Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  The Marines said no.

  A relief company would almost certainly be ambushed if it took the fastest overland route to Lang Vei, Colonel Lownds felt, and the alternative plan—to lift the force in with helicopters—was no longer considered feasible now that the enemy had put tanks on the field.

  Besides, Lownds believed the combat base was next.

  The mood in the Khe Sanh command bunker was solemn. The pleas for help and the sounds of battle crackled from the radio speakers. “By tomorrow morning,” one pessimistic staff officer said, “we’ll all probably be eating rice, or we’ll be dead.” David Douglas Duncan, a Life photographer who became the only journalist to enter Lownds’ command post (Duncan was an officer in the Marine reserves, a veteran of World War II and Korea, and a contemporary of the colonel), emerged from the bunker after listening to the radio exchanges between Lang Vei and Lownds. A Time reporter, and John Wheeler of the Associated Press, came over to ask him what he had learned.

  “They told me to get out,” Duncan said. “If any planes come in today, they told me to get on one.”

  • • •

  WILLOUGHBY’S LAST DESPAIRING message, broadcast just before his antennas were shot away at 0310, went all the way to Westmoreland. When he learned the Marines would not carry out the relief plan, the Special Forces commander in Vietnam, Colonel Ladd, called Saigon and demanded to be put through to ­COMMMUSMACV. Westmoreland was wakened, but he said he would not second-guess a commander at the scene. He rang off.

  The general did authorize the Marines to use for the first time in the Vietnam war a secret new artillery shell code-named Firecracker. The shell popped like a dud when it hit, but it cast hundreds of golfball-sized bomblets over a wide area; an instant later they exploded like so many small grenades.

  At four o’clock in the morning, the acting commander of Special Forces in I Corps—Schungel was presumed lost—asked the Marines to send a relief force at dawn. An officer in the Marine communications center noted the request and response:

  0400—Conference call with Col Smith III MAF and Capt Edwards USSF—Wants relief force at first light

  0405—Gen Cushman and Gen Tompkins confer

  0406—Gen Tompkins passes word Negative on relief force

  Willoughby could hear North Vietnamese soldiers chatting as they began to dig a large hole beside the wall of his underground concrete fortress. At 6 A.M., a thermite grenade exploded with a blinding flash that ignited maps and piles of paper and filled the bunker with acrid smoke. Fragmentation grenades and gas grenades bounced down the steps. The Americans shared the few available gas masks with one another, but everyone was vomiting from the chemical fumes and the dwindling oxygen in the bunker.

  A few minutes after six, a North Vietnamese officer invited Willoughby to surrender—or be entombed when the bunker was demolished. The South Vietnamese officers and the CIDG troops went up the stairs; soon after the Americans heard frightened shouts and prolonged shooting.

  At 0630, a tremendous explosion blasted a hole six feet wide and four feet high in the bunker’s north wall and filled the interior with concrete shrapnel. Dazed and wounded, the Green Berets awaited the final rush.

  The North Vietnamese never came—apparently diverted from finishing off Willoughby by a tiny counterattack.

  Three of the Special Forces medics at old Lang Vei had rallied a hundred or so Laotians to try to rescue their comrades in the fallen camp. At dawn, with an American on each end of the line and one in the middle to stiffen the timorous Laotians’ assault, they actually fought their way into the northeast corner of the camp where they found wounded Bru soldiers and others who had escaped the enemy’s mopping-up efforts. As the small force pushed toward the center of the camp, two Vietnamese stood and waved from the top of the command bunker. The three Americans cried for everyone to fall flat—then dove to the ground just ahead of fire from hidden enemy machine guns. When one of the Green Berets was lifted from the ground and hurled sixty feet by a mortar blast, the Laotians broke and ran.

  Four times that morning, the medics at old Lang Vei led counterattacks toward the fallen camp. In the final assault, with just two Green Berets and fifty nervous Laotians, one of the Americans was hit hard in the chest. The other medic lifted him, placed him in the back of a jeep, and raced back to old Lang Vei. He was almost there when an artillery shell hit the jeep—throwing him clear but killing his comrade in the back seat.

  The command bunker was like a charnel house. One American had suffered serious head wounds and was raving deliriously. The survivors of the tank assault had been without water for hours. Almost everyone was sick or wounded.

  Still, by timing U.S. Air Force strafing runs on the camp in the late afternoon, Willoughby and the other survivors were able to flee the bunker and escape to the north. They were met on Route 9 by a jeep driven by First Lieutenant Le Van Quoc, the same young officer who had saved Colonel Schungel’s life.

  Forty CIDG troopers and ten Green Berets flew in Marine helicopters to old Lang Vei in the last hour of light to move the surviving Americans to the combat base. Of nearly 500 CIDG defenders at Lang Vei, 316 were dead or missing. Ten of the twenty-four Americans had been lost, and eleven of the survivors were wounded. Among those who could not find a ride to Khe Sanh on the helicopters was First Lieutenant Le Van Quoc.

  • • •

  THE LOGBOOK OF the First Battalion/26th Marines for February 1968 does not mention the fall of Lang Vei. The Summary of 1968 actions published in Saigon by the United States Military Assistance Command’s office of information described the battle this way:

  “. . . the defenders were compelled to withdraw from the camp under pressure. The North Vietnamese forces used several tanks in the attack. . . . This was the first enemy employment of armor in the war and was a failure.”

  Two months later, a heavily armed column of Army air cavalrymen pushed from old Lang Vei toward the abandoned camp. A short distance down the road, they came on an American jeep. In the back seat lay a weathered, blackened corpse in a Special Forces camouflage uniform. The skin on the face had been pulled back by the sun to show all of the teeth, and the soldiers were horrorstruck by the ghastly grin.

  The long-dead medic was placed in a green body bag and helicoptered back to Graves Registration. Two morgue attendants unzipped the bag—and reeled back.

  “Shit, this is a gook! What’d they bring him here for?”

  “Look, Jesus, he’s got on our uniform.”

  “I don’t give a fuck, that ain’t no American, that’s a fucking gook!”

  “Wait a minute,” the other one said. “Maybe it’s a spade. . . .”

  • • •

  GENERAL WESTMORELAND, WHO had been wakened a second time by Colonel Ladd when the Marines decided not to send a rescue force at all, flew to Da Nang early in the morning of February 7. He was profoundly disturbed by the developments in I Corps.

  Westmoreland called together all the Marine and Army commanders in the northern region and listened to their reports. He gave terse orders to reopen roads, to establish new logistics lines, to reinforce at Hue, and to move troops to meet an enemy thrust toward Da Nang. It was Westmoreland who ordered the Marines to provide helicopters and the Special Forces to provide troops to go in and extract the survivors.

  “One of Westy’s best days,” General Chaisson wrote in his pocket diary.

  But Westmoreland was steaming. His intelligence people put the North Vietnamese Army’s 325C and 304 Divisions at Khe Sanh and the 320 Division near the Rockpile, one enemy division fighting in Hue and two other NVA divisions loose in I Corps—one of them driving toward the vital Da Nang airport/seaport facilities. Radio Hanoi was boasting that “the U.S. defense line along Highway 9 has been breached,” and that President Johnson was “very afraid of another Dienbienphu.” Westmoreland had shifted the U.S. Army’s America Division, a South Korean Marine division, the 1st Air Cavalry Division and a brigade of 101st Airborne Division to I Corps�
��and yet the problems seemed to be getting worse, not better.

  “General Cushman and his staff appeared complacent, seemingly reluctant to use the Army forces I had put at their disposal,” he said. “I grew more and more shocked.”

  The fall of Lang Vei evaporated Westmoreland’s last reserves of confidence in the Marines. Two days later he sent his deputy, Army General Creighton W. Abrams Jr., to oversee the deployment of troops in northern I Corps. And he jammed the tactical aircraft issue. Westmoreland was deeply offended that the Marines had taken the argument over his head and now he demanded that he be given full authority to dispose of Marine aircraft as he saw fit—not as General Cushman saw fit.

  • • •

  THE APPEARANCE OF enemy armor on the battlefield in South Vietnam had shocked American military leaders, although the six tanks at the combat base were happily looking forward to a duck shoot. The hulks at Lang Vei had been identified as old models of a thin-skinned Russian amphibious tank that was absolutely no match for the Marine behemoths. Still, some fighter-bombers over Khe Sanh changed ordnance from Cluster Bomb Units to tank-destroying rockets, and Marines re-read the instructions printed on the side of the LAW tubes—and recoilless riflemen stacked high-explosive rounds beside their stores of flechette shells.

  The Marines were unusually alert, therefore, when enemy mortars threw hundreds of shells into the combat base beginning at 4 A.M. the next morning, February 8.

  The shelling was heaviest on A Company, stationed with the 1st Battalion/9th Marines at the Rock Quarry. One of A Company’s platoons (about fifty men) was holding a little pimple of ground—Hill 64 on the maps—five hundred yards west of the quarry. Second Lieutenant Terence R. Roach Jr. radioed at 0420 that he had enemy soldiers in the wire.

  North Vietnamese assault units hit the platoon outpost from the northwest and southwest, threw canvas over the barbed wire—and rolled into the forward trenches.

  The Marines were nineteen-year-old short-timers, who counted their remaining time in Vietnam in weeks instead of months, and they fought like veterans. North Vietnamese soldiers knocked out the Marine bunkers one at a time with satchel charges and rocket-propelled grenades. Lieutenant Roach was killed trying to rally the defenders, and finally the platoon’s fire fell off. Enemy soldiers collected souvenirs in the captured trenches, one taking a family Christmas photograph from the wallet of a Marine who lay shell-shocked and paralyzed, but fully conscious behind the fixed stare of his open eyes.

  Reinforcements reached the hill at 9 A.M. The rescue force found twenty-one dead, twenty-six badly wounded, and four missing in action. One Marine emerged unscathed.

  The commander of A Company reported 150 enemy dead, and several years later Colonel Lownds, in testimony before a Congressional committee, named this bitter little battle as one of the Marines’ victories at Khe Sanh. He described Marine losses on Hill 64 as “light.”

  The Marines were watching body bags being loaded when the first of more than six thousand refugees streamed to the front gate of the combat base. The carefully cleared fields of fire became a parade ground of Babel.

  Here were the thrice-beaten soldiers of the 33rd Laotian Elephant Battalion and their wives and children and mothers; a clump of Ca Montagnards who had also been driven out of Laos; some two hundred scattered survivors from Lang Vei, including Hré Montagnards of the Mobile Strike Force, South Vietnamese CIDG troops and ARVN Special Forces cadre, Bru Montagnards in CIDG camouflage—and thousands of Bru civilians, many of them mourning for husbands and sons lost at Lang Vei. There were six different kinds of uniforms in this mob, hundreds of rifles and machine guns and, for all Colonel Lownds knew, ten North Vietnamese Army sapper squads in disguise.

  The great crowd of military and civilian refugees outnumbered the combat base defenders, and Lownds had no intention of letting this weapons-bearing mélange inside his fortress. Neither did he want them standing in a sullen, armed mass outside his main gate where they could shield an enemy attack—or join one.

  Colonel Lownds ordered the weapons seized, and then he warned the crowd of 6,000 to disperse—or risk being caught in a terrible crossfire.

  Two thousand five hundred demoralized Laotians had nowhere to go except back through enemy lines to their country. They trudged west on Route 9. American jet bombers, looking for the North Vietnamese who overwhelmed Hill 64 that morning, started Cluster-Bomb Unit runs on one column but were called off when a spotter pilot flew low enough to see it was “mostly old men, women, and children.” Thousands of Bru, and some of the CIDG soldiers, walked east on Route 9—hoping to reach Quang Tri City.

  One of the most forlorn was First Lieutenant Le Van Quoc. The South Vietnamese Special Forces officer expected harsh treatment if captured by the North Vietnamese. He had fought until it was impossible to fight any more inside Lang Vei, then escaped to the north. He returned to the camp several times, and helped Willoughby and other wounded Americans reach old Lang Vei. The Green Berets at old Lang Vei, sorry they could not take him in the last helicopters to safety, had told him to try to get to the combat base on his own. Le Van Quoc had crawled past enemy patrols on the night of the seventh and, still in uniform and still carrying his weapon, he reported for duty at the combat base on the morning of the eighth. He was disarmed at the gate.

  “I don’t know why they take our weapons,” Le Van Quoc cried in the afternoon. “I don’t know what we’ll do.”

  • • •

  WESTMORELAND FLEW BACK to Saigon from Da Nang feeling very much in charge. He’d finally blasted the logjam free in I Corps, and he could hope the problems were on the way toward solution. The situation had required a take-charge officer, and Westmoreland had shone.

  Now there were other problems to be dealt with, and Westmoreland called his staff together in the Saigon headquarters. One item on the agenda was the new report on comparisons between Khe Sanh and Dienbienphu.

  Colonel Argo could hardly have been more gloomy. The Marines were cooped up inside their barbed wire while the enemy could move and probe and concentrate his forces for specific attacks, Argo said. The fatal fault at Dienbienphu and at every famous siege in history was the defenders’ loss of initiative. He could see the same fate for the combat base.

  The room froze in stunned silence. The unthinkable had just been spoken. Every officer in the room kept his eyes fixed intently on Colonel Argo—never once glancing toward COMMUSMACV.

  Westmoreland stood, assumed the Command Presence, and demanded the attention of all.

  “It’s good that we have heard the worst,” he said, pronouncing his words precisely, firmly. Then he put steel in his voice:

  “But we are not, repeat, not, going to be defeated at Khe Sanh. I will tolerate no talking, or even thinking, to the contrary.”

  Westmoreland’s eyes strobed the officers, and then he performed an about face with a First Captain’s sharpness—and strode from the room.

  9.

  LIFE IN THE V-RING

  The Khe Sanh combat base was a reeking trash heap by the first week of February.

  Torn ponchos, half-empty cans of beans with ham, soggy crumples of paper, shell casings, soleless boots, duds from the ammunition dump explosion, moldy bits of canvas, splintered fiberglass plates from ripped flak jackets, shrapnel chunks, and broken timber littered the dugouts and shallow fighting trenches.

  Not far from the Tactical Operations Center—the old French bunker that served as the Marine command post—a terrible heap of stained fatigues smoldered fitfully in the fog. It was the burn pile from Charlie Med: sweat-soaked shirts and baggy pants, underwear and socks almost purple with blood, mangled boots, and holed camouflage covers. Doctors and corpsmen in the tough little tent hospital by the airstrip tied off spurting vessels and tidied up traumatic amputations for the one-hour helicopter ride to excellent surgical facilities at Phu Bai.

  Round-the-clock bombing and shelling and digging and bulldozing and piling had filled the air with the red dust of the pla
teau.

  Smoke and the smell of things burning lifted the back of the tongue almost to gagging. Dark blue exhaust fumes pumped from generator housings; neat, white clouds drifted from close-in air bursts; dirty, grey gouts leaped from mortar hits.

  Smoke rose from trash fires and garbage fires and petroleum fires, and it rolled in black, choking billows from the fifty-five gallon drums in which shit and diesel fuel had been mixed. The gruesome brew was stirred constantly to keep the flames alive. “It hangs, hangs,” groaned a visitor, “taking you full in the throat. . . .”

  Water was scarce, and most of the Marines wore scraggly beards. Few washed regularly. The sleeping bunkers were dank stench chambers, redolent of sweat and urine, diarrhea and fear, C-ration garbage, vomit, farts, feet, and fungus.

  Rats ran across the dirt floors, gnawing at shelves and boots and fingers, chittering in fear when the big guns fired and sometimes scratching faces as they raced across sleeping Marines in the dark bunkers.

  The camp looked wrecked, “like a shanty slum on the outskirts of Manila.” Enemy rockets and shells had flattened the officers’ club, broken the “hardback” huts, deroofed the beer hall, and toppled antennas. Fragments of helicopter blade, hingeless truck doors, hopeless tangles of communications wire, blowing cardboard cartons, shattered windshields, and rotting sandbags were scattered everywhere.

  The sounds of war were unceasing. Fighter-bombers roared in very low to hit North Vietnamese positions, enemy shells whapped on the steel plates of the runway, truck horns blared warnings of inbound artillery, machine gunners fired clearing bursts along the perimeter, B-52 strikes rumbled like heavy thunder in the mountains, sniper rifles cracked, and helicopters thudded overhead to carry ammunition and replacements to the hilltops—and casualties to Charlie Med.

  Almost every day the heavy popping of North Vietnamese .50 caliber machine guns could be heard to the east, followed immediately by the full-throated roar of a four-engined cargo plane lowering through the fog on instruments.