A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (115 page)

The day-and-night bombardment of the hill that had seemed so awesomely destructive to the watching Marines had been mainly fireworks. The rockets detonated on the branches or the overhead cover of the bunkers, and the machine-gun bullets and 20mm cannon shells didn’t penetrate anything either. Most of the napalm burned in the trees. The howitzer shells did give the Vietnamese in the bunkers headaches. The bombs were more frightening, extremely difficult to bear. The concussion from them gave some of the Vietnamese bleeding noses and ears, but the bombs usually did not kill or disable either.

Prior to the assault on the morning of April 30, the fighter-bombers had dropped no 750-pounders and only a small number of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs on Hill 881 South. Almost all of the bombs had been the 250- and 500-pound “Snake-eye” type preferred by the Marine pilots and their Navy and Air Force counterparts. Snake-eye bombs
have large tail fins that unfold after release to retard descent so that the bomb can be launched from low altitude in a slow, parabolic trajectory that allows the aircraft time to fly clear of the blast and fragmentation. Jets can bomb accurately from a low, relatively flat approach and Vietnamese weather also encouraged the use of Snake-eyes. Navy and Air Force pilots had to be prepared to fly anywhere. With one part of the country or the other always in a monsoon, they frequently encountered low cloud ceilings. At Khe Sanh in late April and early May 1967, the ceiling was often 1,000 feet or less. To drop the heavier 750-, 1,000-, and 2,000-pound bombs accurately and escape the blast and fragments, a pilot had to take a high-angle approach akin to dive-bombing and pull away at a good height. An approach like this was dangerous when the clouds were down and the air space around a target was crowded. The Vietnamese had also observed this practice of the American aviators. The bunkers were sturdy enough to withstand anything but a direct or close hit by a 250- or 500-pound Snake-eye bomb, infrequent in practice.

Rain-forest bunker complexes served the Vietnamese for both offensive and defensive purposes. During the early stages of a battle, as in the fighting for Hill 861, the Vietnamese could sortie out and employ their flanking and envelopment tactics to advantage. They knew the terrain intimately, because they had been living in the area secretly for quite a while during the last phase of bunker construction. Later, when the battle was approaching a high point, as in the assault on Hill 881 South, the Vietnamese could wait out the bombardment in the shelter of the bunkers.

In the end, bombs and shells would exact their toll. Those Vietnamese who were ordered to hold their positions or to expose themselves in counterattacks would die, as they were to die by the hundreds during the two and a half weeks of the Hill Fights. By planning carefully, by fortifying in advance, and by designing a battlefield that enticed the Americans into becoming victims of their own stylized methods of fighting, the Vietnamese could accomplish what was most important to them: they could prolong the combat and make any American infantry sent against them suffer grievously. Merely to strip away the top layer of canopy trees, the second layer of pole trees, and finally the underbrush so that one could see the bunkers to attack them with precision consumed days of this standard bombardment with artillery and 250- and 500-pound bombs. Despite all of the preparatory bombing and shelling of Hill 881 South, the Marines could not see the bunkers until they were almost on top of them, and there were plenty of trees left standing to give the snipers leafy perches.

Lew Walt cared about the lives of his Marines. He flew to Khe Sanh the moment he received a report of the bloodletting on the hill, took a squad of riflemen, and crawled forward to find out for himself what was happening. Peleliu in the fall of 1944 had been the first of the Pacific islands where the Japanese had avoided foolish banzai charges and holed up in caves and pillboxes of steel-reinforced concrete and coral. Walt had been sent back to the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, after that battle and put in charge of the attack section, which developed a special course on how to overcome a fortified position. He therefore understood the limits of conventional bombardment against bunkers like the ones he now saw on Hill 881 South and the rashness of sending infantry to seize them. He ordered all of the Marines withdrawn from the hill and instructed the air wing to switch to 750-, 1,000-, and 2,000-pound bombs with delay fuses. The delay fusing meant that the bomb penetrated the earth before exploding. A miss was still effective, because the subterranean shock waves tended to collapse the bunkers from beneath. The concussion from the big bombs was disabling in itself (lethal when the hit was close enough), and the delay also gave the pilot time to fly clear.

Walt intervened too late. The death toll in the Hill Fights was already ninety-nine. Close to half of the men had just been killed in this impetuous attack on 881 South, and this time the Marines were forced to abandon their dead in order to extricate the living. When they returned two days later to recover the bodies of their comrades and occupy the wasteland of cratered ridges littered with splintered trees, fifty of the bunkers were still intact and the Vietnamese were gone again. The survivors of the 18th NVA Regiment that had borne the battle until this point had retreated to Hill 881 North, where, unbeknownst to the Americans, they had been relieved by fresh troops of the 95th Regiment, which the NVA division commander had been holding in reserve.

Lew Walt had also put his 1st Marine Aircraft Wing to work on Hill 881 North with heavy bombs, but 2,000-pounders could not blow away the perverse weather of this land. As the lead Marine company neared the top of that hill late on the same afternoon that 881 South was occupied, the men encountered brisk sniper fire. The Marines thought they could handle the snipers. They could not handle the tropical storm that enveloped them with forty-mile-per-hour winds and blinding rain. The battalion commander had to order a retreat. It was too dangerous to allow his Marines to plunge ahead into who knew what.

The Vietnamese took advantage of the hiatus to launch a counterattack that night by two reinforced companies. The NVA troops broke
through the perimeter of one Marine company and seized some previously unoccupied bunkers in a tree line. There, with automatic weapons and grenades, they traded their lives through most of the next day in a fight to the death bunker by bunker. More dying followed on subsequent days. By the time the two and a half weeks of fighting for the hills had ended, the bodies of 155 Marines had been carried to the graves registration point at Khe Sanh airstrip and 425 had been wounded, the worst Marine losses for any single battle of the war thus far.

As quickly as they let it ebb in the west, the Vietnamese shifted the fighting to the eastern side of the DMZ, striking the Marine base at Con Thien with two battalions in early May. The shelling became the worst curse of this DMZ war, worse than the infantry assaults, worse than the ambushes of the supply convoys, worse than the raids by the sappers (a term Americans applied to NVA and Viet Cong commando-type troops) who stripped to their undershorts and crawled through the barbed wire to toss satchel charges into bunkers and artillery revetments. The shelling was worse because it was equally lethal but harder on the nerves. It too began to get serious in May when nearly 4,200 rounds fell on the Marine positions. The Vietnamese brought to bear all manner of artillery in the Soviet-designed arsenal—85mm, 100mm, 122mm, and 130mm guns; 120mm mortars that burst in an extremely large fragmentation pattern; and 122mm Katyusha rockets nine feet long. By July they were shooting 152mm guns at the Marines. The duds from these penetrated four feet into the earth.

The Marines tried all manner of counterbattery measures to silence their opponents. Their batteries, Westmoreland’s Long Toms, and the guns of the Seventh Fleet cruisers and destroyers fired hundreds of thousands of shells. The A-4 Skyhawks and F-8 Crusaders precision-dive-bombed, and the B-52S and the Marine and Navy A-6 Intruder bombers, which lofted a respectable seven tons each, laid carpets in the tens of thousands of tons. Nothing gave more than a respite from these Asian artillerymen who counted in their intellectual heritage the seventeenth-century French genius of artillery and siegecraft Sebastien de Vauban, and who had had so much practice at digging and disguising against his direct military heirs who had forgotten his teachings.

The Vietnamese built phony gun positions for the interpreters of the aerial photographs to find. They set off harmless explosive charges to simulate muzzle flashes for the Marine observers. They hid the real guns and mortars and rocket launchers in deep pits and in tunnels, fired the
weapons at irregular intervals, and pulled the camouflage back over the weapon and its emplacement after each shot. A favorite time to shoot was in the late afternoon when the muzzle flashes were hardest to spot. A technique for the heavy mortars was to burrow a narrow shaft far down into the slope of a hill or ridge that looked toward a Marine position. Chambers were hollowed out at the bottom of the shaft for the mortar and its crew so that weapon and men would have the whole of the earth above as protection. The fired mortar round flew up and out the camouflaged opening of the shaft. A variation of the technique was often used for the howitzers. Gun and mortar and rocket-launching sites were found, of course, and the weapons and the crews smothered in bombs and shells. The arsenals of the Soviet Union, China, and the Eastern European countries produced a plentitude of artillery to resup-ply the Vietnamese, and Hanoi did not stint at replacing the crews. Soon, if one counted in the smaller 82mm mortars, half of the Marine casualties were resulting from shellfire and rockets.

When Lew Walt went home in June 1967, at the end of two years, he took with him the lesson in how to deal with the bunker complexes. The lesson had to be relearned on almost every occasion by trial and error in American lives. The American military system of the 1960s provided for the unlearning rather than the learning of lessons. The one-year tour that Westmoreland had decided to carry over from the advisory era because he thought it would help morale meant that all ranks from colonel to private first class left the country by the time they were beginning to acquire some experience and perspective. The turnover was twice as fast, every six months, at the operating levels of battalion and brigade (regiment was the equivalent of brigade in the Marine Corps), where experienced leadership was needed most. The officer spent the other six months of his tour in a staff job or as an executive officer at a higher level. There were few exceptions, and only rarely could a man hold a command longer than six months by volunteering to extend his tour. (Often the turnover was faster than six months because the officer became a casualty or got sick.)

The Army personnel bureaucracy tended to view Vietnam as an educational exercise and rationalized the six-month rule as a way of seasoning more officers for the “big war” yet to come with the Soviets in Europe and for more of these “brushfire wars.” The real reason, which held true for the Marine Corps too and which explained why the practice was derisively called “ticket-punching,” was a mechanistic promotion process and the bureaucratic impetus this created. To win eagles a lieutenant colonel had to punch a battalion command on his record. To
gain a star a colonel had to punch on command of a brigade or a regiment. To keep an officer in a battalion or brigade or regimental command longer than six months was regarded as unfair to his contemporaries. Much the same system of ticket-punching held true for the general officers, although they were on eighteen-month tours. A general was seldom permitted to hold a division or corps command for more than a year, because so many other generals were waiting in line to qualify for another star. Walt had been an exception, because he was the senior Marine. The Vietnamese could thus count on their American opponents to behave according to pattern.

More than half of all American servicemen who died in combat in Vietnam from 1967 onward, 52 percent, were to die in I Corps. Of this 52 percent, 25 percent were to perish along or close to the DMZ itself in the two northernmost I Corps provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien. The remaining 27 percent were to die in the three lower provinces of I Corps, because these quickly reverted to big-unit warfare after Westmoreland forced Walt and Krulak to abandon their pacification strategy. Westmoreland’s success had the effect of uncovering the Marines’ rear and permitting the Viet Cong regulars and the NVA to operate freely once more in the populated rice deltas close to the coast.

The same summer of 1966 that they lured Westmoreland to the DMZ, the Vietnamese moved the focus of their second border front in the Central Highlands where Moore had fought his battle. They drew the Americans farther north to the remote mountains of upper Kontum Province, right next to the terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply line and another region where the Annamites are at their most rugged. In 1967 the Hanoi leaders were able to open a third border front in III Corps along the Cambodian frontier. The Chinese made an arrangement with Sihanouk to ship the Vietnamese thousands of tons of arms, ammunition, medicine, and other supplies (more than 26,600 metric tons by the end of 1969) through the port of Sihanoukville. The Cambodian army received a small share of the weaponry, and Sihanouk and his generals were bribed. One of Sihanouk’s wives owned the trucking company that was paid to haul the weapons from the port to the Vietnamese depots.

The statistics on where Americans died invariably demonstrated the extent to which Westmoreland convenienced his enemy. Nearly four-fifths of all Americans killed in action in Vietnam from 1967 onward, 77 percent, died in just ten of the country’s forty-four provinces. Five of the provinces were those constituting I Corps. Three others were the border provinces of Kontum, Tay Ninh, and Hau Nghia of Vann’s memory.
The ninth province was Binh Duong, in between Tay Ninh and Hau Nghia and thus part of the Cambodian border front. The sole exception to the border pattern was the tenth province, Binh Dinh on the Central Coast, and Binh Dinh has its own mountainous interior that reaches back into the Highlands.