Siege of Khe Sanh Read online

  Then, on January 2, several hours after dusk, six men in U.S. Marine uniforms—one of them as tall and husky as a linebacker—walked up to the western perimeter of the combat base and stood talking, pointing occasionally at strong points. They froze when challenged by a security team, hesitated for too long a second when asked to identify themselves—and died in a hail of rifle fire. A single survivor, bleeding heavily, had been able to collect a map case from one of the bodies and escape into the night, but within hours the Marines were boasting of an important coup: papers on the dead men identified them as the highest-ranking officers of a North Vietnamese Army regiment.

  For Westmoreland and Colonel David E. Lownds, commander of the 26th Marines, the incident was the final piece of evidence that Khe Sanh was about to move to the center stage of the Vietnam war. Only for a target of the very highest priority, the American officers believed, would such key leaders undertake the dangerous personal reconnaissance that had ended in death.

  The preparations for battle continued with a special urgency.

  Cargo planes delivered hundreds of tons of ammunition to scuttling forklifts on the airstrip. Reinforcements hurried to Khe Sanh, including the second battalion of the 26th Marines. For the first time since the terrible fighting on Iwo Jima in 1945, all three battalions of the 26th Marines were operating in combat together. Colonel Lownds told his regimental staff in a hushed briefing that he expected massed assaults to begin before January 20. He ordered the Marines to dig fighting holes next to their sleeping bunkers as well as at their posts on the perimeter. The defenders extended their minefields and added German tape, a twisted rope of razor blades, to the triple coils of barbed wire and bewildering maze of foottraps that ringed the base. General Westmoreland diverted intelligence resources, especially the technological wizardry of the Air Force, to an intensive search for what was now believed to be the largest gathering of enemy forces in the war.

  Not a hint of this ominous news trickled down to Captain Dabney and his men on their hilltop four miles to the west. They might not have believed it, anyway. They had humped these hills and ridgelines and stream beds and sawgrass mazes for a solid month, including one grueling, five-day, Christmas-week patrol all the way to Laos. They had patrolled their own hill by day and by night, poked into tangled thickets and bamboo clusters, and plunged into the deep guillies that separated their hill from Hill 861 to the east. They had found nothing—not even a trace of recent enemy activity.

  No one doubted that the North Vietnamese could be preparing for an attack. The Marines respected the enemy’s skill in camouflaged movement. Besides, Dabney’s men lived amidst constant reminders of the North Vietnamese commitment to this war. Even now, as the Marines slithered down the steep slope in darkness, they had to dodge the jagged needles of splintered trees and skirt the deep pits of old bomb craters. Melted gobs of plastic, the signature of napalm, hung like taffy in the trees.

  For seven days during the previous spring, Marines of another regiment had fought the North Vietnamese for control of this hill and its two neighbors, Hill 881 North and Hill 861. American firepower had finally blasted the enemy troops off the hills. The trees here were so full of shrapnel that combat engineers refused to collect timber for bunkers, complaining that their power saws fouled at the very first cut. When the men of India Company enlarged and deepened their defensive positions on 881 South, they broke into ghastly, putrescent pits that sent them staggering backwards, gagging and cursing at the smell. Nine months underground, these were the corpses of enemy soldiers who had fought and died, and been buried, on the battlefield.

  The Hill Fights, as the battles of late April and early May of 1967 had become known, were toe-to-toe slugging matches between the shock troops of two nations. The Marines had shown the “hey diddle-diddle, straight up the middle” spirit that had won them glory in a score of American wars, but somehow the standards had changed for Vietnam. Army doubts about Marine leadership flowered during these battles, and the Hill Fights exposed weaknesses in American tactics and weapons.

  The North Vietnamese had been ready, and waiting. Dug deeply into an interconnected system of fighting bunkers with as much as six feet of packed earth and logs overhead, superbly camouflaged and aiming down lanes cut out of the underbrush, the enemy troops had held their fire until the leading Marine units were only a few feet away. The initial volley knocked down scores of young Marines and, as stunned survivors scrambled for cover, enemy marksmen firing rifles with telescopic sights shot radio operators and machine gunners through the head.

  Spirited North Vietnamese soldiers shouted, in English: “Put on your helmets, Marines! We’re coming after you!”

  The Americans fought back, but their new M-16 rifles—received earlier that month—began to break down. As the Marine fire dropped off, signal whistles sounded on the hillside. North Vietnamese squad leaders maneuvered their soldiers out of the bunkers to flank and overrun isolated Marine positions. After the battle, dozens of American dead were found crouched over their rifles, killed as they tried to thread together the three separate pieces of their cleaning rods so they could ram a jammed shellcasing out of their rifles and return to the fight.

  The bloodied Marines had pulled back without their dead, a rare concession to enemy might, and then watched, spectators at Armageddon, as waves of B-52 Stratofortresses and fighter-bombers put 3,250 tons of explosives on the enemy positions. The Marine commander in the Hill Fights, Colonel John P. Lanigan, had been awed by the power of bombs and naval gunfire on Okinawa where he had won a Silver Star as a young Marine twenty-three years earlier, but he had never seen more devastating firepower than was brought to bear on the hills above Khe Sanh. In fact, no other target in the Vietnam War had been so heavily bombed.

  The Marines waited as heavy artillery and massive airstrikes blasted the vegetation from the hilltops, then waited while more bombs churned the splinters and soil to an ugly brown goo, and then climbed to the top of Hill 881 South to find only silence, “no NVA, no trees, no nothin’.”

  By the time the third hill was captured and a major enemy counterattack repelled, 160 Marines were dead and more than 700 evacuated with wounds. Estimates of enemy dead, made more difficult by their battlefield burials and disciplined withdrawal, ranged from 558 to 940. The Hill Fights were declared a victory, a successful preemptive attack that had prevented the small outpost at Khe Sanh from being overrun.

  The M-16 was strongly defended as a fine assault rifle, and Army officers in both Saigon and Washington suggested in private that Marine carelessness in training and maintenance had been responsible for its breakdown in battle. The chuckle of the day was that the new M-16 was fool proof, but not Marine proof.

  Then, on the other side of the world, Congressman James J. Howard of New Jersey had risen on the floor of the House of Representatives to read a letter from a bitter Marine who had been wounded in the Hill Fights:

  “We left with close to 1,400 men in our battalion and came back with half,” he wrote, warning his parents not to believe what they read in the newspapers. “We left with 250 men in our company and came back with 107. Practically every one of our dead was found with his rifle torn down next to him. . . .”

  The letter, and the new perspective on casualty tolls, tarnished the Marine victory in the Hill Fights. A formal investigation of the new $121 M-16 rifle would find a “serious frequency of malfunctions.”

  • • •

  DABNEY’S MEN WERE eighteen and nineteen years old in January of 1968. Most of them had been in high school during the Hill Fights. They knew little of the sacrifice and scandal that had attended the battles on their hill, but the hard lessons of the previous spring had been a part of their training. It was standard practice in Vietnam now to seek contact with the enemy, then pull back immediately to let airplanes and artillery deliver the punishment. All the M-16s in Vietnam had been recalled, refitted with chrome chambers and a new buffer system to reduce the rate of fire, and provided with
a different gunpowder to lessen jamming.

  Most of all, Dabney’s troops had been warned to respect the tenacious enemy soldier who clearly thought of these hills as his own.

  Americans sometimes called the guerrilla soldiers in Vietnam “Charlie” because of the radio initials for Viet Cong: Victor Charlie. Here, near the borders of North Vietnam and Laos, where well-trained enemy troops maneuvered with the support of artillery and rocket and anti-aircraft units, he was known as “Mr. Charles.” The North Vietnamese soldiers moving toward Khe Sanh were “well-equipped with the latest weapons, well-uniformed, well-fed, and thoroughly professional.”

  Dabney’s men moved down the slopes of Hill 881 South as though the victory of last spring was still in doubt.

  These young Marines were the quintessential American warriors of the Vietnam era, TV sons of Victory at Sea and The Sands of Iwo Jima, stripped for battle—and loaded for bear.

  Each carried twenty or more magazines of ammunition for his automatic rifle, and many had taped two magazines together—back to back, one up, one down. With the taped package, a Marine could double his immediately available firepower from twenty bullets to forty with a flick of his wrist. Only rarely did a U.S. Marine fire all of the eighty bullets he carried ashore with him during World War II—even when the fighting was quite heavy during the first twenty-four hours of battle. The Marines in Vietnam often fired eighty bullets in the first two minutes of combat. In fact, Dabney had already arranged for a pallet of rifle ammunition to be delivered by the first helicopter that came to evacuate casualties.

  The men of India Company did not worry about the controversial M-16 because none carried it. Upon arrival at Khe Sanh, they had traded their M-16s for M-14s, heavier, longer rifles that were being phased out but could still be found in support units. The M-14 could reach five hundred meters from ridgeline to ridgeline with power, while the M-16—deadly at close range—couldn’t seem to find people beyond three hundred meters.

  Each Marine wore leather and nylon jungle boots; baggy, deep-pocketed pants; a long-sleeved shirt; a vest of armor known as a flak jacket; and a steel helmet covered with camouflage cloth. Four small, smooth one-pound bombs, affectionately called “baseballs,” hung on every belt, usually beside two smoke grenades. Technology had replaced the heavier cast-iron “pineapple” of previous wars with a thin-skinned grenade that exploded a tightly coiled band of spring steel into a thousand jagged fragments. The new “baseball” increased the circle of death from twenty to thirty meters.

  Every man carried a two-foot-long fiberglass tube on a canvas shoulder strap. Called a LAW, this one-shot, disposable rocket launcher was an essential tool for opening enemy bunkers or blasting the roof off a fighting hole. It had been designed as a Light Anti-tank Weapon, hence its acronym, but there were no tanks here. To the east, toward the U.S. base at Con Thien, Marines carried LAWs because they swore they could hear the ominous clank of heavy treads during night patrols. But the hills around Khe Sanh were a vertical jungle of vines and thorns and thickets, low trees, high trees and higher trees. The very few roads and trails were pitted, potholed, washed out, blocked by landslides and blown bridges. This was difficult terrain for men; it was impossible terrain for tanks.

  Four canteens of water, a small shovel, and a first-aid packet completed their gear. There were no ponchos, no bedrolls, no transistor radios, no Polaroid cameras or battery-pack tape decks, no fishing rods or Frisbees, nor any of the other items in the incredible array of personal equipment that Americans often carried into battle in Vietnam. This was to be a fighting day. Even eating and sleeping would wait until their return to the hilltop.

  They traveled lighter than usual because they could count on instant fire support from their own hilltop, which would never be much more than a mile away. At that range, the 106mm recoilless rifles on 881 South could fire shells into a garbage can on 881 North. Heavy mortars and three 105mm howitzers on their hill had already fired practice rounds at potential trouble spots on the south-facing slopes of 881 North, and could join the fight in seconds.

  The Marines, working their way slowly down the steep hill, were slipping, swearing, shivering proof that the extraordinary technological leaps in electronic warfare had not yet rendered the infantry obsolete.

  Somebody still had to go out, look, and report back. This time it was India Company.

  An unbelievable variety of highly specialized aircraft had crossed and recrossed the skies above Khe Sanh for thirty miles in every direction for the past month. Some planes snapped thousands of high-speed still photographs, and some sniffed the air with electrochemical analyzers to detect men who dared to sweat or urinate in the jungle below. Some planes looked sideways with radar to detect movement, and some peered at the double and triple tiers of foliage with infrared eyes to “see” the hot spots of cooking fires of bivouacked troops. An air-conditioned electronic laboratory packed with technicians circled high above Khe Sanh, listening to the clicks and beeps of hidden sensors.

  By late January, this unprecedented concentration of intelligence assets included “all the resources of Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force reconnaissance and electronic warfare aircraft, and all ground intelligence-gathering activities” as well as extensive use of the still highly secret sensors.

  The intelligence-gathering effort ranged from computer analysis of sensor signals to the hand-crumbling of elephant feces by long range patrols. Still, Colonel Lownds had no exact idea where the North Vietnamese were or when they planned to attack. He shared Westmoreland’s conviction that a concentration of 20,000 or more enemy soldiers would be the single most spectacular bombing target of the Vietnam war—but he also knew that his 5,000 Marines risked a fatal surprise if the enemy could approach Khe Sanh undetected.

  And so Lownds sent men out, in patrols and platoons, to walk the hillsides, to comb the grassy seas, to listen beside the plateau trails. Teams of eight, their faces smeared with black and green paint and their equipment heavily taped to muffle metallic rattles, jumped from hovering helicopters to undertake dangerous reconnaissance missions many, many miles from the combat base.

  Lownds was a fisherman standing in midstream but unable to see beneath the glare reflected from the water’s surface. He cast his lures first into the likeliest spots, the pool below the plunging falls, the eddy beneath an overhanging bank, the quiet edge of a swift-flowing current. When each cast came back empty, he began to try the unlikely places, the broad ripple in midstream, the too-shallow rill, the darkness beside a drowned stump.

  On January 17, there was a quick swirling of the green water and a sharp tug on Lownds’ line. Enemy troops ambushed a reconnaissance team on the south slope of Hill 881 North. The team leader and the radio operator were killed, and the wounded survivors pulled back calling for emergency help. By chance, one of Dabney’s platoons was patrolling on the same hill. Tom Brindley, a twenty-four-year-old second lieutenant from St. Paul, ordered his men to shed their bulky flak jackets and packs and then led them, on the run, carrying only rifles and grenades, to the rescue. Brindley found the recon team, organized a helicopter evacuation of the dead and wounded, and returned to the packs without a shot being fired. Only three months in Vietnam, Brindley felt pretty good about his platoon’s successful mission.

  Yesterday, January 19, Dabney had sent a platoon under Second Lieutenant Harry F. Fromme back to the ambush site. The Khe Sanh Combat Base had ordered a careful search to find the recon team’s lost radio and, more importantly, the plastic-wrapped package of shackle cards—sheets of radio codes that provided security for Marine communications. The platoon was still short of the ambush site when its point man, the boastful young gunslinger, had his showdown at fifty feet. Fromme estimated from the sound of rifles that his platoon had brushed against twenty-five or more North Vietnamese, but he didn’t wait to count them. Calling on the 81mm mortars to cover his withdrawal, he returned to the hilltop.

  Captain Dabney knew nothing about the 20,000 enemy soldie
rs who were believed to be closing on Khe Sanh, but he was growing concerned. The two shooting incidents on 881 North could indicate an enemy buildup. His little hilltop fortress bristled with barbed wire and mines and machine guns and mortars and recoilless rifles and even three 105mm howitzers. Hundreds of Claymore mines, pocket-sized packages of death, stood on bipod legs, pointing their seven hundred steel balls at likely approach routes. Here and there in the tangles of wire were fifty-five-gallon drums of fougasse, a brew of aviation fuel, chemical thickener, and plastic explosive. If a breakthrough seemed imminent, Dabney could spill homemade napalm down the hill. In the most extreme case, he could pull people from the secret radio-intercept equipment and from the big guns and put nearly four hundred rifles on the line. It would be a very, very dedicated enemy soldier who climbed the steep slopes of Hill 881 South to assault these defenses, but Dabney knew it was not impossible—especially with surprise. He needed to know more about the developments on the hill to his north, and he asked the combat base for permission to take his entire company on a reconnaissance-in-force. Lownds approved the mission, and flew 100 men to the hilltop by helicopter to hold the defensive positions while Dabney was gone.

  • • •

  IT WAS 9 A.M. when the fog finally lifted. It had taken four hours to cover what the map said was only five hundred yards. Now, India Company had eyes, and the men moved forward with more confidence.

  Dabney could feel the change in mood, and he shared in it. Leading an infantry company in combat is an essential course in the education of a career military officer. Dabney had set his goals very high. Educated in the private Episcopal schools of rural Virginia and North Carolina, he had attended Yale University on an academic scholarship—only to lose his grant to low grades at the end of his freshman year. He promptly moved from the campus at New Haven to the grinder at Parris Island, a willing recruit for the Marines.