by Robert Pisor
“Thanks to a small army of war correspondents and reporters, millions of people followed the battle day by day,” noted the formal Marine history of the siege. “The well-publicized struggle had long since become more than just another battle; it was a symbol of Allied determination to hold the line in Vietnam.”
Colonel Lownds had very nearly been sacrificed to appease General Westmoreland, and he appeared to some to be a “meek, low-keyed, distracted, and even stupid man . . . utterly insensible to the gravity of his position.”
Certainly no colonel in the world had to justify himself more perfectly to more people—to General Tompkins, who had interceded to save him and who helicoptered to the base every day to make sure Lownds was doing things right; to General Cushman, the Marine commander in I Corps who thought a more dynamic leader might ease the strains with Saigon; to General Westmoreland, who was increasingly worried about the Marines’ abilities, and of whom Time said on February 16: “The blade is . . . poised above Westmoreland. His reputation—and much more—is riding on the ability of that barren, hill-girt outpost to stand.”
Lownds cultivated a luxurious regimental moustache with upswept waxed tips—and an air of quiet confidence:
“Can we hold this place?” he said, echoing a reporter’s question in the first week of February. “Hell, yes. The morale and discipline of my men are high.”
Lownds said he was not surprised when the North Vietnamese failed to follow up their January 20 attacks. “I expect a thoroughly Oriental kind of battle. The enemy takes his time. He’s going to bang us when he’s ready.”
And what if the North Vietnamese really did hurl tens of thousands of soldiers at the combat base, as they had at Dienbienphu?
“I should like to hope they don’t have enough,” Lownds answered. “Anyway, we’re here to stay.”
General Tompkins’ decision to restrict Marine patrols to line of sight from the base perimeter was endorsed by the majority of officers—and not just because it permitted Niagara to rain bombs on the plateau without fear of hitting friendly troops.
“If you go out after the North Vietnamese with a platoon, they hit you with a company,” explained Lt. Col. Edward Castagna, who directed operations for the 26th Marines at Khe Sanh. “And if you go out with a company, they slam you with a battalion.
“That’s the way it is.”
“Inevitably,” said another Marine officer, “they pick just the right piece of terrain and they dig in and wait for us in the bottleneck.”
Even Army officers preferred not to engage the North Vietnamese on terrain of their choosing. “You don’t fight this fellow rifle to rifle,” said Brig. Gen. Glenn D. Walker. “You locate him and back away, blow the hell out of him, and then police up.”
The deluge of bombs, unprecedented even in a war that had already surpassed the tonnages of World War II, was changing the geography of the northern border region—erasing ridgelines, diverting streams and rivers, reducing hills, cratering the plateau, and starting fires that burned for days.
Twenty-five years earlier, American bombers dropped 478 tons of bombs on the Schweinfurt ball bearing factories that kept the Nazi war machine on wheels; 650 American servicemen lost their lives in the one-day raid. The B-52 Stratofortresses over Khe Sanh routinely tripled the tonnage of the Schweinfurt raid every day—without the loss of a single plane.
The big bombers came from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, U Tapao Airbase in Thailand, and, after the first week of February, from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa. The additional planes made it possible to put two cells of three B-52s over Khe Sanh every three hours around the clock.
Clods of dirt vibrated from the bunker ceilings and the earth itself trembled rhythmically as the B-52s bombed suspected enemy road systems, troop bivouacs, supply depots, bunker complexes, and gun positions.
For every B-52 visit, ten fighter bombers arrived over the combat base—Phantoms and Intruders, Crusaders, Skyhawks, Thunderchiefs, and even rugged old Skyraiders, prop-driven planes that looked like they’d come from the museum. They came from the 1st Marine Air Wing, the 7th Air Force, the Strategic Air Command, U.S. Navy Task Force 77, the Vietnamese Air Force, varied U.S. Army aviation units, and once from an air wing in North Carolina that flew halfway around the world just to show it could be done.
Many of the fighter bombers had been diverted from missions against North Vietnam. The weather over the enemy homeland in February and March was so terrible that 5,900 of the 8,383 bombers that set out for North Vietnam diverted to targets near Khe Sanh.
An airbone computer control module named Sky Spot kept as many as eight hundred aircraft a day at appropriate altitudes and speeds until they could augur down through the swarm and strike at an enemy target.
Side-looking airborne radar systems, infrared and chlorophyll-loss detectors, seismic and acoustic sensors, and aerial photographs provided up to 150 targets a day—and the bombing did not slow because of darkness or fog: two thirds of all bombing missions at Khe Sanh in February were instrument controlled; the pilot never saw the target. A computer in a heavily sandbagged van at the combat base juggled radar readings, map coordinates, the ballistic characteristics of various bombs, compass headings and wind speeds, and guided the planes through the gloom to precision bombing runs.
The most instantly responsive fire support at Khe Sanh was the Marines’ own artillery, some forty-six tubes in all. Colonel Lownds liked to walk into the fire support control center from time to time, point at a spot on a giant wall map, and order it destroyed. Using a Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer to digest the information beneath Lownds’ finger, the fire support control center could have shells on the way within forty seconds.
By mid-February, Niagara was the great thundering waterfall of explosives that General Westmoreland had envisioned. Every day B-52s dropped more than one thousand tons of bombs on the plateau, fighter bombers roared in at five or ten minute intervals, and hundreds of artillery missions churned and rechurned the red soil.
But it did not silence the North Vietnamese guns.
Every day, 100 enemy shells—or 350 or 500—hammered the combat base. Every day, one Marine would be caught in the open and flailed by shrapnel or another mangled when a rocket ripped through a bunker roof.
This was hardly shelling of historic proportions, and many experienced military leaders pooh-poohed the North Vietnamese effort. On their very best day, enemy gunners fired 1,307 shells and rockets at the Marines—hardly more than Dabney’s mortar crews had pumped out in a few hours during the battle for Hill 861 Alpha. Furthermore, the impact of the enemy shelling was dissipated over the two square miles of the combat base and a half dozen scattered hilltop positions.
Dienbienphu had absorbed up to forty-five thousand shells a week, and during the Korean War a tiny Allied outpost just 275 yards square had taken fourteen thousand rounds in twenty-four hours.
S.L.A. Marshall, the military historian and analyst, scoffed in print at the use of the word “barrage” to describe enemy shelling at Khe Sanh. The North Vietnamese shells falling on the Marines, he argued, were a mild sprinkle compared to the thunderstorms of explosives in previous battles.
In the opening days of World War II, the Japanese battered Americans on Corregidor with 3,600 five-hundred-pound shells, then 16,000 shells in just twenty-four hours, and then “an artillery barrage so heavy that the flashes and sounds of the explosions ran together in a continuous sheet-lightning, a continuous roll of thunder.”
Mocking the North Vietnamese artillery was easier in New York, or Washington, than it was at the combat base where a kind of knee-hugging, ground-huddling helplessness gripped the Marines every time the klaxons blared.
It wasn’t the weight or the accuracy, but the persistence of enemy shelling that slowly eroded the Marines’ cocky readiness for battle. Every hour of every day, in clear weather and foul, fighter bombers and B-52s burned the jungle scrub with high explosives and jellied gasoline and white phospho
rus—and still the enemy lobbed a few hundred mortar shells at the Marines every day.
The shelling slowly wore them down.
Marines spent the nighttime hours staring into the swirling fog, waiting for battalions of North Vietnamese assault troops to charge the wire. In the daylight hours, they filled sandbags until the fog lifted enough for enemy spotters on the surrounding hills to direct artillery fire at the combat base. Then the Marines went underground again.
“We went into some tough places [in World War II] . . . Tarawa or Peleliu, parts of the ’canal, Tinian,” said a Marine general who had fought in the Pacific island campaigns, “[but] I don’t think we were ever asked to carry out—day in, day out, no Sundays, thirty-one days a month, twenty-four hours around the clock, 360 degrees of direction—a fight that you were involved in during your whole twelve-to-thirteen-month tour.
“It’s a pretty dreary, dirty, miserable war.”
Marine Lieutenant C.J. Stack counted his losses from enemy shelling and told a news report:
“When I get back, I’m going to open a bar especially for the survivors of Khe Sanh. And any time it gets two deep at that bar, I’ll know someone is lying.”
In one of the open trenches, Lance Corporal Richard Morris strummed his guitar and sang the mournful song that had reached the Top Twenty list in early 1968: “Where have all the soldiers gone? To the graveyard, every one. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”
“All they ever do is peck, peck, peck,” an impatient battalion commander complained toward the end of February. “There’s no sweeping battle. They just keep pecking away.”
One Marine was evacuated from the base because he masturbated every day in the bunker, the trench—and in the tent where he was sent to be examined. Others were sent to the rear when they shook helplessly every time the big 122mm rockets walked the length of the combat base.
“This ain’t the Marine Corps I know,” complained one senior sergeant.
The waiting and the shelling and the weariness were worse on the hilltop outposts—and worst on 881 South.
For India Company alone, the North Vietnamese installed two 120mm mortars—the biggest such weapon in their arsenal. The extremely large fragmentation pattern of the giant mortar’s shells virtually guaranteed that any Marine caught above ground would be wounded or killed. And the 120s, hidden in a U-shaped fold of ground called the Horseshoe about a mile and a half from the hilltop, punched through the thickest overhead covering the Marines could devise.
U.S. fighter bombers filled the Horseshoe with canisters of napalm, thousand-pound bombs, tear-gas crystals, chemical smoke, and hundreds of tons of high explosives, but they never silenced the big mortars.
Twenty-four hours of tension robbed the Marines of sleep, just as foul weather robbed them of food, ammunition, water, and the hope of speedy medical care. The North Vietnamese attacks on Hills 861 and 861 A, and the overrunning of Lang Vei and Hill 64, wound the spring tighter. Individual enemy soldiers crept close to the Marines’ positions. One sniper drilled a veteran gunnery sergeant through the head on Hill 861; another particularly fine marksman dropped ten of Dabney’s men in a single week.
India Company was often able to warn the combat base of incoming shells. The Marines on 881 South could see muzzle flashes on the face of Co Roc, or hear the loud rustling of shells from Laos passing close overhead—“like a squirrel running through dry leaves,” said Dabney—and radio a terse warning:
“Arty, arty, Co Roc” or “Arty, arty, 305.”
A Marine monitoring the radio net at the combat base instantly pressed two wired beer can lids together—closing an electric circuit that honked a truck horn mounted in a tree. When India Company was on its toes, Marines at the combat base had five to eighteen seconds to find cover.
Once, a wedge-shaped bull of a Marine corporal named Molimao Niuatoa, a Samoan Islander known in India Company as Pineapple Chunk, actually spied an enemy gun more than six miles away. Becoming absolutely still behind his tripod-mounted twenty-power naval binoculars, never blinking the eyes that had helped him to a 241/250 score on the rifle range, Corporal Niuatoa guided a flight of bombers to the camouflaged gun. Spotters usually correct friendly fire by saying “Add five zero, left one hundred,” which tells the gunners to fire the next shell fifty meters farther and one hundred meters left of the last shell. Because of the extreme range to the enemy gun on this day, Niuatoa corrected the first bombing run by saying, “Add two ridgelines, left a half mile.” The jets finally closed on the gun and reported it destroyed.
Captain Dabney always used sick or wounded men to carry badly hurt Marines to the helicopter landing zone; they could climb on the ship and fly out, while healthy Marines would have to run back through 120mm mortar fire to the bunkers.
A Marine with a severely impacted wisdom tooth carried a wounded comrade to the landing zone one day, and was climbing into the open tail ramp of a double-rotored Sea Knight when mortar rounds bracketed the helicopter. The pilot hit the Git button, and the ship lurched into the air. The dental patient hung desperately by his fingertips for a few seconds, then fell twenty feet to the ground. He limped painfully away.
Later in the day a smaller ship swooped in to pick up a new casualty. The Marine with the aching tooth scrambled aboard and the chopper lifted quickly—only to have its tail rotor sawed off by enemy machine gun fire. It crashed on the crest of the hill, the first of five helicopters to die on 881 South. The Marine limped once more to his bunker.
Just before dark the swollen-jawed Marine had one more chance, but now the passenger list had grown to fourteen, including the crew of the downed helicopter and ten wounded Marines. The loadmaster turned him away; the ship was overloaded.
Sometimes, the helicopters wouldn’t come at all.
One of India Company’s corporals took a 120mm shell fragment in the head at ten minutes after ten in the morning; the Marine considered it a decent time to be wounded because the fog lifted about noon. The fog didn’t lift. Thirty-mile-an-hour winds pushed “billowing soft mountains of white” out of the valleys to cloak the hilltop in clouds. The young medics on 881 South radioed the combat base’s surgeons for advice that night, then called again the next day—after they ran out of glucose and the corporal slipped into a coma.
“It’s now or never for this man,” India Company radioed at the end of the second fogbound day. “He can’t last the night.”
One helicopter searched for the hill in the fog, but turned back when it ran low on fuel. As the ship returned to base, India Company announced the corporal’s death: “Be advised that medical evacuation is now routine. Repeat: now routine.”
“We just couldn’t see you,” the chopper pilot radioed.
“We understand,” India closed. “Thank you for the try. Thank you very much.”
Helicopter losses were quite serious in the early days of the siege. One Marine officer at Khe Sanh counted seventeen destroyed helicopters, but another—a chopper pilot who was named “Marine Aviator of the Year” in 1968—remembered that before the end of February “we’d lost more than half our aircraft to enemy fire.” Lieutenant Colonel David L. Althoff, who was shot down four times, described aerial operations over Khe Sanh as “pure hell.”
In late February, the Marines’ air arm conceived Super Gaggle—a swirling mix of jets and choppers designed to disrupt enemy fire.
Four Skyhawk fighter bombers, small attack jets that were so maneuverable the pilots called them “Scooters,” opened a Super Gaggle by hitting enemy positions with napalm and bombs. More Skyhawks then streaked in to saturate North Vietnamese gun sites with tear gas. With thirty seconds to go, still more jets laid down a heavy smoke screen on the facing slopes of enemy-held hills. Twelve big Sea Knight cargo helos, each carrying a two-ton load in a rope sling, rotored in through the smoke and fog and fire, followed closely by gunships prepared to engage individual enemy guns or to pick up the crews of downed choppers.
India Comp
any welcomed the supply run by pitching smoke grenades down the hillside, but nothing could silence the 120mm mortars. The two-man helicopter support team that guided choppers in, unhooked cargos, collected heavy nets and reattached them to hovering helicopters, had to stand in the landing zone to do their work. India Company went through four teams in February.
Super Gaggle sharply reduced helicopter losses, and reopened the supply line to the hilltops. It was none too soon. Combat fatigue had become more common by late February. “We had trouble with psychological breakdowns,” Dabney said. “There’s an absolute limit to what someone can take.” Some painted their toes with peanut butter to get rat bites that would put them between clean sheets in Phu Bai. “Accidental” rifle discharges were frequent. Some Marines just huddled on the floor of their bunker, refusing to emerge even for scheduled R and R trips.
“If it wasn’t for the Gaggle,” said Dabney, “most of us probably wouldn’t be here.”
As the weather cleared, and the counterfire measures began to take effect, the helicopters began to operate with more panache. Gunners in hovering helos would suddenly sling their weapon, pitch out a case of soda pop, and return immediately to firing at enemy positions. Once, working behind the code name Cool It, the chopper crews scrounged large quantities of dry ice—and delivered hundreds of Dixie cups of ice cream to the hilltops. India Company was under such heavy enemy fire that it could not recover the surprise until after it had melted to goo.
While the Marines on the hilltops were discouraged, even despairing on some days, they never really lost a cocky sureness that they could do the job. “One thing for certain: we would never have surrendered,” said Dabney, quite firmly, as he discussed the differences he saw between the French at Dienbienphu and the Marines at Khe Sanh. “At the end, the colonel and the sergeant major would have gone down with their backs to the flagpole.” The Marines grew weary of the waiting and shelling, but they did not fear a face-to-face fight with the North Vietnamese. Most of them went about their duties with a kind of tough, macabre humor.