Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  The attack kicked off at 5:40 A.M., and scout dogs gave first warning a half hour later. Brisk firefights broke out on the facing slope as enemy outposts gave warning, but the Third Battalion was not to be denied.

  “Moving behind a wall of steel,” the Marine history recorded, “the battalion clawed its way through the defenses . . . stormed the hill, swarmed over the crest, and killed anyone who stood in the way.”

  Some of the Marines were seized by a bayoneting frenzy that not even their officers could restrain.

  A group of North Vietnamese, shell-shocked by the heavy bombardment, ran insanely from bunker positions to open ground. The assault companies were ordered to halt while air and artillery finished off the cluster of terrified soldiers, but a handful of Marines plunged in with bayonets. Their company commander apologized on the battalion radio net: “Sir, I can’t stop them. . . .”

  The Marines mopped up small pockets of resistance into the early afternoon, killing and counting 106 North Vietnamese, and declared at 2:28 P.M. that Hill 881 North was in friendly hands.

  As the new regimental commander and Dabney watched from 881 South, a Marine shinnied up a tree whose limbs had been sheared away by shellfire, gripped the trunk with his knees, and tied a United States flag to the topmost splinters.

  When he had climbed down, the Marines turned and struggled back down the steep slopes of 881 North. Casualties had been “surprisingly light” this time: six dead and thirty-two wounded.

  Marines from the assault companies were staggering with fatigue when they arrived atop Hill 881 South just as night came. The battalion commander was there, and his executive officer, to slap each man on the back and congratulate him for a job well done.

  “They were near exhaustion, filthy, bearded, ragged,” recalled the commander, Lieutenant Colonel John C. Studt. “Some wore bloody battle dressings.

  “But they were loaded with captured NVA weapons, and they were all grinning.”

  • • •

  A C-130 PROVIDER landed on the combat base airstrip this Easter Sunday, blowing a tire in an old shellhole and slamming into a forklift. Only one man was killed: Felix Poilane, who had thumbed a ride on the first available flight to Khe Sanh to see what he could save of his plantation.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, at 8 A.M. on April 15, the U.S. Command announced that Operation Pegasus had been concluded and that all objectives had been achieved: Route 9 reopened, the enemy routed, the siege relieved.

  Pegasus, like the defense of Khe Sanh, American officers told news reporters in Saigon, could be counted as one more outstanding success of American arms in Vietnam.

  It was almost over.

  12.

  THE CURTAIN FALLS

  The Marines had hoped to close the combat base as soon as the revenge raids were completed, but on April 15 Westmoreland vetoed the plan. The base had become too much of a symbol to abandon abruptly; at least a thousand Marines would have to stay to show the flag.

  The 26th Marine Regiment, however, was free to go, and on April 18 it was airlifted from the combat base. The regiment had been there when the fight began on January 20, and it had been there when the siege was declared over on April 8, and it had been in at the finish, with flamethrowers and bayonets on 881 North. General Tompkins had the 3rd Marine Division’s brass band on the tarmac when the regiment arrived at Quang Tri City; the first thing the dirty Marines heard as they marched down the ramps was “a stirring rendition of the Marines’ Hymn.” Every man, by order of the commanding general, got a hot shower, a clean uniform, and a big steak dinner before nightfall.

  The Army had already left Khe Sanh.

  As soon as the cameras recorded the ritual handshake that confirmed the “relief” of the Marines, General Tolson turned the 1st Air Cavalry Division toward the A Shau Valley, where he was sure he could find action. The 101st Airborne Division went, too, and the 3rd ARVN Airborne Task Force. Pegasus only brushed Khe Sanh with its wings.

  The combat base had become a liability, and an embarrassment, even before the middle of April.

  It could be shelled by unshellable enemy guns, it was plagued by foul weather, and it had failed spectacularly to block enemy movement into South Vietnam.

  “We are no longer stopping any invasion,” one Marine officer said in the last days of the siege. “In fact, from the tops of the bunkers we can see Communist trucks moving along Route 9. . . .

  “It looks like a little Los Angeles freeway.”

  General Tompkins was especially upset by North Vietnamese disdain for American fighter bombers.

  “Right to the end, they drove lighted trucks, with headlights, and the vaunted A-6 [Intruders] could no more catch them than I can fly,” Tompkins said. “As far as interdicting the North Vietnamese lines of communications, U.S. airpower was almost completely zero.”

  The new airfield and fortified base at Ca Lu offered an attractive alternative to Khe Sanh: it was out of range of the guns in Laos, closer to friendly lines, and no where near as fog-cursed.

  But it would not be easy to abandon Khe Sanh.

  The combat base had been portrayed for months as a critical strongpoint—as “the crucial anchor of our defenses along the demilitarized zone.” Maps prepared in Washington showed how the base blocked five avenues of infiltration. Without Khe Sanh, American military authorities had warned, the end of the line would be turned and enemy divisions would “pour down Route 9” to attack Quang Tri and Hue.

  The focus of General Westmoreland, official Washington, and the news media on the battle at Khe Sanh had made it “the most famous military engagement of the Vietnam War, even though it has not yet taken place.”

  America had come to care for the young Marines who uncomplainingly carried out a difficult task—“the little band of defenders,” as President Johnson had pictured them, “holding the pass at Khe Sanh.”

  General Westmoreland was attentive to the vibrations in the political threads from Washington, and he knew he could not simply shut down the base and walk away.

  The problems were political—not military.

  At the very core of the U.S. decision to stand and fight at Khe Sanh had been “an unwillingness to grant the enemy a psychological victory by giving ground.” It was even more difficult to step back now that the enemy threat had loomed so large at Khe Sanh—and now that the hills had been blooded again.

  Generals Rosson and Cushman, the highest-ranking Army and Marine officers in I Corps, had urged abandonment, and West-moreland’s chief of operations, General John Chaisson, agreed: “From the military standpoint, there’s no doubt it’s the desirable posture.”

  But General Westmoreland was extremely sensitive to public opinion in the United States, and he worried that abandonment might be misunderstood by many Americans.

  Moving to Ca Lu would mean dismantling the combat base, tearing up the airstrip and then breaking up the road, completely undoing the work of Pegasus.

  “When this is to be done, how this is to be done, and how this is to be handled, from, shall I say, the public relations standpoint, is what makes this a rather sticky problem,” Chaisson told admirals and generals in Honolulu in May.

  “One thing we feel quite strongly that we can’t buy,” Chaisson said, “is the enemy one morning sitting on top of Khe Sanh. . . .

  “We just can’t afford that type of play on his part.”

  It was especially important that the discussions about abandoning Khe Sanh not become public before May 23, when President Johnson was scheduled to honor the 26th Marines for their defense of the combat base and the hills. In formal ceremonies in the Cabinet Room of the White House, the Commander in Chief personally put into Colonel Lownds’ hands a Presidential Unit Citation—a proud new banner to hang with the regiment’s flag and battle standard, and then he solemnly shook the hand of Sergeant Major Agrippa W. Smith, representing the enlisted men who had served at Khe Sanh. Once again the story of the siege was told, and the valor
of Marines recounted. For President Johnson, especially, it seemed a fitting conclusion to a battle upon which “the eyes of history itself” had looked.

  It was almost over.

  The few Marine units still at Khe Sanh were busily firing shells into the hills to use up the last stocks of ammunition when General Westmoreland made his final swing through I Corps a few weeks later.

  He reviewed the final plans for shutting down the combat base, and agreed with Generals Rosson and Cushman that it should be razed promptly. But, he added, they must wait until after June 11 and let the new commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General Creighton W. Abrams, choose “the optimum time” for closing the base.

  On the morning of June 17, just six days after Westmoreland left Vietnam, the Marines began slashing sandbags, blowing up bunkers with plastic explosive, filling in trenchlines with bulldozers, and peeling up the pierced steel plates of the airstrip. All supplies, equipment, ammunition, vehicles, building beams, and airfield matting were to be trucked out, the order read, “[and] everything else buried by bulldozer, burned, or blown up.”

  It was imperative that no identifiable landmark remain that could become the centerpiece for a North Vietnamese propaganda film.

  When the combat base had been reduced to an unrecognizable red blur on the cratered landscape of the plateau, the Marines backed down Route 9—blowing up the new bridges, destroying the new bypasses, and triggering landslides under the new roadway until the highway was once again a shattered ruin from Khe Sanh to Ca Lu.

  The pullout proceeded in complete secrecy to avoid a public relations disaster in the United States. The North Vietnamese still observed Khe Sanh from the face of Co Roc, and could see quite clearly that the Americans were destroying their fortifications and disappearing down Route 9. Americans did not know about the pullout because news reporters were forbidden to write about it by the U.S. Command.

  John S. Carroll of the Baltimore Sun went considerably out of his way during a late-June tour of I Corps to see the famous Marine base one more time. He was astonished to discover that the bunkers had been blown up and the airfield destroyed—and the Marines were already packed up to move to Ca Lu. Carroll raced back to Saigon to write what he believed to be one of the more important stories of the war: Khe Sanh was being abandoned.

  Carroll’s story set off precisely the kind of public questioning and criticism that General Westmoreland and his staff had feared.

  In Washington, President Johnson was not available for comment. Mr. Johnson had not been involved in any way, Press Secretary George Christian told reporters; the decision to abandon Khe Sanh had been solely a military decision.

  General Westmoreland explained carefully that the decision to abandon Khe Sanh had not been made by him, but by General Abrams.

  In Saigon, General Abrams explained that he had acted on the recommendation of Generals Rosson and Cushman.

  In Paris, the spokesman for North Vietnamese affairs, Nguyen Thanh Le, told a news conference:

  “The United States military commanders once decided to defend the base at all costs. They are now forced to retreat from the base. The high command pretends the retreat was ordered because the base is unessential now.”

  Smarting from the criticism, the U.S. Command in Saigon acted swiftly. Brigadier General Winant Sidle, chief of information for MACV, called John Carroll before him, reprimanded him for endangering the lives of American troops by reporting on military movements in progress—and suspended his MACV identification card.

  A formal communiqué was issued: the huge increase in American troop strength in the northern two provinces and the extraordinary helicopter assets of the 1st Air Cavalry Division had given the U.S. command much greater flexibility in dealing with enemy threats. With vastly enhanced mobility, and with enemy forces poised for assault at new and different targets, it no longer made sense to have powerful U.S. forces “tied to specific terrain”—like the Khe Sanh Combat Base.

  “Therefore, we have decided to continue the mobile posture we adopted with Operation Pegasus in April. The decision makes the operation of the base at Khe Sanh unnecessary.”

  It was over.

  BODY COUNTS

  During testimony before a special committee of the United States Congress in November of 1970, Colonel David Lownds and General Rathvon Tompkins disagreed for a moment on the exact number of Marines killed at Khe Sanh.

  One hundred ninety-nine, said Lownds.

  Two hundred five, countered the general.

  Yes, the colonel remembered quickly, it was 205. But it was important for the congressmen to understand, he continued, that the number represented all Marines killed on the Khe Sanh plateau from November 1, 1967 to April 1, 1968—the duration of a larger military operation named Scotland—and not just those lost at the combat base during the siege.

  Two hundred five dead in such a lengthy battle is a reasonable, acceptable, justifiable number as the military measures losses in combat, and it has come to be accepted as the true accounting of the cost for victory at Khe Sanh.

  Two hundred five dead represents only three percent of the Marine force at Khe Sanh, and when compared to the estimated losses of the North Vietnamese, no other battle of the war produced a more satisfying body count/kill ratio for American forces than the siege of Khe Sanh.

  Yet 205 is a completely false number.

  John Wheeler, a veteran Associated Press correspondent who spent more time at Khe Sanh than any other reporter, discovered the lie in late February. Wheeler saw more men being killed or wounded than were being reported by the Marines. One day he walked over to Charlie Med to look at the records and talk with the surgeons. When his personal count exceeded the “official” number by 100, Wheeler closed the books and walked away. He never believed the numbers again.

  The Reverend Ray W. Stubbe, a Lutheran chaplain, estimated that 475 Marines were zipped into green plastic body bags during January, February and March at Khe Sanh.

  The chaplain was a kind of Pepys for the combat base, writing down every report and rumor in his diary, and wandering from the somber intelligence briefings in Colonel Lownds’ command bunker to the soup counter at “Howard Johnson’s” in the village, from the drawing room of the Poilane plantation to the morgue room of Charlie Med. In the endpapers to his unpublished book, the chaplain lists the name, rank, serial number, and date of death of 441 Americans for whom he offered prayers during the siege.

  The official number of 205 does not include the Marines who died in the Easter Sunday attack on Hill 881 North; these deaths were counted in Pegasus’ totals.

  Nor does the official number include the lost comrades of the “bloody, filthy, vacant in the eyes” survivors of the horror at Lang Vei, where ten Green Berets were killed or missing in action.

  Three hundred sixteen CIDG soldiers—South Vietnamese and Bru montagnards and Hré Montagnards—had also been lost in the flames of Lang Vei, but they were not included in the official list of dead.

  And how dearly did the 33rd Laotian Elephant Battalion pay for its brief appearance on the stage at Khe Sanh? Overrun by tanks, panicked into flight to Vietnam, caught in the battle for Lang Vei, disarmed at the gates of the combat base, and trapped on the most heavily bombed battlefield of the war, the Laotian battalion surely lost hundreds from its long columns of disheartened soldiers, and women, and children.

  Robert Ellison isn’t one of the official 205. The twenty-three-year-old photographer had just scored a professional triumph: Newsweek magazine had purchased a whole portfolio of his color shots of Khe Sanh. His picture of an explosion in the combat base ammunition dump would be on the cover. Ellison was on his way back to Khe Sanh on March 6, lugging a case of beer and a case of soda pop for new-found friends at the combat base, when enemy fire ripped through his plane and it crashed—killing everyone aboard.

  Ellison had hitchhiked his ride—civilian journalists could almost always find a loadmaster who would let them aboard at the last minute
—and so his name did not appear on the passenger manifest; thus he has never been counted among the official casualties of Khe Sanh.

  But then none of the forty-nine Marines, Air Force crew, and Navy corpsmen killed in the March 6 crash are counted in the official statistics of the Siege of Khe Sanh, either; their plane struggled on one engine long enough to crash outside the formal map boundaries of Operation Scotland, and the bodies were not recovered until much later, after the books had been closed.

  The official number of dead does not include any soldiers from the 37th ARVN Ranger Battalion, which absorbed the only enemy attacks on the combat base perimeter, and which was pounded by the same shells and rockets that hurt the Marines. Deeply distressed by the deaths of many of their wives and children in the Tet fighting, the ARVN Rangers had nevertheless won the respect of Marine officers with their aggressive tactics and commitment to the fight. Their sacrifices at Khe Sanh appear nowhere in the official record of the siege.

  Two hundred five dead does not include casualties from the Special Forces’ compound on the southwest perimeter of the combat base. Nearly 500 South Vietnamese and Montagnard irregulars under Green Beret control guarded the main gate from this position, and also conducted short patrols to seek intelligence from the Bru; their dead and wounded are not part of the official number.

  And what ever happened to First Lieutenant Le Van Quoc, left standing at the gate after his long night of personal heroism?

  Of all the Allies on the Khe Sanh Plateau—“the friendlies,” as they came to be known in the special language of the Vietnam war—the Bru people suffered the heaviest losses. During the emergency evacuation of civilians at the start of the siege, the South Vietnamese province chief in Quang Tri City had specifically excluded the Bru people.

  Three thousand Bru tried to walk out on Route 9 in late January, when the road was considered impassable, but only 1,643 made it to Cam Lo, including a sixty-year-old man who had carried his crippled wife the whole way. In March, the Marines airlifted 1,432 Bru to safety.