Vietnam (17 page)

While all this was going on, the American people were treated to nightly reports from the bunkers of Khe Sanh which remained under siege for 77 days. Fifteen miles south of the DMZ and near to the Laotian border, this forward base straddled Route 9, an old French road that linked the Laotian towns along the Mekong to the coast, and it had become a major infiltration route. A base had first been established around a French airstrip there by the Green Berets so that they could recruit and train local hill tribesman. At that time, the rolling hills around the little village of Khe Sanh were considered one of the most beautiful places on earth, but all that was about to change. In the summer of 1966, General Westmoreland strengthened the base at Khe Sanh as a springboard for operations into Laos, which President Johnson later vetoed. Bulldozers were brought in to extend the French airstrip, which was carpeted with metal planking, while engineers built a huge new combat base. Tons of ammunition and matériel were stockpiled there, and a battalion of US Marines were sent in to defend it.

Throughout 1967, the Marines met the North Vietnamese Army in a number of pitched battles in the surrounding hills. Then in late 1967, intelligence reports indicated the Communists were gearing up for a major attack. Sensors on the Ho Chi Minh trail picked up just over a thousand truck movements around Khe Sanh. By December that number had increased to six and a half thousand and in early January 1968 there were reports of large-scale NVA troop movements in the area between Route 9 and the DMZ. By that time there were 6,000 Marines at Khe Sanh. On 10 January, a Marine detachment patrolling the surrounding hills ran into a battalion of NVA. The ensuing firefight convinced the base commander Colonel David E. Lownds that the long-awaited attack was now on its way. A showing of the Elvis Presley movie
Paradise Hawaiian Style
was cancelled and the Officers' Club closed until further notice. Marines cleared their small arms with short bursts of fire. The 105mm artillery guns were readied. The barbed wire defensive perimeter was checked and extra claymore mines and trip flares were laid.

NVA gunners began to lob range-finding shells into the compound and the Marines started wearing their flak jackets at all times. The Marine artillery returned H&I (harassment and interdiction fire), though they had problems identifying their targets, the low cloud and dense fog that shrouded the surrounding hills making it impossible for airborne observers to 'walk' the Marine's gunfire onto the NVA artillery positions. The various electronic sensors in the area were too inaccurate to tell if the Marines had hit anything, and to send observations teams out into the NVA-infested territory would be the same as handing the spotters their death certificates at the gates of the camp.

On nearby Hill 881S (881 South), Captain Bill Dabney and India Company met an NVA lieutenant who strolled up to the patrol waving a white flag. He told Marine interrogators that the NVA planned to attack at 0030hrs that night. After overrunning the base at Khe Sanh and the surrounding hills, they would go on to take the cities of Quang Tri province and Hué. Although the man could have been a plant to spook the Marines, Lownds decided that he had nothing to lose by believing him. Exactly as the deserter had predicted, Hill 861 to the east came under heavy rocket, mortar and machine-gun fire and a fierce battle for the possession of the hill broke out. Five hours later, the base itself came under fire. Hundreds of 122mm rockets, each weighing over a hundred pounds, screamed into the Marine positions. One of the first hit a large ammunition bunker, and the whole plateau was lit up as 1,500 tons of ammunition went sky high. Shells of every description came raining down, some exploding on impact, others 'cooking off' in the intense fires caused as the oil and aviation fuel dumps ignited. Buildings were blown away and the helicopters parked on the airstrip were knocked over like ten-pins. The explosion reduced the length of the runway to 2,000 feet, which meant that four-engined C-130 Hercules aircraft could not land. Only smaller twin-engined C-123 Providers with one third the cargo capacity could get in. They had to be turned around within three minutes. Meanwhile, more rockets, artillery shells, and heavy-mortar rounds came screaming into the compound.

On the morning of 21 January, the sun came up to reveal what was left of the base. Fires were still burning. There was blackened debris everywhere and the compound was full of unexploded ordinance and shrapnel. As the tired and shell-shocked Marines struggled to put the base back onto a war footing, they were constantly harassed by more incoming fire. For the rest of the month, the NVA kept up its pressure on Khe Sanh and the surrounding hills. But abandoning the battle-scarred base was not an option. Westmoreland had gone on TV, telling the American people how important it was to hold Khe Sanh and there was no chance of the world being allowed to see Marines retreating down Route 9 with their tails between their legs. Westmoreland believed that the battle for Khe Sanh would be as decisive as the battle for Dien Bien Phu. Walter Cronkite agreed.

'The parallels were there for all to see,' he told a CBS radio audience.

Even the formidable 304th Division that had won the day at Dien Bien Phu turned up on the battlefield. During the siege, President Johnson had a sand-table model of the base built in the basement of the White House and, expressing his fear that Khe Sanh might turn into another Dien Bien Phu, took the unprecedented step of having a declaration that they would hold Khe Sanh 'signed in blood' by the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. On 10 February a North Vietnamese newspaper also picked up on the analogy. But the analogy was wrong.

At Dien Bien Phu the French had been caught in a remote valley where they could not be resupplied and were outgunned by superior Vietnamese artillery. Throughout the siege at Khe Sanh the Marines were resupplied by parachute drops and landings on the airstrip, which had been repaired, though planes landing there were shot at and hit by rockets. Three C-123s and two C-130s were lost, and a Marine was killed when a pallet from an air drop crashed onto his bunker. Neither was Khe Sanh outgunned. It had artillery support from the Rockpile and Camp Carroll, and more than 75,000 tons of high explosives were dropped on the NVA formations – the largest aerial assault on a tactical target in the history of warfare. This had begun as early as 6 January, when 600 tactical air strikes were flown against enemy bunkers, trench and tunnel networks, supply depots, assembly areas, and forward units. The French fort at Dien Bien Phu also lay in a valley, while the Vietminh occupied the surrounding hills, while at Khe Sanh, the Marines held onto the surrounding hills, despite intense fighting.

At Dien Bien Phu, both the Vietminh and French had massed themselves for a final battle: at Khe Sanh, both sides knew that was not on the cards. A Communist victory could not be decisive, as the US was still entrenched throughout the South. Besides, the French had lost at Dien Bien Phu; Westmoreland was determined to win. He had moved 6,000 Marines into the area and initiated Operation Niagara, the campaign of tactical air strikes against the NVA that would break up enemy concentrations and make an organised attack on the Marine base impossible. Westmoreland even drew up plans to use tactical nuclear weapons, arguing that this would force the Communists to capitulate. Fearing protests at home, Washington issued a directive ordering him to halt these plans in case the press found out. On 16 February, after much public speculation, President Johnson denied that he ever considered using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

Some 2,000 French and 8,000 Vietminh troops died in the 54-day siege at Dien Bien Phu. At Khe Sanh, just 204 Marines died during the siege and, although only 1,622 NVA bodies were left on the battlefield, Westmoreland reckoned between ten and fifteen thousand were killed. Some Communist units had losses of 90 per cent. Even the NVA commander, General Giap, almost lost his life at Khe Sanh, when 36 B-52s bombarded his field headquarters with a thousand tons of high explosives after intelligence intercepts revealed that a high-ranking Communist was in the area. But despite their losses, the NVA and Vietcong had good strategic reasons to continue their assault. America had made the battle a test of its prestige and the fighting there diverted 30,000 US troops away from the South Vietnamese cities that were the targets of the Tet Offensive.

Throughout the siege, Westmoreland maintained that the Tet Offensive was just a feint to distract the American forces from the main struggle at Khe Sanh. Khe Sanh was the feint. However, had Khe Sanh fallen after the US humiliation at its Embassy in Saigon it is unlikely that the American people would have allowed the war to continue.

The US Marine Corps itself was not happy about defending Khe Sanh. Marine commander Major-General Lowell English described Khe Sanh as 'a trap' which forced Westmoreland to expend 'absolutely unreasonable amounts of men and maté riel to defend a piece of terrain that wasn't worth a damn'. He had not wanted to defend it in the first place, and General Westmoreland used the siege as an excuse to put the Corps under army command and its air wing under the control of the air force.

As the siege continued into February, the base continued to be pounded daily by enemy fire and the Marines were constantly on the alert for the unstoppable human-wave assaults that the NVA mounted. Ditches regularly snaked their way up toward the perimeter wire and the NVA constantly probed the defences. But the Marines drew comfort from the amount of firepower they could call in. The base itself had plenty of heavy mortars and batteries of 105 and 155mm guns, and barrages from the sixteen huge 175mms at the Rockpile and Camp Carroll to the northeast could be called in. B-52s, along with 350 fighter-bombers from the USAF, navy, and Marine Corps, would pound everything from the NVA positions just outside the wire to their supply areas and long-range gun platforms over in Laos. Poor visibility hampered air support, but low-level bombers would go right down through the ack-ack fire into the soup and hope that during bombing runs they did not run into one of the hills in the area that rose to a thousand feet . Over hot targets, the bombing runs came in so thick and fast that the planes would stack up in a holding pattern, which one pilot compared to the traffic pattern at O'Hare on a foggy day. Pilots of the A-4 Skyhawk, A-6 Intruder, F-4 Phantom, and F-8 Crusader strike aircraft had to make instant decisions in cloud cover, dodging enemy fire, whether the people on the ground were a formation of NVA or a group of refugees fleeing the area, while the B-52s bombed up to within 1,000 feet of the Marines, though 3,000 was considered the safe distance. Closer than that, 500-pound high-explosive bombs would burst eardrums, at the very least. Up to 108 were dropped at a time. In all 2,700 B-52 missions and 24,000 tactical air strikes were made during the defence of Khe Sanh, while AC-47 'Puff the Magic Dragon' gunships maintained the pressure on the NVA at night. Despite the appalling weather conditions only one F-4 Phantom and one A-4 Skyhawk were lost, though the Marines also lost seventeen helicopters that resupplied positions on the outlying hills.

Living conditions inside the base became intolerable. The constant noise of incoming and outgoing artillery shells and the scream of jets overhead meant the men got little sleep. Piles of garbage mouldered around the base. Human excrement had to be doused in black oil and burned in oil drums. The stench was sickening. The Marines lived in underground bunkers that reeked of sweat and urine, plagued by rats who would jump on them from the rafters at night. Men trying to sleep would cover their faces to prevent them being bitten. Bites developed into ugly infections and running sores, which some men encouraged by smearing their toes with peanut butter – a bad rat bite was a ticket out of Khe Sanh.

The base was hit by over 1,000 rounds of incoming fire some days. Any movement above ground attracted the attention of snipers. On 23 February, 29 men from Bravo company under Lieutenant Jacques went out to deal with an NVA mortar position that was pounding the base with uncanny accuracy. They walked straight into a wave of rifle fire and only four of them made it back to the perimeter. The remains of the other 25 lay outside the wire for four weeks before they could be retrieved.

Each morning a tattered Stars and Stripes would be hauled up the flagpole on Hill 881S to show that the Marines still occupied it. Captain Dabney ordered his men to stand to attention until the last note of the bugle had sounded, despite being in the enemy line of fire. Some days the battle became so intense that men had to stand in line to piss on the mortar tubes to keep them cool. On Hill 881, the casualty rate was 50 per cent and the men got down to a one-quart canteen of water a day. Marines were constantly in danger of being shot by snipers and medevac helicopters carrying the wounded were brought down. However, only small-scale attacks were launched against the base itself: Westmoreland never got the full-scale battle that he craved.