by Max Hastings
3 LAM SON 719
It is a curiosity that, while North Vietnam was a cruelly disciplined totalitarian society, it was governed by civilians. Meanwhile South Vietnam, which purported to be a democracy, was ruled by generals who displayed little talent for either politics or military affairs. Lewis Sorley in his biography of Creighton Abrams makes the remarkable assertion that Nguyen Van Thieu ‘was arguably a more honest and decent man than Lyndon Johnson, and – given the differences in their respective circumstances – quite likely a more effective president of his country’. He likewise compares 1965–75 ARVN chief of staff Gen. Cao Van Vien favourably with Earle Wheeler, arguing that the former was ‘probably less irrelevant’. Yet Thieu displayed greater skill in sustaining the trust and goodwill of Americans, chiefly by compliance with their wishes, than of his own people. Vien was a reasonably competent officer, hamstrung by his president’s insistence on appointing commanders chosen for loyalty to himself, rather than for their fitness to direct troops.
Vietnamisation thrust a huge burden on both men and their closed circle of subordinates, because suddenly they were invited to govern their own country and to run their own war, instead of acquiescing while Americans did so. Yet contradictorily, the very continued existence of Thieu’s regime was being disputed in Paris between the North Vietnamese and an American – Henry Kissinger – without any Saigon representative commanding a serious hearing: the communists were scarcely unjust in branding Thieu and his associates as ‘US puppets’. Meanwhile, however harsh a view may be taken of the Hanoi politburo, nobody beyond the White House and the US conservative media any longer characterised Le Duan and his comrades as mere stooges of the Soviets or the Chinese.
Characteristically, the decision to launch the ARVN on a big battlefield test of Vietnamisation was taken not in Saigon, but in Washington. Despite meagre dividends from the 1970 Cambodian incursion, an imperative persisted to maintain military pressure on the North Vietnamese if there was to be any hope of extracting concessions from them in Paris. Kissinger told Arthur Schlesinger: ‘I have been thinking a lot about resignation,’ but then added that he was engaged in something he could not talk about, but must see through to the end. Schlesinger rightly assumed this meant secret negotiations. On Nixon personally, Kissinger said ‘he is a shy man, who needs compassion’. He added that as the 1972 election began to loom while protests about Vietnam raged, ‘[Nixon] has enough support to win, but not enough to govern.’
New congressional action – the December 1970 Cooper-Church amendment – prohibited the administration from committing US ground troops beyond the border of South Vietnam. Yet the huge problem persisted of stemming the flow of men and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1970 the North Vietnamese received accelerated deliveries of Russian and Chinese materiel, estimated at two and a half million tons, including five hundred trucks a month. MACV reported: ‘The logistics war of southern Laos and north-eastern Cambodia now stands as the critical conflict for the VC/NVA.’ Early in 1971, Seventh Air Force commander Gen. Lucius Clay described his instructions from Creighton Abrams: ‘He wants that Ho Chi Minh Trail in such a shape that a crow has to carry his rations to fly over it.’ Clay’s staff identified four ‘choke points’ – the Mu Gia, Ban Karai and Ban Raving passes, together with another location just west of the DMZ. New movement sensors were installed, monitored by surveillance drones. Each ‘choke point’ was designated to receive daily for sixty days at least twenty-seven B-52 and 125 tacair sorties. Bombing and rains indeed rendered stretches of the Trail impassable by vehicles for weeks, yet somehow the NVA in the South continued to receive just sufficient supplies and munitions to keep fighting.
Meanwhile congressional willingness to fund Vietnamisation was wearing thin, and USAF sorties were ever more restricted – the fourteen thousand a month now authorised represented less than half the 1969 quota. Late in 1970, Nixon and Melvin Laird faced the prospect of financing the war through the following year with only $11 billion, as compared to $30 billion in 1969. Against this background, it was decided to risk a battlefield plunge: to commit a large South Vietnamese force, supported by American air- and firepower, against the NVA in Laos. In December 1970 Kissinger’s military assistant, the increasingly influential Brig. Alexander Haig, was dispatched to Saigon to explain this proposal to Abrams. Controversy persists about who originated the operation that was somewhat clumsily code-named Lam Son 719: Lewis Sorley, Abrams’ standard-bearer, says it was Haig; Haig later asserted that it came from Nixon and Kissinger.
Abrams’ boss, C-in-C Pacific Adm. John McCain, whose own commitment to the war was intensified by his navy flier son’s captivity in Hanoi, had favoured the Cambodian incursion, and now rooted for a drive into Laos, though he told Abrams, ‘I recognize that the operation may present many problems.’ The general went off to inform Thieu, who agreed to commit the ARVN to a thrust of which the final objective was the Laotian town of Tchepone. On 10 December Adm. Thomas Moorer, Earle Wheeler’s successor as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, forwarded to Abrams a presidential order for the operation. Moorer said that it would bolster Vietnamisation: ‘The enemy’s lack of mobility should enable us to isolate the battlefield and ensure a South Vietnamese victory.’ The Americans believed that if the ARVN could wreak havoc upon the NVA’s supply routes, they could buy a year’s breathing space for themselves. Abrams was uneasy about Vietnamese capabilities to execute the operation, and warned that in Laos ‘the enemy can be expected to defend his base area and logistics centers’, as it had not done in Cambodia. He did not, however, seek to impose a veto, and indeed accepted overall responsibility. Abrams must thus bear considerable blame for what took place.
At a meeting of regional ambassadors in Saigon on the 17th, CIA station chief Ted Shackley reported that the communists expected the allies to launch another thrust into their sanctuaries. The NVA deployed strong forces in southern Laos; in the dense jungle, there were few plausible helicopter LZs. On 26 January 1971 the Agency also received a decrypted enemy signal that anticipated an assault, and that concluded: ‘Prepare to mobilize and strike the enemy hard. Be vigilant.’ A post-war Hanoi study frankly acknowledged the weakness of the communists’ position in South Vietnam at that time: ‘Our offensive capability had been depleted,’ guerrilla operations had tailed off. In Laos, by contrast – on their own doorstep – they felt far more confident: ‘We held the strategic initiative and were stronger than the enemy.’ Hanoi, almost certainly tipped off by an ARVN informant, forecast that Saigon would attempt an operation involving fifteen to twenty battalions. The politburo decreed: ‘This will be a battle of decisive strategic importance.’ Dragon Court identified the Ban Dong–Tchepone area as a battlefield favourable to its own troops – close to North Vietnam, its jungle offering good overhead cover from aircraft. Communist planners declared an objective of killing twelve thousand Southern troops and destroying three hundred aircraft and helicopters.
In Saigon, as the ordained February 1971 assault date drew nearer, Abrams became ever more uneasy, fretting about the ARVN: ‘We’re pushing them too hard … going too far too fast.’ On 29 January he warned Moorer that the communists would be waiting, yet still did not demand cancellation. The most grievous error, in which the entire US leadership was complicit, was failure to recognise that the risk of Lam Son 719 outweighed any possible gain. If the communists defeated an assault of this magnitude, as many American officers thought likely, the whole façade of Vietnamisation must totter. This, at a time when the political climate was deteriorating: in January Nixon had signed the Foreign Sales Act to which was attached repeal of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, though the White House denied that this imposed any new limitations upon its authority to keep fighting inside Vietnam.
Within reach of Saigon’s intended thrusts, the NVA could call upon some sixty thousand men, with eight sapper battalions, plentiful artillery, even some tanks. The South Vietnamese were to air-assault and drive armour towards nine immediate objectives, b
etween twenty and forty miles west of Khe Sanh. I Corps’ commander, Hoang Xuan Lam, whose unfitness was plain, held overall command. Lt. Gen. ‘Jock’ Sutherland, who headed XXIV Corps, controlled American troops supporting the operation, together with fifty-three Chinooks, five hundred Hueys, eighteen 155mm howitzers, sixteen 175mm guns, eight 8-inch howitzers. A hundred yards short of the Laotian border stood a sign: ‘WARNING, NO US PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT’. Major Tran Ngoc Hue, who had commanded the ‘Black Panthers’ in the 1968 Hue fighting, had a bad feeling about this immensely ambitious operation: before he led the 2/2nd Infantry into action he spoke earnestly to Dave Wiseman, the battalion’s adviser who was staying behind, demanding: would the American adopt his children?
Lam Son 719 got underway on 8 February 1971. An armoured column of sixty-two tanks and 162 M-113s made the main drive west along Route 9, while Airborne troops and Rangers protected its northern flank, 1st Infantry the southern. Hueys crewed by both Americans and Vietnamese bore ARVN into air assaults. So sure were the communists that the Southerners would be coming that they had prepared tracks around the prospective battlefield, pre-positioned munitions, fortified some hills and bridges. They conducted careful terrain reconnaissance, and some units had exercised on the ground. Nonetheless, the South Vietnamese achieved temporary tactical surprise: the communists, stunned by the size of the incoming helicopter armada, responded slowly. Few NVA officers had experience of big all-arms battles; a shortage of radios caused command-and-control failures.
Through the first few days, nothing terrible happened to the attackers; in vile weather, Saigon’s tanks linked with an Airborne battalion at Ban Dong (A Luoi on American maps), twelve miles into Laos. Infantry established firebases and dug in. Hanoi later admitted that some of its commanders were wrongfooted: ‘We did not have a firm grasp of all [the enemy’s] activities … Many units deployed for battle prematurely.’ On the 13th, Gen. Vien told Abrams that President Thieu had decreed that his forces should advance no further westwards. Rumour, never confirmed, held that Thieu also secretly ordered that the operation should be aborted if or when South Vietnamese casualties exceeded three thousand.
In Laos, the battlefield balance tilted slowly but inexorably against the Southerners as the communists concentrated ever more powerful forces around the invaders’ sixteen battalions. Abrams in vain urged the Vietnamese to keep moving, warning that if they merely sat tight, the enemy could hit them piecemeal, and at leisure. On the night of 18 February, two NVA battalions struck the 39th Rangers, who were soon in retreat. ARVN firebases were relentlessly hammered by shellfire – one was abandoned after all its guns were knocked out. Three hundred miles southwards, on 23 February the respected Gen. Do Cao Tri perished in a helicopter crash. His death impacted on Lam Son 719, because it had been rumoured that he would be sent to replace Gen. Lam, whose incompetence had become painful to behold.
A week later, a badly rattled Sutherland told MACV by secure phone: ‘The enemy is all over that goddamn area and seems to be getting stronger … There’s a real fight going on up there.’ Abrams raged at his subordinate, whom he accused of failing to grip a deteriorating situation. For the first time in the war, tanks were fighting tanks. Air support was achieving limited impact, for lack of American FACs on the ground – few Southern officers had the language skills to communicate effectively with US fliers; flak was worsening by the day, causing alarming attrition; least expectedly and most embarrassingly, US helicopter serviceability declined steeply – only a quarter of all Huey gunships were flying. Lt. Gen. Fred Weyand fumed: ‘You’ve got a corps commander up there who’s supposed to be keeping track of every fucking bird. There’s something wrong there … He just doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.’ Abrams, too, raged at Sutherland: ‘The entire national strategic concept is at stake here!’
The White House grew increasingly alarmed. Kissinger said late in February: ‘I do not understand what Abrams is doing.’ Lt. Gen. Bruce Palmer, army vice-chief of staff, wrote sourly: ‘Kissinger willingly assumed a field-marshal role when things went well, but not understanding the nature of war and its treacherous uncertainties, became irritable and upset when Lam Son 719 stalled.’ Meanwhile MACV’s chief refused to despair: ‘We’re in a real tough fight. We’re just going to have to stick with it and win … We’ve been inundated by the prophets of doom before.’ Abrams’ optimism persisted on 9 March; he was ‘more and more convinced that what you’ve got here is maybe the only decisive battle of the war’, which could be won by superior firepower. A major difficulty for US commanders was that they could not see what was happening on the ground, nor send people whose word they trusted to see for them.
Creighton Abrams made a personal approach to Thieu, the only man with authority to shift army formations, urging him to commit 2nd Division, to turn the battle. The president responded: only if a US formation was deployed as well. While fighting raged on, Thieu’s generals urged him to quit Laos. Contrarily, Alexander Haig arrived on 18 March and told Sutherland that the White House wanted the ARVN to sustain the battle through April. In Washington, spirits rose following reports that air power was hurting the communists. Every eight minutes a C-130 landed at Khe Sanh bearing ammunition and supplies, while three flareships and three gunships remained on station over the battlefield throughout the hours of darkness. In the course of the battle American tactical aircraft flew eight thousand sorties, nearly 150 a day, while B-52s made a further 1,280. The NVA’s Col. An wrote of the area around his command post beside the Sa Mu River: ‘The reeds and tall grass on the hills were completely burned away by napalm. Our forest became a little isolated island amid a blackened ocean of desolation.’
Yet the Southerners had already suffered 5,500 casualties. Brig. Haig abruptly changed his mind, and said that it seemed time to wind up the operation. On 18 March the NVA struck hard to cut off some exposed South Vietnamese units. One of An’s men, a squad leader from Hanoi, wrote: ‘The moon was bright that night. We set out for the road just after dark. The enemy walked artillery barrages from the road up the hill to our fortified position, then down again, over and over again. We had two men wounded, leaving only seven fit to fight. Every man dug a firing position as fast as he could, some using bomb craters or old foxholes dug by the enemy. Then I lay down, pulled my hammock up over my stomach, and slept like a log. I woke just before dawn. Rain had soaked through my clothes. It was so cold that I could not keep my teeth from chattering. The colder I felt, the hungrier I became … The strength from the rice ball, a little bigger than a fist, that we had eaten the previous afternoon had been used up by our dash through the barrage.’ Then one of his men came from a hasty forage bearing a helmet filled with rice that he had found in an abandoned enemy bunker: ‘I was as happy as if we had won a battle!’
So indeed he had: the communists were isolating successive Southern positions, then battering them into ruin, employing 122mm guns with a range of almost fourteen miles, 130mms that reached seventeen miles; they seemed indifferent to their own casualties. The Northerners were playing energetic radio games, both to jam their enemies’ communications and to broadcast propaganda: men of the two armies exchanged abuse in their common tongue; South Vietnamese Marines were disconcerted to hear battle orders being issued by a female voice. An NVA soldier described how he made his squad search the battlefield for discarded M-79 ‘Thumpers’, then held a hasty practice session with them: ‘We got quite accurate.’ Within the hour they were lobbing 40mm shells in earnest at an ARVN convoy. The battlefield finally fell silent after the South Vietnamese retreated. The communists advanced cautiously down the road, counting enemy bodies, amid abandoned trucks whose engines were still running.
Southern officer Tran Ngoc Hue was promoted to colonel even as his battalion endured a Northern bombardment of its positions on Hill 660. Himself wounded by mortar fragments, when the survivors belatedly withdrew he told them to leave him behind – just one captain and sixty enlisted men escaped. After falling into c
ommunist hands Hue stumbled up the Ho Chi Minh Trail missing several fingers, with insects and worms feeding on his body wounds. He was twenty-nine when he reached Hanoi, and spent the ensuing thirteen years in captivity, like many others who participated in Lam Son. Thieu made a personal decision, for prestige reasons, to insist that his troops reached their designated objective of Tchepone, towards which they launched a new air assault on 3 March. After a savage struggle South Vietnamese spearheads reached the town, only to be swiftly forced back.
And while South Vietnam’s soldiers fought for their lives, its generals displayed a familiar petulance and ineptitude. Lam, the corps commander, seemed paralysed, and the top Airborne officer declined to discuss the operation with him; the country’s most senior Marine refused to leave Saigon. Lam Son, wrote Col. Nguyen Duy Hinh, ‘was plagued by dissension verging on insubordination among some ARVN field commanders. President Thieu and Gen. Vien were probably aware of the discord, but took no remedial action … perhaps [because] these generals were considered pillars of the regime.’ On the battlefield, while five of the Airborne’s nine battalion commanders were killed or wounded, one who was unhurt forced his way onto a dust-off for evacuation. On 27 March Fred Weyand told an American command meeting that it seemed time to face the fact that the world saw Lam Son 719 as a failure: ‘We’ve got a public relations problem or a psychological problem … which is very, very important.’ Abrams fumed at press treatment of the battle: he took especially strongly against Gloria Emerson of the New York Times – ‘that big horse of a woman’ – and spoke almost despairingly of the US–Vietnamese relationship: ‘There’s a cultural chasm there that’s pretty big, and for some Americans it’s just impossible for them to ever bridge it.’