The Cold War (52 page)

Surely Dien Bien Phu was also on the mind of Colonel David Lownds on January 20, when he learned that a low-ranking NVA officer had defected, turning himself in to marines at the KSCB and revealing that his former brothers-in-arms were poised to strike Lownd's marines within twenty-four hours. The officer, Lieutenant La Thanh Tonc, told marine intelligence interrogators that Hill 861, which lay about five kilometers to the northwest of the base, was to be attacked and overrun that very night. Once that key hill outpost was in North Vietnamese hands, said the NVA officer, a regimental-size attack on the KSCB would commence. Colonel Lownds and his boss, General Ravthon Tompkins, commander of the 3rd Marine Division, decided there was nothing to lose by assuming the information was accurate. That night all units were put on 50 percent nighttime alert. Sure enough, at precisely twelve-thirty A
.
M. on January 21, more than two hundred NVA soldiers, led by elite sappers called Dac Cong, assaulted the Hill 861 mini-fortress from their positions on nearby Hill 861A, blowing holes in the marines' perimeter wire with bangalore torpedoes and satchel charges. The company commander was wounded three times, and his gunnery sergeant was killed. Within a few minutes, the helicopter landing pad was in enemy hands, and NVA soldiers were running all around the firing positions of the marines, who were forced to withdraw to a smaller, higher position.

With the help of expert mortar support from Dabney's India Company marines on nearby Hill 881S (which wasn't attacked at all that night), the K Company marines regrouped and counterattacked, inflicting heavy punishment on the NVA with knives and rifle butts as well as small arms fire. By fivefifteen A
.
M. the only North Vietnamese on Hill 861 were dead.

But Lownds and his marines had little time to celebrate the success of the K Company victory. Just a few minutes after the fighting had stopped, the KSCB itself came under rocket attack from the NVA positions on Hill 881N. One of the first hits occurred in the eastern sector of the base perimeter, landing directly in the main ammunition dump and setting off, in Robert Pisor's words, “a colossal explosion that bathed the Khe Sanh plateau in a glaring white light of apocalypse.” To some of the marines near the explosion, it must indeed have seemed like the world was about to end, as helicopters tumbled over and clouds of tear gas enveloped the landscape. All sorts of artillery ammunition, some white-hot, were scattered about the base, and fires burned within the marine positions for two full days.

At six-thirty A
.
M. the North Vietnamese mounted their assault, but not on the main base, as the NVA defector had predicted. Instead, their target was the village of Khe Sanh, which happened to be the seat of the regional South Vietnamese government. There, a small contingent of civic action marines were stationed. They led poorly armed local security forces in the defense of the village. To the surprise of many, the small contingent repulsed two attacks with minimal casualties. After the second attack, and a thousand rounds of support artillery fire, Lownds decided that he couldn't defend a position so far from his main outpost, so he ordered helicopters to retrieve the marines in the village. The local forces would have to walk back to KSBC.

The effect of the first (of many) NVA bombardments of the base was devastating. Over 90 percent of the marines' ammunition had gone up in smoke. The airstrip had been damaged: Just 2,000 feet of the 3,000-foot aluminum runway were usable. Most of the aboveground bunkers had been severely damaged or destroyed. That meant smaller transport planes had to be used to replenish desperately needed ammunition. The situation, Lownds remarked, “was critical, to say the least.”

The hill fights and the artillery barrage on January 21 set the tone and pattern for the battle of Khe Sanh, a struggle that lasted two and a half months. Almost every day the base would take fire from rockets, mortars, and large-caliber artillery, most of which originated in three brilliantly camouflaged locations: Hill 881N; Co Roc Mountain in Laos (which lay maddeningly out of range of even the largest American artillery, the 175mm U.S. Army guns to the east of Khe Sanh at Camp Carroll); and “position 305,” about ten thousand meters northwest of Hill 881S. Meanwhile, navy, air force, and marine airpower continued to punish the NVA by dropping tons of high-explosive ordnance and napalm on suspected troop and headquarters positions of the two crack enemy forces in the area: the 304th and the 325C divisions. As the marines busied themselves each day digging deeper into their cloud-shrouded plateau, reinforcing their bunkers, revetments, and minefields along suspected routes of approach, they were sporadically probed by NVA sappers and snipers. And they steeled themselves for the assault that every day seemed more and more likely. “Thus,” writes Marine Corps historian Captain Moyers Shore II, “the two adversaries faced each other like boxers in a championship bout; one danced around nimbly throwing jabs while the second stood fast waiting to score the counter punch that would end the fight.”

What happened on the last day of January—or rather, what did not happen—
added another element of mystery to the cat-and-mouse game around the Khe Sanh plateau. Hanoi on this day launched its biggest offensive of its war against the United States and South Vietnam. Combined Vietcong– North Vietnamese forces struck ferociously at five district capitals, military installations, and all of South Vietnam's major cities, including Saigon, where a VC sapper team made its way into the U.S. embassy compound. But on this day KSCB received not even a single probe. Most of the Tet attacks resulted in disastrous casualties for the Communists, and they were quickly repulsed. Hanoi did succeed, however, in greatly discrediting the American military's rosy predictions that the end of the war was coming into view in early 1968.

The Tet Offensive attacks also ratcheted up concern over the enemy's true intentions regarding Khe Sanh: Would the flurry of attacks on January 31 be the trigger for the big assault on the isolated marine garrison? It was in this context that General Westmoreland considered the possibility of using “a few small nuclear weapons” at Khe Sanh—the first time that option had seriously been weighed by an American general since the Korean War.

If the NVA were going to overrun KSCB, they would have to neutralize the company of marines dug in on Hill 861A, northeast of Hill 861 and about four kilometers northwest of KSCB. Pfc. Mike Delaney of Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines, remembered that “there was nothing but double- and triple-canopy jungle on the hill [861A] when we got there. It was heavy growth, and we saw a lot of wildlife…. It was super hot. It was like a smothering heat. Very little wind. The vegetation held the heat close to the ground. It was … constantly humid. The fog would roll up from the valley … that was scary because we couldn't see anything below us.”

What lay below the marines on the night of February 4–5 was a battalion of NVA assault troops. At 3:05 A
.
M. that night, the Americans on the hill were on the bad end of a mortar barrage that led to one of the most ferocious engagements of the entire siege. The NVA, an estimated battalion from the 325C Division, overran Echo Company's first platoon. Captain Earle Breeding's troops quickly mounted a counterassault, attacking the enemy with bayonets, handguns, and bare hands. The company commander remembered that one marine knocked an enemy soldier unconscious with a roundhouse punch, then finished him off with a knife. “It was uncontrolled pandemonium,” Breeding recalled. The engagement lasted over three hours, during which time the NVA mounted their own counterassault. Bill Dabney's India Company on Hill 881S was kept quite busy, firing some 1,100 mortar rounds in support of their
brother company on Hill 861A. Air strikes were called in and may well have broken up the enemy's reserve battalion, as it was on the verge of attacking (it never did). The North Vietnamese left 109 bodies on the battlefield that night. Seven marines died, and thirty-five had to be evacuated from the hill with serious wounds.

On Hill 861A, the marines prevailed. An extraordinary five Navy Crosses were awarded for heroism in action that night. On February 7 it was the NVA's turn: The Special Forces camp seven miles west of KSCB was overrun; and for the first time in the Vietnam War, the enemy used tanks on the battlefield. Ten of the twenty-five Green Berets at Lang Vei that night were killed in the fighting, and as many as several hundred of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) strikers who were stationed in the Special Forces compound were lost to enemy fire as well.

The fall of Lang Vei greatly increased the rancor between the Special Forces and the marines, largely because Colonel Lownds had refused to mount an infantry relief force, fearing that it would face almost certain ambush. It also brought more than six thousand Bru and Laotian refugees to the front gate of the KSCB, seeking refuge from the increasingly intense artillery and aerial barrages that were turning the once lush landscape around Khe Sanh into a wasteland of charred earth and shrapnel-laden trees. The arrival of the civilians unnerved the marines, who feared the NVA might try to use them as a human screen behind which to mount an attack. Lownds was sympathetic to the locals, most of whom had family members fighting with the Americans, and he managed to evacuate the Laotians and some Vietnamese, but the Bru Montagnards, who had fought bravely and with great loyalty, were denied the right to evacuate to the lowlands by the Vietnamese government and had to fend for themselves in a hazardous combat zone.

Lang Vei emboldened the NVA—or so it seemed, for at 4:45 A
.
M. on the morning of February 8, they attacked painfully close to the KSCB perimeter, this time against the reinforced marine platoon on Hill 64, very near the rock quarry just to the west of the combat base. The NVA assault was murderously intense: Within fifteen minutes the force of sixty-five marines was reduced to just more than twenty fighters—everyone else was dead or too seriously wounded to carry on. The fight raged for hours, with the marines barely hanging on to a small portion of their original perimeter until reinforcements arrived with airpower at around eight-thirty A
.
M., driving off the attacking force.
On one of the 150 NVA corpses was found a map of KSCB showing that, as one veteran recalled, “almost to a bunker, they knew where almost everything we had was, including the positions of our underground ammo bunkers. If they had hit [in an assault on the main combat base], I'm sure an initial wave of RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] men … would have decimated many of these positions.” That night on Hill 64, the official tally has it that twenty-four Americans were killed in action, and twenty-nine were wounded. (In fact, the total was probably somewhat higher: Many veterans hold firm to the belief that all U.S. casualty figures at Khe Sanh were deliberately set far below the real totals.)

By the second week in February, Khe Sanh and the fate of the marines had become an abiding concern of President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were attempting to gauge not only the enemy's intentions but the soundness of their own field commander's strategy. In the National Security Council and in the highest reaches of the Pentagon, voices of skepticism were more and more in evidence. The marines were taking a daily pounding from gun positions that apparently could not be knocked out by artillery or airpower. The U.S. troops were unable to patrol more than a few hundred meters from their base, and even then invited ambush. Thoughtful men, even Westmoreland's protégé, the scholar-soldier General Maxwell Taylor, were beginning to have grave reservations about the rationale for holding on to so remote an outpost. And there was vigorous debate over whether the United States could effectively use marines as bait to lure the NVA infantry units into the open, to be crushed in a well-orchestrated bombing campaign. It was a new kind of tactic. Who knew if it would work?

In a reasoned and provocative memo to the president dated February 14, Taylor, then serving as the chief executive's personal military adviser, argued for a careful consideration of alternatives to keeping Khe Sanh. He felt that Westmoreland's own cables and statements revealed that the rationale for holding the base was faulty:

The tremors of doubt running through official Washington led a determined Westmoreland to redouble his efforts to ensure that the United States stuck it out. He worked furiously at Military Assistance Command Vietnam to preserve a unified front among the senior staff, insisting that there was no room for negativism and defeatism, and in March that “there are no advantages of military significance accuring [
sic
] from abandoning Khe Sanh if it is indeed our purpose to eject or destroy the invading NVA forces.”

While the president and the JCS doubted and debated, the NVA infantry entered a quiet phase. For two weeks, no major attack was attempted on either the hill strongpoints or the base. But the steady shelling went on and on. Often more than five hundred rounds a day struck inside the base, and the marines grew ever more weary of waiting for the big assault, eating K rations, and getting by (very often) on less than a canteen of drinking water a day.

Meanwhile, keeping the base in food and ammunition proved a daily struggle. A big KC-130 transport was hit by incoming fire and exploded on the runway on February 10, killing six people. Khe Sanh's airstrip, dreaded by fliers all over Vietnam, was a favorite target of NVA artillery men, and one of the most dangerous places in a country chock-full of them. So hazardous was the airstrip that the air force stopped landing its star transport, the big, vulnerable C-130, and began to drop supplies out of the back hatch of the C-130s and the smaller C-123s. The so-called low-altitude parachute extraction system required steady nerves and a strong heart, as pilots had to bring their planes to within five feet of the tarmac and then pull up hard, while parachutes dragged the cargo pallets out of the rear. In March and February alone, eight transports were lost to NVA antiaircraft fire. Hundreds more were tagged by small arms and machine-gun fire on the way in or out.