Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  “This was not their best effort,” Lownds declared, lifting the Red Alert. “It was just another probe.”

  • • •

  ON MARCH 6, a C-123 Provider took a hit in the left engine as it approached the airstrip. Straining on a single engine, the plane turned away and tried to return to Da Nang. Four miles east of the combat base, the over-stressed engine quit, and the aircraft—with four U.S. Air Force crew members, forty-three Marines, a Navy corpsman, and a civilian photographer named Robert Ellison, slammed into a hillside and burned.

  That same week, one of the Marines’ big choppers suddenly plummeted out of a Super Gaggle, carrying twenty-two men to their deaths.

  • • •

  STILL, IT SEEMED too quiet.

  Every night during the first week of March, one or more of the enemy trenches moved inexorably forward another hundred yards, yet there were fewer than a dozen trenches—nothing like the maze of diggings that had strangled Dienbienphu.

  All of the infantry attacks so far had been quite small, with the enemy committing only a few hundred men at a time.

  The North Vietnamese artillery had fallen far short of the pulverizing barrages that U.S. intelligence had expected, and the anti-aircraft fire was, frankly, “unsophisticated.”

  Where were the tens of thousands of North Vietnamese? Why had they not struck when the Marines were stunned by the titanic blast that destroyed the American ammunition stores, or when dense fog paralyzed U.S. air support?

  Some of the highest-ranking military officers in Vietnam believed that Khe Sanh had never been the enemy’s prime target, despite Westmoreland’s assertion that it was “a vital link in the northern defenses.”

  “Khe Sanh was a trap that the enemy could use whenever he wanted to force you into the expenditure of absolutely unreasonable amounts of men and material to defend a piece of terrain that wasn’t worth a damn,” said Major General Lowell R. English, deputy commander of the 3rd Marine Division, which defended Khe Sanh. “There was no reason why the enemy had to pass through there; the reason it became an outpost was because Westmoreland wanted it.”

  When Congressional investigators asked retired Marine General David M. Shoup—a Medal of Honor hero, a former commandant of the Corps, he’d even been born in Battle Ground, Indiana—why the Marines were at Khe Sanh, he said:

  “Somewhere along the line there is some strategy with respect to Khe Sanh that we don’t know, and this is one thing I don’t think we should know, else the enemy might find it out, too. I have to feel that there is some strategy in which it is expected that eventually we will gain a great deal by maintaining Khe Sanh. And I don’t think they are going to take Khe Sanh.

  “I continue to believe that there is, there must be, some good sound reason for being there.”

  But critics argued that Khe Sanh had been a feint, a gesture with the left hand to catch the eagle’s eye while the enemy’s right hand struck like a mailed fist at South Vietnam’s cities. General Westmoreland had dismissed the idea on the first morning after the Tet Offensive, but on February 5, Joseph C. Harsch, a commentator for ABC News, wondered aloud if the North Vietnamese had conducted “minor jabs at Khe Sanh . . . to keep our troops concentrated where they can have the least influence on the outcome of the [Tet] campaign.

  “Perhaps our generals prepared for the wrong battle,” he said.

  A few days later the U.S. Army’s respected chronicler, retired Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall, told Newsweek:

  “I am inclined to doubt that Khe Sanh is really going to come off. I am very suspicious of all this publicity. They simply don’t telegraph punches this way. Maybe Khe Sanh is just a feint to cover the Viet Cong attacks of last week.”

  In mid-February, General Westmoreland’s chief information officer, Brigadier General Winant K. Sidle, told senior news reporters in Saigon that it was “illogical” the North Vietnamese had not already attacked Khe Sanh. It was possible the enemy forces had not yet completed preparations for the attack, he said, or that they had been badly hurt by the bombing, but it was also possible that they had never planned to attack at all.

  General Westmoreland looked over the latest radio intercepts, aerial photographs, and intelligence summaries and came to the conclusion on March 6 that the enemy had turned his attention from the combat base.

  Within hours, the vast enemy force believed to be in the siege ring around Khe Sanh, still unseen, melted away. The Marines at the combat base wouldn’t learn about the enemy’s departure for nearly a week, but Westmoreland told President Johnson on March 9 that the enemy at Khe Sanh had dropped to “between 6,000 and 8,000 men.” On March 10 the general reported to Washington that the North Vietnamese had stopped repairing their trench systems.

  The siege, it appeared, might be over.

  • • •

  IT WAS ON March 10 that the New York Times printed on page one a detailed story about Westmoreland’s “urgent” request for 206,000 additional American soldiers. The news, coming at the moment the U.S. Command proclaimed victory in the Tet Offensive, jolted the American public almost as much as the enemy’s surprise attacks.

  Westmoreland was still fitting newly arrived reinforcements—the U.S. Marines’ Regimental Landing Team 27, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division from North Carolina, and the last units of the 101st Airborne Division—into key positions in I Corps. He now had fifty-two U.S. infantry battalions, more than half the American infantry units in Vietnam, prepared for battle in the northern provinces, and he had announced a triumph of sweeping proportions in the Tet battles.

  Why did he need more?

  The general explained on March 11, amid rising political clamor in the United States, that he expected “very, very heavy fighting” in the two northern provinces—nothing less than a full scale invasion across the DMZ, with both Khe Sanh and Hue as potential prizes. None of the powerful enemy divisions that had materialized in the DMZ in the weeks before Tet had yet entered the battle, he said.

  Westmoreland believed he had been presented with a tremendous opportunity to hasten an end to the war. He thought Vo Nguyen Giap had “lost the cream of his army” in the foolish Tet attacks. The Communist forces were on the brink of defeat; another 200,000 American troops might push them over the edge.

  A growing number of Americans in the military and political and diplomatic worlds of Washington, D.C., and in the cities and towns of the rest of the country, did not interpret the numbers of Tet with the same ebullient enthusiasm they induced in Westmoreland.

  To America, the enemy had never seemed stronger. On March 7 the U.S. Command announced that 542 Americans had died in battle the previous week—just one less than the record toll in the third week of February. The shocking television film of house-to-house fighting in Hue and Saigon, the haunted faces of the Marines at Khe Sanh, and the looming threat of a massive north Vietnamese offensive in I Corps cracked Westmoreland’s credibility.

  “We think the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven’t already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized on February 23. The war was costing the United States too much, the Journal said, and American firepower seemed to be destroying the country it was supposed to save.

  On February 27, Walter Cronkite told nine million CBS viewers:

  “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”

  During February and March, a majority of the American people began to rethink U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

  “Nobody in Saigon, to my knowledge, anticipated even remotely the psychological impact the offensive would have in the United States,” said Westmoreland. He blamed the news media for creating a national mood of gloom in the midst of victory.

  “They got so damn hysterical back in Washington over the Tet O
ffensive,” fumed Admiral Sharp, the commander of all Americans in the Pacific, “that they sort of went off the deep end and decided to get the war over with—even if we weren’t going to win it.”

  • • •

  MILITARY ASSESSMENTS OF the Tet Offensive were more sober than the public proclamations of triumph. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told President Johnson that only the surprising performance of ARVN had held the fragile government of South Vietnam together in the first confused days of the enemy offensive. “If they hadn’t performed well, we’d have had a catastrophe,” General Wheeler said.

  The earlier criticism of Westmoreland’s border fighting now sharpened.

  “The search-and-destroy strategy, combined with a fixation on the infiltration routes, dispersed American forces all over the . . . Vietnamese map,” wrote the British military analyst Sir Robert Thompson. “The doors were left wide open for the Tet Offensive.”

  An Australian military writer said Westmoreland could not guarantee the security of both the combat base and the cities of South Vietnam, “and the point was made to the whole world that even 525,000 American troops were not enough to deprive Giap of the strategic initiative.”

  General Westmoreland knew he could not guarantee freedom from terror for the South Vietnamese people, even with 206,000 more American troops. “To maintain an American, Allied or ARVN presence everywhere all the time,” he said, “would have required literally millions of men—and I still would have had to maintain a reserve to counter big unit threats.”

  The United States Army had known these numbers for years, but they had been lost in the institutional memory. In the early 1950s, General Matthew B. Ridgeway had studied the prerequisites for an American military campaign in Indochina—and found them “chilling”: up to a million men, enormous construction costs, and a national mobilization that he predicted might become “politically very messy.” Because the land was particularly suited to guerrilla operations, Ridgeway said, “every little detachment, every individual that tries to move about the country, will have to be protected by riflemen. Every telephone lineman, road repair party, every ambulance, and every rear area aid station will have to be under armed guard. . . .”

  Ridgeway’s worst fears had been realized, and now the war strained the United States’ strategic responsibilities.

  The little counterinsurgency in South Vietnam had grown into a major war that consumed U.S. military resources so rapidly that the Joint Chiefs no longer felt confident they could defend more critical American interests elsewhere in the world. The United States was spending more than $30 billion a year in Vietnam while its strategic foes, Russia and Red China, were spending hardly a billion. Americans had shed tears on more than twenty thousand coffins, but no Russian or Chinese mother mourned lost sons in Vietnam.

  If some unexpected flashpoint suddenly escalated into war with the Soviet Union, a high percentage of the United States’ best strategic bombing crews would already be busy—dropping five-hundred-pound bombs on Vietnamese jungles.

  Simple, straightforward military logic—uncomplicated by political concerns about nuclear warfare or world war—called for the smashing of the enemy’s capital city, the closing of his harbors, and the squeezing off of his supply lines—even if the supplies came in Russian or Polish or French ships.

  The fear of Chinese intervention in the war, and the possibility of triggering World War III, kept American bombers from leveling Hanoi and Haiphong.

  Denied permission to wage a war of annihilation, Westmoreland had chosen to fight a war of attrition, to try to kill enemy soldiers in South Vietnam faster than they could be replaced—“to kill the tree by plucking leaves faster than new ones could grow.”

  To kill in war means to risk being killed, and Westmoreland’s way of war had grown more costly—from a monthly average of 114 dead Americans in 1965, to 417 dead Americans a month in 1966, to 782 dead Americans each month of 1967. Now, in the first months of 1968, the death tolls were surpassing 500 a week.

  • • •

  SOME UNMARKED THRESHOLD of pain was crossed in March of 1968. One in five Americans switched from support of U.S. involvement to opposition.

  The news on March 10 that Westmoreland had asked for 206,000 more Americans for Vietnam duty startled the nation into a reassessment of the war. Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler, deeply worried about a world monetary crisis, warned of severe jolts to the U.S. economy if the request was granted. A group of governors, fearing renewed rioting in the nation’s big cities, pleaded with the President not to call the National Guard for duty in Vietnam; the Guard was needed at home.

  On March 12, Senator Eugene McCarthy, who opposed the war, confirmed the collapse of Johnson’s political consensus when he came within 330 votes of the President in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

  On March 16, Senator Robert Kennedy announced he would oppose the President in the remaining Democratic primaries.

  On March 18, 139 members of the U.S. House of Representatives called for a thorough Congressional review of American policy in southeast Asia.

  It was almost over.

  The President searched for some way to demonstrate his desire for peace. He had in his hands a detailed memorandum from U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg that recommended a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. President Johnson knew that pilots, Defense Department analysts, and America’s friends abroad were sharply critical of the bombing, but he could not bring himself to issue the order—because of Khe Sanh.

  “What would happen,” he wondered, “if we stopped the bombing and the North Vietnamese then launched a major offensive, overran Khe Sanh, and killed thousands of Americans and South Vietnamese?

  “The American people would never forgive me.”

  Dissent among his most trusted counselors, the polling evidence of a sea change in American attitudes, rising opposition inside the Congress and his own Democratic Party, and sleepless nights over the fate of the combat base had wrought a profound change in President Johnson. He decided to lay his burden down.

  The President began to set the country on a new course by announcing on March 23 that General Westmoreland would be coming home.

  The general was not quite ready. His plans for a capstone battle—a clean, crushing victory to highlight his Vietnam years—had not come off exactly as hoped. The Khe Sanh combat base was still being pounded by enemy shells: the North Vietnamese celebrated Westmoreland’s transfer with 1,109 rounds on the base—the heaviest one-day shelling of the month.

  General Westmoreland flew to Washington, D.C., a few days later to personally brief the Commander in Chief on the plan to relieve the siege.

  He believed it was important to end the siege with a symbolic demonstration of American military might. Khe Sanh, after all, had become a symbol of American determination in Vietnam; it would be distinctly anti-climactic if the biggest battle of the war ended without taking place.

  Now that he had the equivalent of a field army assembled in I Corps, and now that the logistics problems were solved, and especially now that the weather had begun to clear, General West-moreland could once again wage war the American way, and he was thinking big.

  More than 30,000 men would be involved in the relief operation, Westmoreland told the President, with the flying horses of the U.S. Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division leading the way. The Air Cav would custom-make its own landing zones with ten-thousand-pound parachute bombs to eliminate the risk of landing in ambushed jungle clearings. Operation Pegasus, two months in the planning, would be the perfect conclusion to the Marines’ stand against the North Vietnamese—and it had been meticulously prepared.

  Two U.S. Marine battalions had already secured the road from the Rockpile to Ca Lu, clearing the way for continuous truck convoys of supplies, fuel, ammunition and construction material. Three battalions of engineers—one each from the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps—were leveling ground for a new airfield, building parking ramps and logistical fa
cilities, and digging artillery pits, trenchlines, and bunker complexes for a powerful forward base at Ca Lu.

  From there, it was only twelve miles to Khe Sanh.

  Nothing was being left to chance, the general assured President Johnson. Heavy bombing would soften up the enemy positions, then the Air Cav would leap forward like knights on a chessboard—surprising enemy defenders with vertical envelopment tactics. A Marine infantry regiment would thrust west on Route 9 to shepherd the engineers as they rebuilt the road to Khe Sanh. The 3rd ARVN Airborne Task Force would follow the U.S. juggernaut.

  Using maps of the northern provinces to illustrate the plan, Westmoreland showed the President how Pegasus even included a regimental-sized diversion in eastern Quang Tri province.

  These were unusually elaborate preparations, considering that Westmoreland had believed as early as March 6 that the North Vietnamese no longer prized Khe Sanh. By March 15, Westmoreland judged that the enemy had “given up, his attempted repeat of Dienbienphu an abject failure.” But the general believed it was important to conclude this unfinished chapter of the war with a great show of force—for morale and for good public relations.

  President Johnson was usually very attentive in his military briefings, prodding the generals with questions, nodding reluctantly at explanations, and asking to be shown aerial photographs or maps. But as Westmoreland spoke, on March 26, part of the President’s mind was shaping the words that would end a lifetime in politics: he had decided not to seek reelection.

  The President had been stunned on March 25 and 26 when his most trusted counselors—a group of distinguished former ambassadors and cabinet officers and retired generals whom Johnson called the Wise Old Men—recommended by a two to one margin that he move the country toward disengagement from Vietnam. The same group—sober, steady men who had been tested in earlier crises—had unanimously endorsed the President’s escalation policies as recently as November.