The Cold War (51 page)

The cards were considered vital; Dabney didn't want them in NVA hands. Two days later, he sent out another platoon to collect the gear. This platoon, too, came under attack from an estimated twenty-five North Vietnamese soldiers. Lieutenant Harry Fromme's marines withdrew under the steady cover of mortar fire. It was the second time the NVA had engaged his marines on the same terrain: That was unusual. Something big was in the wind, or so Dabney believed. And the captain was not the only marine officer to think so.

Since November, signs of increased enemy activity—fighting holes, bunker complexes, widened trails, even newly created, paved roads—were uncovered on a regular basis uncomfortably close to the KSCB and the surrounding hills that protected the approaches to the main marine outpost. Recon teams were spotting NVA soldiers brazenly marching out in the open. Often the enemy soldiers were wearing new uniforms and carrying new AK-47 assault rifles. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Green Berets at Lang Vei, which lay seven miles to the west of KSCB, were discovering ominous signs of an enemy escalation on their deep patrols into Laos. What the foot patrols observed, the vast array of electronically gathered intelligence—from both the air and the ground—con-firmed. There were more than ten thousand enemy soldiers in the area, and more were en route.

Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of the big build-up came in the form of a group of NVA officers who had been shot on January 2 while attempting to gather intelligence just a few hundred meters from the eastern perimeter of the Khe Sanh base. This incident, more than any other, ratcheted up concern over whether KSCB could be held—concern that reached to the highest levels. Walt Rostow, the president's national security adviser, told Lyndon Johnson that in the estimation of the field commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, “The NVA were massing for another major offensive in this area, perhaps targeted this time around Khe Sanh.”

On January 11 a gravely concerned General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cabled the field commander in Saigon from Washington, asking for contingency plans in the event of an attack, and asking if such an attack might be forestalled by a marine withdrawal to the east. The next night, after conferring with the III Marine Amphibious Force commander, Lieutenant General Robert R. Cushman, Jr.—commander of the marines in all of I Corps, the northernmost military region of South Vietnam—Westmore-land cabled back his answer: Two marine battalions could be on the scene in twelve hours if needed. He had already alerted an army brigade about going north to fill the marines' shoes if they had to. And Westmoreland vigorously rejected the withdrawal option:

Recalling the situation on the eve of the battle, artillery aerial observer Major Jim Stanton “saw literally hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers in their bright green, easy-to-see uniforms. They were in large numbers, they were bivouacking in the open, they were doing things that made it very difficult to patrol. I could go out and recon areas by fire and
always
get North Vietnamese to scatter.”

It was against this backdrop that Dabney asked his battalion commander for clearance to conduct a reconnaissance in force on the morning of January 20. He would use most of India Company's infantry to determine just what the enemy was up to in the area of Hill 881 North.

The first several hours of the patrol were slow going. Progress was hampered by fog—it was the tail end of the monsoon season—and by waist-high elephant grass and the hilly terrain. As the marines advanced toward Hill 881N along two ridgelines, approaching a series of four small hills, NVA infantry opened fire from their fortified positions on those small hills.

Within thirty seconds, twenty marines were dead or wounded. Brindley's platoon, leading the right column, was stopped cold and went to ground in the folds of the hillside. Firing and maneuvering continued for several hours. In the course of the engagement, the NVA shot down a CH-46 chopper sent in to retrieve the wounded. Brindley called in artillery fire on the NVA positions, momentarily silencing their guns. Once the artillery barrage lifted, the lieutenant rose to lead his men in an attack on the NVA positions. It was described by one observer as a classic U.S. Marine frontal assault, like “a page out of Chesty Puller….”

It worked. The NVA broke and fled their positions as the Americans continued to pour small arms, mortar, and artillery fire in the direction of the enemy withdrawal. But Thomas Brindley was killed at the moment he reached the summit of the NVA stronghold, and the recon team that had joined in the assault was overrun and shot up by the fleeing NVA troops. The next objective for the marines was to retrieve that recon team, all of whom were wounded or dead. This, too, was accomplished, but several more marines fell in the process.

It was now late in the afternoon. Dabney could see the NVA were preparing to counterassault the ground that had cost him the lives of seven men, and he acted fast. He called in jet strikes on the enemy positions and then pulled his weary marines off Hill 881 North. By the order of Colonel David Lownds, who commanded the entire 26th Regiment, they were to return to their own real estate on Hill 881S.

Although they couldn't have known it at the time, Dabney's marines had just concluded the first fight in the longest and most dramatic battle of Amer-ica's longest war. Within weeks, an apprehensive American public was transfixed by the developments around Khe Sanh, and they remained so even as the war's great turning point, the Tet Offensive, came and went. From late January through March, stark and striking images of an isolated garrison of some 6,000 American troops (and one battalion of South Vietnamese Rangers) locked in combat against an estimated 20,000 NVA soldiers were transmitted via nightly newscasts, newspapers, and magazines.

It seemed to many Americans, including a number of military strategists, a deadly gambit; the marine outpost was in effect totally surrounded. Route 9, the only road connecting the base to the string of other U.S. strongpoints along the DMZ, had been under enemy control since August 1967, when the marines determined that too many men were required to protect the “Rough Rider” truck convoys that brought food, ammunition, and desperately needed construction supplies to KSCB. This meant that the 150 tons of supplies a day it would take to keep the marines in fighting shape had to be transported by air alone.

Lyndon Johnson, the man who had first committed combat troops to Vietnam in March 1965, became obsessed with the fate of the marines and the dynamics of the battle, with its dangers, and with its potential to alter the whole calculus of a mystifying and frustrating war against a third-rate power. On many nights during the siege that followed the fierce combat, Johnson could be found in the basement of the White House in his bathrobe, poring over the latest strategic assessments. Indeed, Johnson was delighted when the National Photographic Center provided him with an exact model of the combat base and surrounding environs so he could better acquaint himself with each day's developments. “No single battle of the Vietnam War has held Washington and the nation in such complete thrall as has the impending struggle for Khe Sanh,” observed
Time
magazine in mid-February.

No one was more focused on the impending battle than its chief architect,

William Childs Westmoreland, who had for over a year pressured and cajoled marine command in Da Nang first to keep Khe Sanh operational, then to expand the size of its garrison. Westmoreland had moved a number of army battalions up north to I Corps in preparation for what he plainly conceived of as the war's Big Battle.

For their part, General Lew Walt, who commanded all the marine units in Vietnam from June 1965 through May 1967, and his successor, General Robert Cushman, couldn't see the wisdom of holding the line so far to the west of South Vietnam's highly populous coastal plains. It was, at least in marine com-mand's estimation, a war for the villages. The area around the village of Khe Sanh, under twenty miles from Laos, was thickly jungled, mountainous terrain, populated largely by isolated pockets of Bru Montagnard tribesmen. To the marines, Khe Sanh seemed a distraction from the main theater of the war. They saw their large infantry units' primary use as providing a shield for the Combined Action Companies, which worked to win hearts and minds in the village hamlets by providing security, training, medical care; improving the lot of the Vietnamese people; and, of course, denying the Vietcong access. As Marine Corps Brigadier General Lowell English put it, “When you're at Khe Sanh, you're not really anywhere…. You could lose it and you haven't lost a damn thing.”

So why did Westmoreland persist with such ardor in having it out with the NVA at Khe Sanh when the people ostensibly in charge of the war in I Corps thought it futile? Both during and after the battle, the army general was never at a loss for reasons. He described the base as the “crucial anchor of our defense along the demilitarized zone.” It was, in his view, necessary to cut off infiltration into South Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and KSCB was an optimal place to conduct operations against the trail. Westmoreland also told his senior officers in Saigon that the base would be necessary for his ambitious plan to launch a devastating thrust into Laos, designed to destroy the enemy's base camps as well as the network of trails and roads by which he moved his supplies into the heart of South Vietnam. (The invasion into Laos in 1967 and 1968 was not a live option, as Washington had ruled out any combat actions in either Cambodia or Laos. Hence, Westmoreland's plan rested on the assumption that he could convince Washington to jettison that restriction.)

Over twenty-five years after the battle, it seems to this observer that the overriding reason for Westmoreland's ardent desire to fight it out with the NVA at Khe Sanh was not rooted in any particular tactical equation. Rather, he saw the
impending battle in the context of a larger canvas: If he did not react to Hanoi's movement of two elite divisions into the area, he would be letting the Communists gain a key psychological edge in a war where psychology and perceptions played a truly defining role.

What was more, if the enemy could be lured into the area of the KSCB in large concentrations, the general reckoned, he could inflict shatteringly high casualties on their units by using U.S. air assets, which included hundreds of fighters, fighter-bombers, helicopters, prop planes, and even strategic B-52 bombers. It was a force capable of unleashing ordnance with a destructive power the likes of which had never been deployed against ground troops in the history of warfare. It might very well cause the Communists to recognize that their effort to conquer South Vietnam was destined to fail. “In a war that frustrated traditional analysis or easy measurement,” comments historian Robert Pisor in
The End of the Line,
“Khe Sanh would be the single, dramatic blow that would cripple the North Vietnamese beyond any question or doubt. It would be the definitive victory, the perfect finishing stroke for [Westmore-land's] generalship in Vietnam, and he had prepared for it painstakingly.”

Adding to the drama, and very much on Westmoreland's mind on January 20 as Dabney's marines made their way back to the comparative safety of Hill 881S, was a bit of history in the form of another battle of some note. In April 1954 a French garrison in a remote fortress at Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam, considerably larger than that of the marines at KSCB, found itself under a choking siege by the Viet Minh. Displaying great patience, sacrifice, and resilience, the Vietnamese troops under General Vo Nguyen Giap hauled large artillery pieces through the jungle, often pulled by hundreds of porters, not trucks or animals, and pummeled the French positions out of existence one at a time. More than 10,000 of France's finest troops surrendered; only 73 members of the 15,000-man garrison at Dien Bien Phu escaped the grasp of the Viet Minh. With the humiliation of the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the war in Indochina ended for France.

The Big Question in January 1968 was whether the NVA could turn in a performance similar to that of their predecessors, or whether the Americans— with far greater firepower and air support than the French could even have imagined, and with their unrivaled intelligence-gathering technology—could accomplish a “Dien Bien Phu in reverse.” Throughout the siege at Khe Sanh, Bernard Fall's book about the French disaster,
Hell in a Very Small Place
, was
much read by marine officers and by the increasingly large army of reporters inevitably drawn to what was shaping up as Vietnam's long-awaited Big Battle.