The Cold War (53 page)

While the marine infantry and artillery struggled against their NVA counterparts, an astonishing array of combat, transport, and intelligence-gathering aircraft crisscrossed the skies over the plateau. Marine and navy A-6 Intruders, A-4 Skyhawks, and air force F-4 Phantoms and F-105s—indeed, planes from all over South Vietnam, Thailand, and even aircraft stationed on carriers in the South China Sea—were ready for action should they be called on by either the Tactical Air Direction Center of the First Marine Air Wing or the 7th Air
Forces Airborne Command and Control Center, both of which orchestrated the air war (not without friction) during the siege.

And then there were the B-52 bombers. During the course of the battle, these behemoths dropped 60,000 tons of ordnance on NVA positions. Add that to the 40,000 tons dropped by the tactical aircraft, and you have five tons of bombs dropped for each of the 20,000 NVA soldiers suspected of being in the general area of operations. NVA veterans still speak today with a mixture of terror and awe at the thunder that rained down on them. Some have said the B-52 strikes, coming as they did without any warning, were far and away the worst aspect of an extremely rough campaign.

And what of the marines' morale? It remained, by most accounts, surprisingly high, especially considering the rapidly deteriorating conditions the men were forced to endure. Sleep was a hard commodity to come by amid the sporadic shelling, and it was not at all unusual to see marines who'd fallen asleep standing up in their fighting holes. The condition of the base, and the marines' rough-edged up-the-middle approach to war, horrified U.S. Army officers who visited during the weeks of the siege. Major General John J. Tolson, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, the outfit that ultimately relieved the marines at Khe Sanh in April, recalled that the base was “the most depressing and demoralizing place I ever visited. It was a very distressing sight, completely unpoliced, strewn with rubble, duds, and damaged equipment, and with the troops living a life more similar to rats than human beings.”

The marines would have found humor in this statement, as they did about so much of their grim experience at Khe Sanh, for rats, big rats, were an integral part of life at KSCB. A favorite trick of the men was to lace peanut butter with C4 explosive and then watch their rodent companions drink themselves to death trying to quench their burning insides.

And there were always the digging and the preparing. Their lives depended on these, and nowhere so much as on the isolated hill positions that were favorite targets of the NVA guns. Lance Corporal Phil Torres of India Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment, remembered:

Rats, sporadic artillery rounds whistling toward their positions, cold food, bad weather, snipers, mortar fire—the catalog of irritants was indeed a long one, and those reporters who made the dangerous trip to KSCB were often struck by the peculiar horrors of the place. Michael Herr, whose reflections on Khe Sanh take up a good part of his masterpiece,
Dispatches,
recalled that “nothing like youth ever lasted in their faces for very long. It was the eyes: because they were either strained or blazed-out or simply blank, they never had anything to do with what the rest of the face was doing, and gave everyone the look of extreme fatigue or even a glancing madness.”

The last week in February brought with it an unnerving revelation: On February 23 the shelling of the base reached an all-time high: 1,307 rounds landed within the perimeter. Two days later, NVA trenches approaching the base were detected for the first time. Hanoi's daily newspaper,
Nhan Dan,
turned up the volume on the propaganda, claiming that the actions in Quang Tri province had “shown the aggressors that they cannot avoid not only one but many Dien Bien Phus.”

One of the newly discovered trenches ran due north, just twenty-five meters from the base perimeter. The Americans countered NVA efforts by saturating the trench areas with fire from C-47 “Spooky” gunships and jet strikes.

For the marines, February 25 was the darkest day of the siege. Increasing enemy pressure called for a response, and a large reconnaissance patrol (fortyseven men) was mounted to locate a mortar that had been particularly troublesome. About an hour into the patrol, the reinforced squads stumbled into an NVA ambush and were cut to ribbons; when another group of marines tried to come to the rescue, they, too, were caught in ferocious fire, and most of the men were killed outright. The toll for venturing beyond the confines of the base was great: twenty-eight dead and more than twenty wounded.

The appearance of trenches, the high level of shelling, the “lost patrol” of February 25—all of these deepened the apprehension and foreboding of Colonel Lownds and his troops. Meanwhile, the acoustic and seismic sensors that had been dropped along all the approaches to the base indicated ever increasing levels of activity just hundreds of meters from the marine positions.
On February 29, Lownds, thinking “this might well be the main attack,” called in B-52 strikes on suspected NVA positions just a thousand-plus meters from the base. The results, recalled the marine colonel, “were devastating … those strikes caught at least two battalions.” Later that night, the enemy assaulted the perimeter where the sole South Vietnamese army (ARVN) battalion of the battle was in place, and they were repulsed handily.

Was that attack meant to be the main one? Records of NVA radio traffic that night indicate that a big assault may have been brewing, but like so much about the battle, the truth remains a mystery, in large part because we don't yet know when and why the NVA decided to scale down the number of combat units in the area of Khe Sanh. We do know, however, that the attack on the ARVN Rangers' positions following the B-52 attacks that night was the last serious probe by a large force of infantry of the KSCB.

On March 8 a front-page story in
The New York Times
offered a sobering comparison of Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu, at once reflecting the level of concern over the fate of the outpost and heightening it. Ironically, it was around that day that CIA and marine intelligence sources began to report a sharp diminution of enemy activity in the immediate area of KSCB. The heavy shelling, however, continued. On March 30, B Company of the 1st Battalion, 26th Regiment, fought a three-hour battle in close proximity to where their comrades had fallen during the lost patrol on February 25. Once the guns were silent, 115 NVA bodies were counted on the battlefield, against nine marines killed in action. It was the last big firefight of the battle of Khe Sanh.

The great ground assault that the marines had long awaited simply never came. By the end of the month, marines were running patrols farther and farther from the confines of the base perimeter. By the end of March, the siege of Khe Sanh had slipped into history. The North Vietnamese Army remained in the area and proved more than up to a good fight on occasion, but the clashes of the next months had none of the strategic overtones of those in January, February, and March.

Operation Pegasus, the relief of Khe Sanh, began on April 1, as the U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division pushed westward at breathtaking speed along the DMZ, meeting little resistance. The four battalions of the 26th Regiment under David Lownds, the men who'd done most of the fighting—and the waiting—at Khe Sanh, began being airlifted out of the area on April 18. They would never return as a unit.

Even before Lownds's troops left the base, the controversy over what role Khe Sanh played in the entire complex conflict had begun. It continues unabated today. In reflecting on the battle, William Westmoreland, the man who had insisted—against strong protest from the Marine Corps—that the base be held, felt that the siege would be remembered as “a classic example of how to defeat a numerically superior besieging force by coordinated application of firepower.” Indeed, “Khe Sanh [was] one of the most damaging one-sided defeats among many that the North Vietnamese incurred, and the myth of General Giap's military genius was discredited.”

Giap and his fellow Vietnamese soldiers have always held that they prevailed by manipulating Westmoreland, by causing him to focus his attention and his precious combat troops in the remote northwestern corner of Quang Tri province, far from where the real battle was in the cities and towns to the east. A number of respected American historians have accepted this view, including Stanley Karnow and Neil Sheehan, who writes in
A Bright Shining Lie,
“Khe Sanh was the biggest lure of the war. The Vietnamese Communists had no intention of attempting to stage a second Dien Bien Phu there. The objective of the siege was William Westmoreland, not the Marine garrison. The siege was a ruse to distract Westmoreland while the real blow (the Tet Offensive) was prepared.”

The ruse theory has many merits, but it rests on no small measure of conjecture and takes a perhaps overgenerous view of the famous Vietnamese gen-eral's strategic acumen. If Giap did have a plan to assault the base—and he could have thought seriously about attacking, if the opportunity had arisen—it is naive to believe he would ever reveal it. And even if one grants that Giap had never contemplated overrunning the garrison, one has to ask whether the diversion of American forces to Quang Tri significantly altered the outcome of the “real battle”: Tet.

Surely, considering the outcome of Tet, with so many fine Viet Cong units utterly destroyed by U.S. and South Vietnamese counterattacks, that is a hard case to make. If six or seven battalions of U.S. infantry had remained among the population centers instead of up north near the DMZ, if all the air assets focused on Khe Sanh had been evenly dispersed throughout the rest of the country, the Tet Offensive might have ended more quickly, but the strategic impact would not have changed an iota. Tet was a strategic victory for the
North Vietnamese, as it crushed the American public's will to continue the fight in Vietnam.

Giap, it would seem, paid for his “ruse” at Khe Sanh with the lives of at least ten thousand men, and he got precious little for it. Khe Sanh, it must be said, was a tactical victory for the United States. Yes, the NVA often got the best of the marines in brief firefights and ambushes at the squad level. But the Americans prevailed in all the major hill attacks, and U.S. artillery and airpower undoubtedly broke up many assaults before they managed to come off. Airpower, more than any other combat arm, crushed the American adversary around Khe Sanh. The diaries of North Vietnamese soldiers confirm the grim hardships of the campaign and the atrocious casualties caused by incessant aerial bombardment. The Americans suffered greatly, but their casualties were almost certainly under one tenth of the enemy's. (The official marine tally is 205 killed in action, which most veterans believe is a significant underestimation. In any case, it doesn't include more than fifty servicemen who were killed in the dangerous airspace above the base, nor the Green Berets who were killed at Lang Vei.)

The irony of Khe Sanh is that the tactical victory was sadly irrelevant. General Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the president had envisioned the confrontation as a great turning point. American military power was meant to crush two divisions of NVA infantry and, in the process, break Hanoi's will to carry on the fight against so powerful a foe. But that did not happen. The Vietnamese will to carry on the fight was just as strong after Khe Sanh as before—a tribute to the tenacity of the enemy.

Khe Sanh, the battle without a proper last act, helped to seal the fate of the war by highlighting the conflict's incomprehensibility to a weary public. To many observers, the battle demonstrated the futility of the American mind-set and way of war in Vietnam. Westmoreland, like many of the nation's military and political leaders, seemed utterly obsessed by his country's raw military strength and battlefield technological wizardry. In reading his statements and proclamations about Khe Sanh both during and after the battle, one senses that his faith in the vast array of killing tools at his disposal blinded him to the war's complexities and subtleties.

In June 1968, a few days after General Westmoreland surrendered command of MACV to General Creighton Abrams, marines began to dismantle the runway and raze Khe Sanh Combat Base with bulldozers and explosives.
Nothing was to be left for propaganda photos by the enemy. When the story reached the press, it set off a furor in the United States. MACV, aware of the public relations problem that came with abandoning a base described several months earlier as “the anchor of our defense” along the DMZ, issued a communiqué, explaining that with greater numbers of army troops in Quang Tri province facing fewer NVA units, it no longer made sense to hold so remote an outpost. Holding “specific terrain” was no longer necessary. Vietnam, the communiqué made clear, was a mobile war.

EPILOGUE

On the night of Sunday, March 31, 1968, President Johnson addressed the American people. He announced that naval vessels and aircraft would cease attacks on North Vietnam. The U.S., moreover, was ready to enter into negotiations. He ended his speech with a single surprise sentence: “I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

In living rooms all over the country, people cheered. Car horns honked. The “twenty words that shook the world,”
Newsweek
said, “gave the nation an almost cathartic sense of relief at the prospect of a move toward peace.” Three days later came another surprise. Radio Hanoi announced that the Communists would come to the table. For a brief moment, it really did seem that the end of the war in Vietnam was just around the corner.