The Cold War (54 page)

RONALD H. SPECTOR

Peace talks, after much argument about where they should take place, began in Paris on May 13, 1968. It was already a given that their fate would depend on the military situation half a world away. Indeed, the Communists went back on the offensive. They kept it up through much of May. They attacked across the thirty-nine-mile-long buffer at the 17th Parallel that formed the boundary between the two Vietnams: the famous demilitarized zone (though it wasn't)—or DMZ, as it was known more familiarly—that had been set up in the mid-1950s after the French vacated Indochina. They attacked Saigon and struck elsewhere along the seven-hundred-mile crescent of South Vietnam. The Americans called the new offensive “Little Tet.” This time, without the distraction of Khe Sanh, they were better prepared.

The coastal wetlands south of the DMZ first saw a series of interconnected actions that, taken as one, may have constituted the largest single battle of the war. It was called Dai Do, after a contested river village, but the names of a number of hamlets might have done just as well. In a month of continuous fighting, the Communist push was stopped, but the North Vietnamese then went on the defensive, which they were better at anyway. American troops, Ronald H. Spector writes, were “sent against superbly concealed and protected Communist bunker complexes without benefit of adequate reconnaissance and sometimes without appropriate supporting arms. Units were often fed into battles piecemeal without any clear idea of enemy strength and dispositions.” In terms of weaponry alone, the American M-16 rifle, which had a tendency to jam at the worst moments, was clearly inferior to the Communist AK-47. Was Dai Do a diversion for the more important attacks to the south? The
Americans did end in charge, but at a price. As Spector writes, they “suffered more than 1,500 casualties, including 327 dead, a figure equal to the number of marines killed at Khe Sanh over the entire seventy-seven days of the so-called siege.”

On May 5, Saigon exploded, as rocket and mortar fire swept the city of 3 million. VC troops concealed by the Communist underground took over entire sections and held them for several days. Some 30,000 homes were destroyed; 500 civilians died, and another 4,500 were wounded, most of them in house-to-house fighting. “The Vietcong has no air force,” the Saigon police chief remarked, “so it uses ours.” Another Vietnamese official told a
Newsweek
reporter that “We cannot go on destroying entire blocks every time a Viet Cong steps into a house.” As far as increasing numbers of Americans at home were concerned, our military in Vietnam could do nothing right.

The numbers of Communist attacks that May were impressive (as were their casualties), but the results were less so. There was one exception: the envelopment of Kham Duc. Ten miles from the Laotian border, Kham Duc was a base for the so-called Studies and Operations Group (SDG), reconnaissance teams that performed special operations inside Laos and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Communists were especially eager to rid themselves of its annoying presence. The fighting at this Khe Sanh in reverse, which Spector describes here, may have been the most unequivocal debacle for American arms in Vietnam, though its final hours were also heroic ones. The end came on May 11–12 and may have provided the Communists with the victory they sought as the peace conference opened.

RONALD H. SPECTOR is a professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of
After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam,
from which the story of Kham Duc is excerpted;
Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan;
and
At War at Sea
. Spector served in Vietnam as a Marine Corps historian.

A
T THE BEGINNING
of April 1968, U.S. Marines and Air Cavalry troops in Vietnam lifted the siege of Khe Sanh in one of the largest operations of the war. As the North Vietnamese withdrew from the area of the beleaguered marine base, leaving behind evidence of their heavy losses, a communiqué from the headquarters of the U.S. commander, General William Westmoreland, declared that for the Communists, the battle of Khe Sanh had been “a Dien Bien Phu in reverse.” Under two months later, however, U.S. forces were to suffer a sharp defeat at another remote outpost near the Laotian border—a defeat that was, in a sense, a Khe Sanh in reverse.

The months following the Tet attacks at the end of January had been a time of stress and of calamity not always averted. Early in February, Communist troops, supported for the first time by tanks, overran the Lang Vei Special Forces camp near Khe Sanh, killing 200 of its 500 defenders, including ten of its more than two dozen American advisers. After the much publicized fall of Lang Vei, Kham Duc was the last remaining Special Forces camp of I Corps along the Laotian border. Far from the urban centers and coastal farmlands, Kham Duc sat in the center of a mile-wide green bowl in the rugged country of northwestern Quang Tin province. Route 14, the principle north-south road through the border region, ran through the base. Just across that border, ten miles away, the roads and tracks of the Ho Chi Minh Trail extended their fingers south and east, some already reaching Route 14 itself.

Like Khe Sanh and Lang Vei, Kham Duc and Ngoc Tavak—its satellite camp three miles closer to Laos—did not truly block the enemy's infiltration into South Vietnam. The border country was too rugged, the Communists' lateral roads were too numerous, and the camps' garrisons were too small to do that; yet the units holding them kept the Communists under observation and
frequently interdicted their movements. Their presence meant that there would always be some sand and gravel thrown into the smoothly meshed gears of the Laotian infiltration system.

Since early April, U.S. Army engineer units had been at work upgrading Kham Duc's runway and constructing a concrete base to support the radio navigation facility. As the improvements to the base progressed, so did Communist preparations for attack. By late April, U.S. intelligence was reporting large enemy units in the area, including elements of the 2nd Division of the North Vietnamese Army. A prisoner taken on May 3 reported that his unit was planning to attack Kham Duc. Four months before, when Khe Sanh had been similarly threatened, the Americans had poured in reinforcements and air support. Now the Americans again began reinforcing. A battalion task force of the Americal Division, consisting of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry, an additional infantry company, and some supporting artillery, began arriving by air at Kham Duc late in the morning of May 10. Lieutenant Colonel Robert B. Nelson, commander of the 2nd Battalion, took charge of the camp.

Nelson's men joined about 60 army engineers, approximately 400 Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) soldiers, and the latter's South Vietnamese and U.S. Special Forces leaders and advisers. Neither as well armed nor as well trained as the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, the CIDG were mercenaries that the Special Forces had recruited and organized from among the various highland, non-Vietnamese tribal, ethnic, and religious minorities. The CIDG's key missions were surveillance, scouting, patrol, and local security. Although their leaders were sometimes bound to the Special Forces and the government by personal ties or political deals, they were primarily freelance soldiers, hired as a group on a contractual basis. Their behavior in a crisis varied from cowardice and treachery to stalwart heroism, depending on the specific situation and the tribal group involved.

Even as reinforcements were arriving at Kham Duc, Ngoc Tavak was already under attack. Located on the site of an old French fort, Ngoc Tavak was defended by a 113-man CIDG Mobile Strike Force company, with eight U.S. Army Special Forces troops and three Australian training-team advisers. Thirtythree U.S. Marines manned two 105mm howitzers, which had recently been moved to Ngoc Tavak to interdict nearby North Vietnamese routes and trails. However, the howitzers were short of ammunition and could be resupplied only by air from Kham Duc.

At about three in the morning on May 10, the Communists opened their
final heavy-artillery and mortar barrage against the base, followed by a ground attack some thirty minutes later. During the height of the action, some of the CIDG troops abandoned their positions and fled toward the compound, yelling, “Don't shoot, don't shoot, friendly, friendly.” But once inside the compound, these “friendly” troops tossed grenades and satchel charges at the marine positions, causing heavy casualties. Some of the surviving Americans believed they could also hear the distinctive sound of carbines being fired at them by the CIDGs. (Only the CIDGs had carbines; NVA troops carried AK-47s, whose high-velocity rounds sound quite different.)

The Special Forces commander, Captain Christopher J. Silva, and the commander of the marine battery, Lieutenant Adams, were both badly wounded during the night. As the North Vietnamese attackers penetrated the perimeter and advanced into the eastern end of the camp, the remaining defenders pulled back and called for support from air force gunships and fighter-bombers. The defenders believed that some of the wounded were still on the western side of the camp, though as the North Vietnamese closed in, the Americans had no choice but to call for the gunships to blast the western side with their deadly fléchettes (artillery rounds with dartlike meta1 projections) and cannon fire.

At dawn two Australian warrant officers managed to organize a counterattack by the CIDG troops who were still loyal: They cleared the perimeter and recaptured the howitzer positions abandoned during the nighttime attack. Yet the marines were almost out of shells for their 105s.

Four CH-46 helicopters carrying reinforcements from Kham Duc arrived later that morning, greeted by a hail of fire from the North Vietnamese forces surrounding Ngoc Tavak. The first chopper managed to land safely and unload its cargo of about twenty-five CIDG troops, but as the second approached the landing zone, its fuel line was severed by automatic-weapons fire. The damaged chopper, fuel streaming from its fuselage, settled safely on the ground and unloaded its troops. The third helicopter landed alongside and discharged its reinforcements as the crew of the crippled CH-46 jumped aboard. But as the third chopper was about to lift off, it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade round and burst into flames. The landing zone was now unusable, and only small UH-l medevac helicopters could land at the camp to take off the severely wounded. As one medevac chopper came in to hover off a nearby hill, a large number of panicky CIDG soldiers rushed aboard; others held on to the skids as the helicopter lifted off, then fell to their deaths several hundred feet below.

The senior surviving officer, Captain White of the Australian training team,
was now in command. Requesting permission to evacuate the camp, he was told to hang on. But with the helicopter pad unserviceable, water and ammunition nearly exhausted, most of the Americans killed or wounded, and the steadiness of the CIDG a doubtful proposition, White believed he had no choice but to abandon the camp before darkness brought renewed attacks. The men destroyed the damaged helicopter and any weapons that they could not take with them.

Avoiding the obvious routes to Kham Duc, where the enemy was almost certain to be waiting in ambush, White led his men southeast through heavy jungle to a hill about a mile from Ngoc Tavak, where they hacked out a landing zone. CH-46s quickly swooped in to take the survivors back to Kham Duc.

The loss of Ngoc Tavak had been a costly one. Of the forty-four Americans and Australians at Ngoc Tavak, fifteen had been killed and twenty-three wounded, and two were missing. Of the hundred-odd CIDG troops, sixty-four were missing or had deserted, and thirty were dead or wounded. By the time the dazed and exhausted survivors reached Kham Duc, that camp, too, was under attack.

Scattered mortar fire rained down on the camp on May 11, as the last of the Americal reinforcements and additional supplies were flown into the besieged base. By the end of that day, there was a total of some 1,500 U.S. and CIDG soldiers at Kham Duc, as well as almost 300 dependents of the CIDG troops who had been evacuated from their village near the base. Many of the Americal troops had been sent to reinforce the outposts in the hills surrounding the bowlshaped valley where the camp was located.

Late in the night of the eleventh, troops of the 1st Vietcong Regiment, 2nd NVA Division, began their final preparations for an assault on Kham Duc. Around four A
.
M. the Communists overran the first of the outposts, Number 7, on a hill northeast of the base. By that time, General Westmoreland had already decided to abandon the camp.

Since the arrival of U.S. forces in Vietnam, some of the largest and most stubborn battles had begun as contests for the control of Special Forces camps such as Khe Sanh. Kham Duc had appeared likely to be the next such battleground, with powerful enemy forces converging on the base, U.S. reinforcements arriving, and support and strike aircraft being summoned to aid the defenders.

Yet as U.S. commanders studied the impending battle, they began to have
second thoughts. When Colonel Jonathan Ladd, commander of Special Forces in Vietnam, met with Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman, Jr., the commander of the III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF), he found Cushman unwilling to commit more troops to Kham Duc. Ladd pointed out that strong reinforcements would be needed to hold the camp against an attack by a reinforced North Vietnamese regiment. But Cushman had few uncommitted troops to spare and was concerned about a new threat posed by the build-up of Communist forces in the An Hoa basin area southeast of Da Nang. A reserve CIDG Mobile Strike Force company had already been dispatched to another threatened Special Forces camp, Thuong Duc, located on the main western approaches to Da Nang. Cushman also pointed out that Kham Duc would be difficult to resupply and was beyond the artillery range of friendly supporting bases.

On the afternoon of May 11, Ladd accompanied the deputy commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), Creighton Abrams, to a meeting with Cushman and Major General Samuel Koster, the Americal Division commander. Koster had assumed operational control of the Kham Duc battle. At the meeting, the III MAF staff briefed the generals on the situation at Kham Duc. They recommended that the camp be abandoned—or, as they phrased it, “relocated.” Colonel Ladd strongly disagreed, pointing out that Kham Duc was the last South Vietnamese outpost of southern I Corps in the western mountains. He also emphasized that it was an important launching site for the super-secret teams innocuously called the Studies and Observation Group, which conducted reconnaissance missions and raids into Laos and other parts of Southeast Asia to observe and interdict lines of communication, capture prisoners, assess bomb damage, and collect intelligence. By 1968 the number of such missions had risen to more than three hundred a year. Further, Ladd suggested that the Communists might put a Kham Duc victory to propaganda use, especially in view of the peace talks opening in Paris.