Siege of Khe Sanh Read online

  SIEGE OF

  KHE SANH

  THE STORY OF

  THE VIETNAM WAR’S

  LARGEST BATTLE

  ROBERT PISOR

  W· W· NORTON & COMPANY

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK | LONDON

  For India Company

  SIEGE OF

  KHE SANH

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1 THE CURTAIN RISES

  2 WESTMORELAND

  3 IN THE TIME BEFORE THE WAR

  4 “HERE THEY COME!”

  5 “I DON’T WANT ANY DAMN DINBINFOO”

  6 GIAP

  7 THE TET OFFENSIVE

  8 BITTER LITTLE BATTLES

  9 LIFE IN THE V-RING

  10 THE FALSE FINISH

  11 ONE MORE TIME

  12 THE CURTAIN FALLS

  BODY COUNTS

  JUDGMENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  MAPS

  INDOCHINA

  SOUTH VIETNAM

  NORTHERN QUANG TRI PROVINCE

  KHE SANH PLATEAU

  INDIA COMPANY ASSAULTS 881 NORTH

  KHE SANH VILLAGE

  NORTHERN I CORPS

  THE FALL OF LANG VEI

  KHE SANH COMBAT BASE

  INTRODUCTION

  MARK BOWDEN

  Sometimes one battle in a long war can tell the whole story writ small.

  Khe Sanh, the months-long 1968 siege that Robert Pisor recounts in this book, was a staunch American effort to defend one god-forsaken Marine base in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. After a vicious initial engagement near the end of January, the 6,000 Marines dug in waiting for a climactic attack.

  At first deemed strategically important for dubious reasons, the base became something more—a point of national pride. Over five-and-a-half months, while the encircled men endured constant shelling, the U.S. military laid waste to the hills and valleys around the outpost, a region of mountain villages, lush jungle, and sprawling coffee plantations. Khe Sanh could not be supplied by road, so its survival depended on airlifts and air power. An estimated 100,000 tons of bombs were dropped and 158,000 artillery shells launched, raining explosives and napalm, more than had been exploded on any comparable space in history, leaving behind, in the words of one military historian, “a red-orange moonscape.” The effort displaced tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians—there is no count of those wounded or killed. Hundreds of American Marines and soldiers were killed and thousands of Vietnamese troops. Then, in the summer of that year, completing the analogy with the Vietnam War as a whole, the United States simply abandoned the position.

  As Pisor makes clear in this compelling account, which ranges from the embattled hilltop to the White House and Pentagon, Khe Sanh was less a battle than a symbolic and ultimately meaningless stand. It might as well be known as Westy’s Folly, after its architect, General William “Westy” Westmoreland, commander of all American forces in Vietnam. Westmoreland deserves to be remembered alongside Civil War General George McClellan as the archetype for a certain kind of bad generalship.

  McClellan was famous for building the Union Army early in the Civil War into a magnificent fighting machine, then refusing to send it into battle. Abraham Lincoln once facetiously asked him if he might “borrow” the army, if the general did not intend to use it. Westy had an entirely different conceit. He was too wedded to his own brilliance to consider anything that contradicted it. So convinced that Khe Sanh was about to be overrun—in a reenactment of the famous French defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu—he diverted enormous resources to the isolated base’s defense, and hyped the base’s survival into an emblem of the entire U.S. war effort. He promised President Lyndon Johnson that it would never fall. Members of his staff, Pisor reports, reverently passed around copies of Bernard Fall’s classic account of the earlier battle, Hell in a Very Small Place, sharing their commander’s belief that, in effect, it outlined the enemy’s intentions.

  Dropping sophisticated new sensors into the jungle around the base, Westy’s command began collecting evidence of troop movements, upping the estimate of enemy forces there. Eventually certain that as many as 20,000 enemy troops had assembled, Westy, ever the dazzling theorist, spun inventive rationales to explain why. It was crucial high ground athwart the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, he said. It was a potential launching pad for an American invasion of Laos, just ten miles west. Other generals, notably Maxwell Taylor, didn’t see it. He urged President Johnson to withdraw the Marines. But Westy managed to convince the president that Khe Sanh was a test—the ultimate test—of America’s will. He was also excited, Pisor notes, by the supposed massing of enemy forces. “The single greatest attraction of the combat base,” Pisor writes, “was as a killing ground for North Vietnamese troops.” After all, Westy’s deep strategy for defeating the Communist effort was “attrition,” killing so many enemy soldiers that Hanoi would eventually buckle. At one point, early on, he considered using tactical nuclear weapons, an idea that was quickly abandoned when word of it leaked to the press. The character of the war prior to 1968 had been almost entirely hit-and-run, with American forces searching high and low for enemy troops that tended to melt away after making contact. “The Viet Cong,” Westy said, “are uncommonly adept at slithering away.” Here, he believed, the National Liberation Front (North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong guerrillas) had finally decided to stand and fight. This would be the war’s great test of arms, and America had more firepower than any nation in history. It would be a chance for American forces to break the front’s back. He would use the unprecedented display of air power—something the French had lacked—to demonstrate the futility of opposing the United States of America.

  As often happens in war, the enemy had different plans. It was not, as Westy assumed, wedded to the strategies of the old war. While the attention of U.S. forces remained obsessively focused on Khe Sanh in early 1968—the general sent daily updates directly to Johnson on the number of bombs dropped, weapons and men delivered, and (vastly inflated) estimates of enemy killed—the front quietly amassed tens of thousands of men and arms elsewhere. On the morning of Tet, January 31st, it shocked the world with attacks on more than a hundred cities throughout South Vietnam, and took Hue, not some isolated Marine base but the third largest city in the nation, and the country’s intellectual and cultural center.

  How did Westy respond? He denied it. And even as his own troops in Hue were engaged in a bloody, bitter, nearly month-long fight to win that city back, with casualties arriving in bloody waves at the field hospital in Phu Bai, the general refused to acknowledge it. While he continued raining fire on the Central Highlands, the enemy was busy in the streets of the old capital, rounding up and executing supporters of the South Vietnamese government and deeply undermining confidence in the regime America was there to defend. Westy dismissed the Tet Offensive, which proved to be the turning point in the war, as nothing but “a diversionary effort” designed to distract attention from Khe Sanh. He continued to believe, plan, and act as if the real attack would come there.

  It never did. It turns out that the front never had more than a fraction of the troops thought to be amassed around Khe Sanh. And even as field commanders around Hue reported they were fighting the very enemy units who were supposed to be outside the Marine base, Westy’s conviction never wavered.

  He had, in fact, been hoodwinked. In my conversations with Vietnamese historians and high-ranking military veterans there in 2015 and 2016 while researching my book Hue 1968, they described Khe Sanh as a deliberate diversion. Noted military historian retired Gen. S.L.A. Marshall saw it as such; he called Khe Sanh “a feint.” G
eneral Lowell English, one of the garrison’s Marine commanders, later termed it a “trap” that forced Westy “into the expenditure of absolutely unreasonable amounts of men and materiel to defend a piece of terrain that wasn’t worth a damn.”

  The general’s obsession with Khe Sanh, while the real battle raged elsewhere, must have been a deeply satisfying thing to North Vietnam’s leaders. And when it became clear that Westy’s predicted attack wasn’t coming, he declared victory. He never acknowledged, even in his memoirs years later, that Hue had been taken, or that the Tet Offensive had scored anything more than a minor public relations victory. Khe Sanh, he insisted, was his major triumph.

  It wasn’t. It was a hellish siege, one that over nearly six months accumulated more American casualties than any other single engagement of the war. After a few intense clashes with skilled enemy forces in January, including tanks, the Marines reinforced their perimeter and started digging. They remained on the hilltops of Khe Sanh week after week, month after month, riding out relentless enemy mortar barrages, waiting on edge for the predicted attack to begin, all the while witnessing the greatest display of aerial bombardment in history. Khe Sanh, in the end, was less a battle than a heroic feat of endurance. The isolated men began to look like ragged castaways, bearded, filthy, their clothes in tatters.

  Even before this standoff started, Khe Sanh had been a tough assignment. Set on high ground and surrounded by jungle and hills in all directions, it was a choice target. Pisor notes that the Marine rifles had “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.” They took to calling their position “the V-ring.”

  One veteran Marine general said, “We went through some tough places [in World War II] . . . Tarawa or Peleliu, parts of the canal, Tinian, 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.”

  During the height of the siege, it was almost unendurable.

  “Water was scarce, and most of the Marines wore scraggly beards,” Pisor writes. “Few washed regularly. The sleeping bunkers were dank stench chambers, redolent of sweat and urine. Diarrhea and fear, C-ration garbage, vomit, farts, feet, and fungus. Rats ran across the dirt floors, gnawing at shelves and boots and fingers, chittering in fear when the big guns fired and sometimes scratching faces as they raced across sleeping Marines. . . .”

  They dug and they dug to escape the constant shelling.

  “It gives you the feeling that you’re digging your own grave,” said one senior officer.

  They grew to admire the tenacity of enemy mortar crews, who after absorbing air attacks that seemingly nothing living could survive, would miraculously resume work after the bombers disappeared.

  “A North Vietnamese soldier had lugged a .50 caliber machine gun to a spider hole not much more than two hundred yards from the perimeter,” Pisor writes. “Every day and night he fired at the Marines or at arriving and departing aircraft. The Marines actually caught glimpses of his face through the scopes of their sniper rifles, but neither marksmen nor mortars nor recoilless rifles could knock him out. Finally, napalm was called in. For ten minutes the ground around the sniper’s position boiled in orange flame and black smoke, the vegetation crisping and the soil itself seeming to burn. When the last oily flames flickered out, he popped out of his hole and fired a single round.”

  Pisor writes that the Marines, buoyed by the solitary man’s ability to survive, “cheered him.”

  They named him “Luke the Gook,” and decided to leave him alone.

  There were not many light moments. By the end of the first week in February, one of every ten Marines at the base had been wounded or killed.

  “When I get back to California, I’m going to open a bar especially for the survivors of Khe Sanh,” Lieutenant C. J. Slack of Carlsbad told AP reporter John T. Wheeler. “And any time it gets two deep at that bar, I’ll know someone is lying.”

  The waves of American planes delivering bombs to the enemy and an unending stream of ammunition and supplies to the encircled outpost were hampered by the thick clouds of the rainy season, and targeted by anti-aircraft weapons along approach routes—one C-130 arrived back at Da Nang with 242 holes in its fuselage and wings. During one stretch of six weeks the Air Force was able to deliver only five days of supplies.

  Like so many Vietnam vets, the men who survived this ordeal were left to wonder what it had all been about. The Army units that were finally able to relieve them in June arrived almost without contest. The 20,000 enemy soldiers thought to be encircling the base were gone, if they had ever been there at all.

  The Johnson administration, under a new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, grew fed up with Westy’s exaggerations and denials. He was kicked upstairs to become Army chief of staff. General Creighton Abrams, his replacement, promptly blew up the fortifications at Khe Sanh and withdrew all American forces. There was no appreciable loss or gain in doing so. The “battle” had, while all too real for the Marines who had weathered it, been in large measure a product of Westy’s imagination.

  It doesn’t detract from their heroism, of course, to say that the entire experience was for naught. Khe Sanh was the Vietnam War in microcosm, a misguided cause, a misunderstood battlefield, and a mistaken and ultimately tragic belief that America had something important to prove by riding it out.

  “The disaster of Vietnam was not the result of impersonal forces but a uniquely human failure,” concluded H. R. McMaster in his stinging indictment of wartime leadership, Dereliction of Duty, “the responsibility for which was shared by President Johnson and his principal military and civilian advisors. . . . The failures were many and reinforcing: arrogance, weakness, lying in the pursuit of self-interest, and, above all, the abdication of responsibility to the American people.”

  1.

  THE CURTAIN RISES

  The cold chill of his steel helmet came right through the plastic liner, and Captain Bill Dabney’s shoulders shivered for a moment before he willed them still. The Marines of India Company filed past, stumbling, grumbling in the gloom. It was five o’clock in the morning in the northern mountains of South Vietnam.

  Dabney stood on the crest of a gnarled thumb of a mountain called Hill 881 South. From this height he could see the bone-shaped scar of an Army Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, the church steeples of Khe Sanh Village, the smokey hamlets of the mountain tribesmen known as Bru, the airstrip and bunkers of the Khe Sanh Combat Base—and even the thick-walled villas of French planters where wrinkled, brown women sorted coffee beans and gracious ladies served crème de menthe on the patio.

  All around lay a phantasmagorical landscape, the kind of place where trolls might live. An awesome, sheer-sided mountain of stone called Co Roc guarded the gateway to Laos, the land of mystery and green mountains that flowed gently around Dabney’s hill to the south. Tiger Peak loomed large in the hazy far distance, a barrier near the boundary of North Vietnam. Down on the plateau, confusing tangles of thorn and vine and low brush gave way to incredibly dense stands of twelve-foot-high elephant grass. Plummeting mountain streams frothed white against house-sized boulders on the hillsides. Across the valleys, silent waterfalls flashed like sunlit diamonds in the deep, green, velvet lushness of the jungle.

  Some of the Marines had caught trout as big as salmon in these rivers. Others hoped for a shot at one of the trophy tigers that stalked this remote, beautiful corner of the earth. This morning, January 20, 1968, the men of India Company were hunting other men; today, they couldn’t see five feet in any direction.

  A thick fog pressed to the ground, flowing heavily in the hollows and draws, parting and closing as the Marines passed. The point men, lone s
couts who probed the thick growth ahead of the company’s columns, lurched down the steep hill, pushing at the curtains of mist with their rifles. They knew these trails intimately, but they walked like eyeless men: tense, bent slightly forward, knees flexed, hands outstretched, ears strained, striving for the synaptic millisecond that could give them an edge in the shockingly close combat that marked encounters with the enemy in Vietnam.

  The American tunnel rats who squeezed with flashlight and pistol into narrow burrows deep in the earth experienced the same unique, lonely terror that shaped the psyche of point men in this war. Their claustrophobic nightmare—of bats and boobytraps, cobwebs and cave-ins—enclosed them only when a secret tunnel complex was discovered; point men lived with The Fear every day. In a war in which ambush was the enemy’s most successful tactic, point men did for the infantry what food tasters did for the Borgias. Just yesterday, one of Dabney’s scouts—a volunteer who had explained quite seriously that he wanted to walk point because he thought of himself as a gunfighter—had played High Noon with a North Vietnamese Army soldier on Hill 881 North. At a range of less than fifty feet, he had exchanged long, ripping bursts of automatic rifle fire with the enemy and then dropped into the tall grass, shaken but unhurt, as loud cracks and soft whispers clipped leaves and twigs all around him.

  India Company, 185 strong, was headed back to the same spot this morning. The fishing rods had been stowed in the hilltop bunkers. Each man carried twice his normal load of ammunition. They expected to fight today, and for almost everyone it would be the first time in combat.

  Rumors of a massive North Vietnamese buildup around Khe Sanh had circulated since mid-December, when India Company and other elements of the Third Battalion, 26th Marines, were airlifted to the combat base on extreme short notice. The commander of all American forces in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, believed that tens of thousands of North Vietnam’s finest troops were moving into attack positions around the isolated Marine post. Apprehension mounted as enemy truck traffic on nearby Laotian roads and trails rose from a monthly average of 480 in the fall to more than 6,000 in December.