by Robert Pisor
Getting supplies to the combat base was proving to be more difficult than expected.
The U.S. Air Force was confident it could deliver sufficient bullets and beans to Khe Sanh; it had resources that beggared the French effort at Dienbienphu—and only half as many people to feed. The French, for example, had to operate from an airfield seventy-five minutes from Dienbienphu, with airplanes that could carry only a ton or two of supplies. The Americans would fly from the sprawling supply complex at Da Nang, just thirty minutes from Khe Sanh, with huge C-130 Hercules cargo planes capable of carrying fifteen to eighteen tons each.
The Air Force could count on unparalleled fire support to suppress enemy ground fire, and could land on a recently-rebuilt airstrip that was thirty-nine hundred feet long; the French should have been so lucky.
But starting on the first day of February and continuing through most of the month, an impenetrable grey fog settled over the combat base—enclosing the Marines in a wet fist that reduced both ceiling and visibility to zero.
The U.S. command knew the northern monsoon season would affect air operations at Khe Sanh. Marines had worked northern I Corps for several years, and had learned to resign themselves to a season of low clouds, fog, drizzle, and light rain, with occasional downpours that triggered flash floods in the rivers and streams.
Still, no one was ready for the zero-zero conditions that nearly paralyzed airlift operations in February. “The airstrip seemed particularly bedeviled by fog,” concluded one formal report. “On many a morning when visibility was excellent [elsewhere on the plateau], the runway remained shrouded in mist. . . . A deep ravine at the east end of the runway seemed responsible, channeling warm moist air from the lowlands onto the plateau where it encountered the cooler air, became chilled, and created fog.”
The French families and the Bible teachers, now refugees from the rubble of what had been Khe Sanh Village, could have told the Marines about the unique weather at the combat base. Carolyn Miller found after she moved a mile from Lang Bu to Khe Sanh Village that she could no longer dry diapers on the line. Madeleine Poilane hung wet clothing in one of her husband’s coffee-drying sheds during the monsoon season.
“I remember looking wistfully out of the west during those long, cold, misty months and seeing the sun shining brightly,” Carolyn Miller recalled. “One of our colleagues who lived with us for awhile threatened to write a book entitled ‘The Sun Always Shines in Laos, or Why I Defected to the Viet Cong.’ ”
It was the worst flying weather the Air Force encountered in Vietnam—“a severe obstacle to aerial operations”—and it threatened the Marines’ lifeline.
“February 1968 made an old man out of me,” said General Tompkins, the Marine commander responsible for the combat base. “Zero, zero, day after day.”
But the airlift was Khe Sanh’s aorta; it had to work.
The Air Force had sophisticated radar and guidance systems, of course, but as the Marines dug deeper into the plateau (the communications center finally buried itself in room-sized steel boxes sixteen feet underground), the profile of the base vanished from instrument screens. Ground radar crews provided an electronic beam for the final approach, and then talked the big planes down through the fog.
It was risky business in a landscape featuring three-thousand-foot mountains, and it got worse when the North Vietnamese set up anti-aircraft weapons along the approach route. The prevailing winds and the east-west axis of the runway fixed the line of approach as surely as berms. Enemy gunners fired straight up—blindly—and scored hits on heavily burdened planes locked in a final instrument approach in zero-zero weather.
The air crews on these dangerous missions were not supposed to be in Vietnam. Westmoreland had already reached the troop limit established by the Commander in Chief and the Congress, so planes and crews were sent to Vietnam on “temporary duty” assignments of thirty days—then rotated out before they were counted in the monthly troop totals.
Seventy-two of the C-130s were on temporary duty assignments from bases in Japan on the first day of February. The number rose to eighty-eight during the month, then ninety-six, as Westmoreland reached out to the Philippines, Okinawa, and Taiwan for more planes to fill the logistical maw of a quarter million fighting men in I Corps.
On February 10, a Hercules carrying flexible bladders of high-octane fuel was ripped by enemy bullets in the final seconds of its blind approach. Fire was licking at the plane when it touched down. It rolled almost three thousand feet, then was rocked by muffled explosions, careened off the edge of the metal strip and began to burn furiously. Fire fighters in hooded heat suits waded into the furnace to pull out the passengers. Six escaped and six died.
Later that day, another C-130 was hit by enemy fire and then crippled by mortar shells as it unloaded. After two days of repair work, the plane was able to take off for Da Nang where awed mechanics counted 242 holes in the fuselage and wings. Almost every plane suffered battle damage in early February, or blew tires on jagged holes on the airstrip.
On February 13, Westmoreland’s deputy for air operations, General Momyer, banned C-130s from landing at Khe Sanh: The big cargo planes were “a make-or-break resource . . . too valuable to be risked needlessly.”
Instead, the most urgently needed supplies—wooden beams for bunkers, pallets of pierced steel plate for the airstrip and bunker roofs, and artillery shells—would be delivered by the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System.
On a LAPES mission, the C-130 came in exactly as though it was going to land—but stayed five feet off the runway. On a timed signal, a large, trailing, wrapped parachute was popped open with a special explosive charge, and the jolt jerked the cargo bundle out of the open tailgate. Because a tilted wing could cartwheel forty tons of aviation fuel, ammunition, and timber into the heart of the combat base, the pilot had to ignore the countdown and the enemy shelling during the critical seconds over the runway—and then climb sharply under full power to avoid flying over North Vietnamese guns to the west.
When the pilot held his aircraft exactly sixty inches off the runway at a perfect 130 knots, and when the cargomaster and ground control achieved a perfect countdown and the parachute deployed exactly on schedule, and when the winds and the gods were neutral, the Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System could set enormous bundles on the airstrip the way a mother lays her baby down.
On February 13, on the first LAPES mission of the siege, the parachute didn’t open properly. An eight-ton pallet of lumber on a steel sled skidded like a berserk missile down the runway—and through the side of a mess hall, crushing three Marines to death as they sat eating lunch.
It was clear in the first few days that LAPES could never deliver the tonnages needed at Khe Sanh. The risks to the C-130s were nearly as great as landing, and the specially constructed steel pallet/sleds were difficult to recover and return to Da Nang. And the explosive cartridges essential to the timely opening of the parachute soon ran out.
Over the next six weeks the Air Force managed to deliver less than five days’ worth of supplies via LAPES.
Late in the siege, the Air Force tried a system in which the C-130 made a LAPES-like approach, but tried to snag an arresting cable with a trailing hook—quite similar to the system used on aircraft carriers, but with the hook attached to cargo bundles instead of the plane.
On the very first mission, a C-130 successfully hooked the ground cable—but jerked the entire system from its moorings and flew off into the fog trailing cables and stakes. One plane eventually managed to drop a multi-ton bundle on the runway so carefully that not one shell was broken on the thirty dozen fresh eggs added to the cargo for showmanship. Still, only fifteen of these hook and cable deliveries were tried at Khe Sanh.
The real work would have to be done by parachute, just as at Dienbienphu.
And it would have to be done quickly.
The extraordinary persistence of the fog and the banning of the C-130s had put the combat base on the brink
of a logistics crisis. On February 15, a chipper Marine told a CBS television correspondent that he was worried his mother might be worried.
“We’ve had no mail or resupplies,” explained Corporal Charles Martin, who then turned to the camera:
“So to Momma back there in Greenfield, Tennessee, hello Momma.”
Firsthand testimony like this, appearing on the evening news shows in the United States, had immediate impact on both mommas and Presidents. On February 17 and 18, in weather so dismal that no other planes were in the sky, eighteen C-130s bored into the mists over Khe Sanh and parachuted 279 tons of supplies—including the first mail delivery in more than a week.
Deliveries dropped to zero the next day when enemy artillery knocked out the ground control radar system.
Marine replacements, delicate equipment, medical supplies, and sensitive ammunition could not be delivered by parachuting them into the fog or jerking them out of the back of a plane. They flew to Khe Sanh in a sturdy cargo plane named the Provider, whose two engines had been fitted with auxiliary jet power boosters.
The C-123 Provider came down the same flak alley that the C-130 Hercules did, but it could make a much steeper approach and it needed only half the runway.
Providers rarely stopped on the ground. The pilot drove his plane like a truck through the unloading area, the cargo master rolled one-ton pallets off the open tail gate, and the plane turned for takeoff.
In the final seconds, Marines whose thirteen-month tour of duty was over, sons going home on emergency leave to visit a dying parent, and news reporters with filled notebooks leaped from nearby trenches and ran through enemy shellfire toward the moving plane. It was a sprint of terror, with cries and shouts and the mad jouncing of equipment—and a final desperate leap for the Provider’s gaping jaw. The adrenalin rush soaked some of the passengers in sweat; others lay face down on the floor, crying, “Thank God, Jesus Christ, thank God.”
With the roar of the power-boosted engines filling the fog, with enemy mortar shrapnel hitting the fuselage and Marine guns firing counterbattery missions, the C-123s lifted from the runway—and vanished instantly in the mists. Green tracer rounds from North Vietnamese guns tracked them into the fog.
Three minutes from touchdown to wheels-up was about average for the Providers, but some pilots had done it in a minute flat. Still, during the worst weeks of late February, only fifty-eight planes managed to land at the combat base—with a meager three hundred tons of supplies.
The airlift ran into unexpected problems. The pallets that made speed-offloading possible were stout, aluminum-reinforced plywood platforms custom made (at $350 each) to carry one-ton packages in the holds of cargo planes. The Marines, unable to find roofing material that could stop an enemy shell, started stealing the pallets to strengthen their bunkers. The best efforts of Air Force and Marine guards could not keep the vital pallets from disappearing before they could be returned for repackaging.
And the logistics crush at Da Nang, the main transshipment point for the quarter million Allied troops in I Corps, was so great that it was easier to fly from other bases—like Can Ranh Bay, seventy-five minutes away; and Tan Son Nhut, ninety-five minutes to the south.
Marines at the Rock Quarry, who had to sweep the drop zone every morning for mines and booby traps, found it impossible to recover all the parachuted supplies before the 4 P.M. deadline for being back in their bunkers. Some cargos had to be destroyed by Marine artillery to keep them out of enemy hands.
The quite confident comparisons with the airlift at Dienbienphu no longer held. “Theoretically, [the Air Force] could deliver six times as much as the French had been able to, but maintenance requirements, the time needed to rig loads, and other considerations cut this tonnage in half.”
Zero-zero weather, enemy fire, and equipment failures caused further constrictions in the supply line. On many days, the Air Force delivered fewer tons than the French had delivered to Dienbienphu.
Luxuries that were commonplace for American fighting men in South Vietnam were not available at Khe Sanh. Even food was more likely to be en route than on the table.
At the end of February, a magazine writer reached into his pack and pulled out some heat tabs—little chemical pills that burn so intensely they can boil a canteen cup of water or heat a can of C-rations. Every Marine in the darkened bunker showed white teeth in a dirty face; it would be the first hot meal in “days, weeks.” They sighed at the mention of peaches in syrup.
Lieutenant Colonel John F. Masters Jr., commander of the small Air Force ground team that coordinated parachute and LAPES deliveries, had no more success than the Marines in obtaining necessary supplies. Six of his people had been wounded by enemy shelling, and one evacuated with rat bites. Masters asked repeatedly for fire extinguishers, toilet paper, and rat poison, but he never got his package.
• • •
ONE OF EVERY ten Marines at Khe Sanh had been wounded or killed by the end of the first week in February, and the highest priority item in the airlift changed from ammunition to bunker material. None of the trees in the area could be used; the wood was too filled with shrapnel to be cut, or too green to support tons of sandbags.
Most bunkers started as eight-by-eight-foot dugouts, with upright beams in each corner and one in the middle for support. With a roof of pierced steel plates or pilfered pallets, then two or three layers of sandbags, the bunker was considered sufficient to stop an 82mm mortar shell. Some Marines heaped several feet of loose earth on the roof, then pounded old 105mm shell casings into the dirt like huge nails hoping the forged brass shell base would predetonate an enemy rocket or artillery shell before it entered the bunker.
The best bunker at the combat base was the spacious, well-lighted fortress constructed underground by the U.S. Navy Seabees. The sign on the door said “The Alamo Hilton.” Visiting news reporters made the Hilton their headquarters at the combat base, and paid the innkeepers in whisky and beer—rare treats in an outpost where even combat rations were sometimes rationed.
Envious Marines asked the Seabees to share, but the engineers ignored them. “Fuck ’em,” said one Navy man after a shouting incident at the door. “Before the siege began, Marines sat on their tails when they should have been digging. They worked nine to four, knocked off, and went to their beer hall.”
Some Marines mocked the Seabees for their prowess underground, calling it candyass. Fighting from holes was somehow sissy—contrary to the aggressive ethic of the U.S. Marine Corps. Digging was demeaning. Even the hospital at the combat base was above ground, with leaning walls of sandbags to provide blast protection. The roof of Charlie Med was canvas; doctors and corpsmen wore flak jackets and steel helmets in the operating theater.
“It gives you the feeling you’re digging your own grave when you go too deep,” explained a senior officer at Khe Sanh.
Besides, it hardly seemed to make any difference.
Nothing at the combat base could stop the long-range artillery shells from Laos, or the big 122mm rockets from Hill 881 North. The guns on the face of Co Roc Mountain, which were wheeled back into tunnel mouths after they were fired, were so close that even duds went four feet into the ground.
Colonel Lownds, cramped in the old French bunker, had ordered a new command post to be built. The engineers supplied the specifications for a roof that would stop a 122mm rocket, but Lownds decided to double the thickness. One day before the regimental staff was scheduled to move from the old bunker, a 152mm artillery shell shrieked in from Laos and ripped through both thicknesses to explode inside the new bunker.
Two thirds of the enemy’s artillery shells came from hidden guns twelve to fourteen miles northwest of the combat base, in Laos, on a compass reading of 305 degrees from India Company’s hilltop. Dabney’s men tried to locate the guns, but were frustrated by the extreme range, an omnipresent bomb-induced dust haze, and the enemy’s rigid camouflage procedures.
The heart of the combat base, and the enemy’s prime tar
get, was the tight cluster of bunkers and tents next to the cargo offloading area, including Colonel Lownds’ command post, Charlie Med, the ground control radar facilities, the radio relay center, and trenches for outbound air passengers.
Here, too, was Khe Sanh’s emergency reserve—a demoralized reconnaissance company whose only duty was to sit and be pounded until called to repel an enemy breakthrough.
Many rifles have an etched steel V for a rear sight and a perfect round bead for a front sight. A marksman sets the bead on the shoulder of a deer, or the neck of a squirrel, snugs the bead in the apex of the V, and smoothly squeezes the trigger. To be in the V-ring is to be dead.
The 3rd Marine Division’s reconnaissance company was camped in the V ring.
This proud outfit boasted it was “The Eyes of the 26th Marines”—point man for the whole division. Its men usually operated in small teams far from friendly lines, and its banner was a grinning skull and crossed bones, with the motto: “Swift, Deadly, Silent.”
The recon teams had taken heavy casualties in January, and since January 20 all patrols had been limited to a few hundred yards, or line of sight—whichever was less. Now the elite recon Marines huddled in bunkers, “in reserve.” More than half the men in the company had been wounded or killed by mid-February—or evacuated when their eyes locked in “the thousand-yard stare.”
One Marine veteran of World War II and Korea looked at the strained faces of the Marines at Khe Sanh in February and compared it to the look in the eyes of tethered bullocks waiting for the tiger. Another visitor to the combat base said:
“It was never easy to guess the ages of the Marines at Khe Sanh since nothing like youth ever lasted in their faces for very long. It was the eyes. Because they were always either strained or blazed-out or simply blank, they never had anything to do with what the rest of the face was doing.”
Colonel Lownds didn’t like waiting either, but he was operating under unique pressures and he chose to keep a low profile. He was a slight man, forty-seven years old, with Purple Hearts from Saipan and Iwo Jima. Two months earlier he had worked with a single battalion at Khe Sanh, isolated and almost-forgotten out at the end of the line. Now nearly 7,000 men looked to him for leadership, and millions of Americans—including especially the President of the United States—looked over his shoulder to examine every tiny decision.