steel-helmeted North Vietnamese soldiers were moving through the gap in the wire.
The colonel raced back down the steps, and shouted at Willoughby to mass artillery fire in front of Company 104 immediately, to get a Spooky on station with million-candle power flares and miniguns, to get air support, to get everything it was possible to get—and to ask for it from both the combat base and the Special Forces headquarters in Da Nang. These were tanks! The colonel ran up the stairs and outside to organize tank killer teams.
The first two enemy tanks had driven up a little-used road from the south, stopped at the defensive wire with the commanders perched almost casually in the cupolas, and waited while soldiers stepped forward to cut the chain-link fence. The fifty South Vietnamese of Company 104, civilian irregulars in fact as well as in name, froze in shock—and then mowed down the wire cutters. The two tanks buttoned up and bulled their way through the fencing, foot traps, mine fields, and barbed wire, then rolled right over the defenders, crushing bunker roofs with their great weight.
Sergeant First Class James W. Holt raced to one of the camp’s two 106mm recoilless rifles as soon as he saw the tanks. He was the camp’s senior medic. The mortars were firing illumination rounds now, and one big flare hung sputtering on its parachute directly over the tanks. Holt sighted down the big tube and, at a range of more than three hundred yards, scored direct hits on both tanks, setting them afire. Three young women carrying American-made M-16 rifles leaped from the lead tank and ran for cover—chased by the singing flechettes of Sergeant Holt’s beehive rounds.
A third tank rumbled past the burning hulks, beamed a spotlight at the CIDG bunkers to blind the defenders, and obliterated the remaining strongpoints with direct fire from its cannon. Holt hit this tank, too, and then ran to get more ammunition for his weapon. He was never seen again. A fourth tank roared at top speed through the gap, blasted the recoilless rifle position, and was joined by a fifth tank.
Company 104 was broken, and its collapse exposed the rear of the eighty-two Bru Montagnards holding the northeast corner of the camp against a two-tank assault from the north. Caught between two murderous fires, the Bru died quickly.
Willoughby’s urgent call for help—and a heavy enemy rocket / artillery barrage—arrived at the combat base at the same instant. The Marines dived for cover, and the first volley didn’t get off until almost 1 A.M. Aimed at the southern approaches to Company 104, it landed squarely in the middle of the camp, stunning the defenders. The defensive fires were quickly adjusted, but the eastern end of the camp was in enemy hands.
Colonel Schungel knelt in the middle of the camp, with green tracers from enemy machine guns criss-crossing the ground in front of him, and wildly-swinging parachute flares overhead, and fired a LAW at the lead tank. The shell hit in a great shower of orange sparks, but the tank kept rolling. He moved closer with another LAW, but this time the disposable launcher refused to fire. Now he was close enough to roll hand grenades into the tank’s treads, and to fire his rifle into the eyeslits. The tank kept rolling. Another team hit one North Vietnamese tank nine times with the shoulder-fired LAW rockets, and the tank kept rolling.
The ammunition dump exploded, and huge billows of black smoke from a fuel fire rolled thickly across the camp. Dust, churned up by the tanks and blasted into the air by shells and bombs, swirled in blinding clouds. The pilot in a small, circling plane—the spotter and guide for jet bombers—reported that NVA soldiers were using short bursts from flamethrowers to eliminate pockets of resistance.
Sergeant First Class Charles W. Lindewold radioed for help when two tanks and a North Vietnamese assault company hit his tiny outpost to the west. Wounded severely, he died with the Hré platoon. Sergeant First Class Kenneth Hanna was captured and led away.
Schungel’s little force, frustrated by misfires, fell back toward the command bunker, pursued by tanks. One shellblast blinded a Green Beret soldier and knocked Schungel half unconsc
ious; North Vietnamese infantrymen rushed forward to finish them off. First Lieutenant Le Van Quoc, deputy commander of the South Vietnamese Special Forces at Lang Vei, cut down the attackers with his M-16 and helped the dazed Americans around to the west side of the bunker.
Now, Schungel could see, tanks had broken through the west end of the camp, too. He was preparing to duel with one of them when a rocket hit it from behind, setting it afire. He killed the crew as they fled the flames.
It was impossible to return to the command bunker; enemy tanks were firing at both doors at a range of not more than fifteen yards. Schungel and a Green Beret lieutenant ran to the team house; they were driven out when North Vietnamese sappers threw satchel charges down the vents. The two men hid in the dispensary, so close to the battle they could hear runners carrying messages between the enemy commander and his assault leaders. Four Americans and forty CIDG made a break to the north, only to be caught in the flail of a Cluster Bomb Unit. Schungel and the lieutenant took the same route out of the camp minutes later.
The command bunker was in chaos.
Five Vietnamese interpreters and officers, twenty-five terrified CIDG soldiers, and eight Americans—six of them wounded—had taken shelter here. The pointblank cannon fire of the tanks slammed at their eardrums, and the enemy was dropping hand grenades and explosive charges down the vents and stairwells. One tank clambered up on the roof, crushing equipment and snapping off radio antennas—but the thick concrete held firm.
Captain Willoughby called heavy artillery fire directly on his position now, and he asked the Marines to execute the relief plan.