A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Sheehan, Neil

  Westmoreland saw the purpose as useful. He gave Krulak several reasons for wanting a solitary airfield six miles from Laos and fifteen miles below the Demilitarized Zone. One was its possible future use as a jumping-off point (Route 9 went through the Khe Sanh Valley) should he ever receive permission for a thrust into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. (The president, McNamara, Rusk, and most other leading members of the administration were opposed to a move into Laos for fear that it might bring China into the war. Westmoreland also placed a curiously low priority on it, given the fact that depriving the Viet Cong of reinforcements and supplies from the North would seem to be a sine qua non of any attrition approach to the war. He was to say in his memoirs that he did not think he would be able to spare enough American troops to attempt a Laos thrust until 1968 and did not plan to lobby hard for the operation until that time. He already had a Special Forces camp at Khe Sanh in 1966 and could, of course, have waited to secure the place with Marines until he actually needed the airfield for a cutting of the Trail.)

  As Westmoreland talked, Krulak could see that his overriding motive for sending Marines to Khe Sanh was the hope that a Marine base isolated in the mountains would attract thousands of North Vietnamese troops who presumably could be pulverized by U.S. firepower. Krulak flew back to Pearl Harbor, the Seabees and a battalion of Marines went to Khe Sanh, and Westmoreland, more determined than ever to bring Walt to heel, turned up the pressure. He soon had five additional battalions of Marines maneuvering full-time in northern Quang Tri Province in search of fights with the NVA.

  Krulak appealed to Walt to defy folly. He sent him a cable at the end of the first week of October marked “SPECAT [Special Category] EXCLUSIVE FOR LTGEN WALT FROM LTGEN KRULAK/MARINE CORPS EYES ONLY.” The cable was one of those supersensitive messages between generals that are called “back channels” because they are transmitted by the intelligence communications men over their separate circuits for greater secrecy. “If I were the enemy,” Krulak said, he would regard pacification, and particularly the Marine demonstration that pacification could succeed, “as the greatest threat to my aspirations on the Indochina Peninsula.” There was a way to remove that threat. It was to divert the Marines by “applying Mao’s tactical doctrine, ‘Uproar in the East, Strike in the West.’” Diversion had been the mission of the 324B Division. “Additionally, the northern battlefield is his [the enemy’s] choice and to his liking.” The fury in Krulak showed when he moved to his conclusion. “Our current actions in Quang Tri are probably agreeable to the NVN. I believe they are glad we have a battalion invested in the defense of Khe Sanh, and that we have five other battalions operating in the inhospitable jungle which might otherwise be engaged in Revolutionary Development Support [the official term for pacification]. … We may expect him [the enemy] to hang on to our forces in Quang Tri as long as he can.”

  Westmoreland and the Vietnamese Communists had eliminated Walt’s room to maneuver. The issue had been narrowed to simple obedience to a military superior. If Walt kept resisting as Krulak was goading him to do, Westmoreland would have him relieved. Getting himself relieved on principle would not allow Walt to affect strategy, nor would his defiance be widely understood. Lyndon Johnson was not the only American who had confidence in William Westmoreland. The general was popular with the press and the public. He had already been on the cover of Time once and in his second appearance at the end of 1966 was Time’s Man of the Year. Walt does not seem to have had Krulak’s acute perception that if Westmoreland had his way, Marines would die from that day forth for the benefit of the enemy. He seems to have rationalized that he could continue pacification at a reduced level while fighting a war of attrition along the DMZ.

  Lew Walt was not the kind of Marine who would wage permanent guerrilla warfare against an Army superior with whom he disagreed. And he was the kind of Marine who in the end makes his decisions for reasons that are not subject to logic. It had turned out afterward that the Japanese forces on Cape Gloucester and Peleliu could not have seriously interfered with MacArthur’s advance to the Philippines. They could have been left to curse and starve as Japanese were on many bypassed Pacific islands. The valor of Walt and his fellow Marines at Cape Gloucester and Peleliu had been as unnecessary as that much-better-known epic of superfluous Marine courage at Tarawa. But those Marines of World War II had died without knowing that their sacrifice was not needed, and in the end victory had redeemed it. Somehow the sacrifice of Marines would be redeemed in this war too.

  Walt gave in and withdrew the 3rd Marine Division from the Da Nang area in October, shifting it north of the Hai Van Pass. Westmoreland had him establish a series of strongpoints along the DMZ. Those on the east were right on the edge of the zone at Gio Linh and Con Thien. Another series farther back moved west with Route 9 toward Khe Sanh: Cam Lo; Camp Carroll (named for a Marine captain who died to seize a nearby ridge); a humplike mound still farther west, just twelve miles from Khe Sanh, that more Marines died to possess and that they dubbed “the Rockpile;” and a place not far down the road called Ca Lu.

  Westmoreland sent Walt Army artillery batteries of 175mm guns to install in the strongpoints. The “Long Toms” could throw a 147-pound shell twenty miles, covering Khe Sanh and beyond almost to the Laotian border, or all the way across the DMZ into North Vietnam. This “strong-point obstacle system,” Westmoreland explained in his memoirs, was “designed to channel the enemy into well-defined corridors where we might bring air and artillery to bear and then hit him with mobile ground reserves.” The 1st Marine Division was extended now from Chu Lai to Da Nang. Westmoreland formed a provisional Army division of three brigades, called Task Force Oregon and subsequently to be named the Americal after a provisional division MacArthur had organized during World War II, and dispatched it to I Corps in April 1967, to take over responsibility for Quang Ngai Province and the Chu Lai sector. The 1st Marines were obviously stretched too thin, and he also wanted to dilute the Marine monopoly in I Corps. He planned to move more Army divisions into the war there as they became available. Walt did not abandon his pacification program. It shriveled.

  Krulak watched from Pearl Harbor in the position Vann had known in 1963. He could see the catastrophe coming and was helpless to stop it. The system might provide a hearing to a man of his rank and accomplishments; a rational response was another matter. Greene could do no more, and Admiral Sharp, Commander in Chief Pacific, had long since ceased to be of help. Under pressure from the Joint Chiefs to support Westmoreland in his perpetual wrestling with McNamara for more troops, Oley Sharp had developed a tendency simply to affirm whatever Westmoreland wanted. Westmoreland looked with satisfaction at the escalating combat along the DMZ. “We’ll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for generations,” he announced as he sent the first Army division to I Corps.

  Ten days after Westmoreland’s boast, on April 24, 1967, a five-man Marine forward observer party from Khe Sanh was ambushed in a grove of bamboo on Hill 861 northwest of the airstrip. One Marine survived. The first and the cruelest struggle at Khe Sanh, the “Hill Fights,” began.

  Krulak had been right that to hold Khe Sanh the Marines would have to garrison the hills that dominated the valley. The Vietnamese understood this and seized the hills. A regiment from the NVA’s 325C Division marched in through the fog and under the low clouds of the monsoon and occupied Hill 861 and the two hills beyond it—881 South and 881 North. A second regiment from the division hid itself in a reserve position behind the hills. It was subsequently discovered that North Vietnamese combat engineer troops had probably been at work on the three hills for months without being detected by the Marines before the main body of NVA infantry arrived. (Walt had reduced the Marine battalion originally stationed at Khe Sanh in September to a reinforced company in February, because the battalion had been unable to find any North Vietnamese worth mentioning.) Westmoreland wanted to keep the airstrip. The Marines
therefore had to drive the Vietnamese from the heights. They did not know the strength of the enemy they faced, nor did they suspect the nature of the battleground the Vietnamese had prepared.

  For three days two companies of Marines—initially the company stationed at Khe Sanh, quickly followed by a second company under a battalion command group sent to take charge—attempted to clear Hill 861. The word “hill” is field shorthand for what is properly called a “hill mass” in military terminology. Hill 861 and Hills 881 South and 881 North were clusters of intertwining ridges, the highest ridge forming the crest that gave the hill mass its designation by height in meters. (Hills 881 South and 881 North happened to be the same height and so were differentiated by the fact that one was north of the other.)

  The Vietnamese on Hill 861 let the Marines climb the ridges to within fifteen to twenty yards, then raked the Americans with fusillades from positions concealed in the undergrowth. Shells hurled by 82mm mortars from unseen pits somewhere back in the ridgelines crashed into the Marines, killing and wounding more of them. Counterfire by the Marine mortars, salvos of high explosive and white phosphorus from the howitzers at the airstrip, strafing and rocket runs by Huey gunships, and bombs and napalm from the jets of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing interrupted but did not silence the enemy mortars or discourage the NVA infantry. When the Marines tried to disengage, the Vietnamese would not let go. They followed the Americans, harrying them with automatic-weapons fire. The Marines could not evacuate their wounded. Whenever they called in a helicopter the Vietnamese would plaster the landing zone with mortar shells.

  The two companies were separated. The Khe Sanh company was on the northwest side of Hill 861, the company with the battalion command group was on the south. The battalion commander told the Khe Sanh company to link up with the company to which he was attached. The captain leading the Khe Sanh company replied that after three days of combat he did not have enough able-bodied men left to carry the dead and wounded that far. Marines abhor abandoning their dead because of the mystical comradeship of the Corps. Leave the dead, the battalion commander ordered. The captain answered that he still would not have enough able-bodied Marines to carry out the wounded, and wounded Marines cannot be abandoned under any circumstances. He said he was pulling into a nearby bank of fog to hide from the mortars and “fight until it was over” against the NVA infantry he was certain would follow.

  The artillery officer back at the airstrip had his batteries walk shells to the company through the fog. He circled the beleaguered men with shrapnel, as Sergeant Savage had done to save Moore’s lost platoon, until a platoon from a third Marine company flown to Khe Sanh as reinforcements could infiltrate to them at dusk. Litters for the wounded were improvised out of ponchos; the dead were slung in ponchos to be carried too; and the Marines gathered up all of the rifles and equipment. When the column set out to march back through the darkness and rain and a fog that thickened with the lowering temperatures of the night, only the men at the point and the rear guard walked without burdens. The periodic downpours turned the dirt of the trails into slippery mud. The days had become hotter now toward the end of the rainy season, and the corpses had deteriorated and bloated. Many times during the night the Marines carrying one of the dead stumbled and the body fell out of the poncho and rolled down the slope. The column halted. The body was retrieved and laid in the poncho again, and the march resumed. When the Marines reached safety at dawn they had left none of their comrades behind.

  The second company also disengaged with the help of the reinforcements. The two depleted companies were replaced, and the Marines built up their forces at Khe Sanh to two battalions under a regimental command post while the 105s and the 155s at the airstrip, Westmoreland’s 175s firing from one of the strongpoints back across the mountains, and the Marine fighter-bombers battered and burned Hill 861 for a day and a night. A battalion then assaulted the hill. The Vietnamese were gone. They had apparently withdrawn to the next hill, 881 South, possibly soon after the fight with the two companies and before the worst of the bombardment had begun. They left many of their dead behind. Otherwise, as the Marine regimental after-action report noted, “the battle area was extremely well policed by the enemy; virtually no equipment or information of intelligence value remained.” The Marines did count twenty-five bunkers on Hill 861, and they found 400 foxholes on and around it and mortar pits on the back slopes. The overhead cover on a number of the bunkers was six feet high in layers of bamboo and packed earth and grass, thick enough to protect the NVA troops inside from a direct hit by the artillery. The bunkers should have made the Marine regimental and battalion commanders suspicious.

  The battalion that launched another headlong assault against Hill 881 South after another day and night of battering and burning attacked right into a man trap. The Vietnamese held fire once more until the lead platoons were fifteen to twenty yards from the bunkers in the undergrowth and the opening volley would have maximum killing effect. Snipers hidden in trees not yet knocked down by bombs and shells picked out radio operators and machine gunners and killed them carefully with a single shot through the head or the chest. At the same moment, salvos of 82mm mortar shells again exploded among the Marines. The NVA did not seem to mind calling mortar fire so close that they were, in effect, bringing it down on their own positions.

  Marines are unsurpassed as assault troops, and these Marines pressed forward with the classic aggressiveness instilled by the Corps. They discovered that the farther they fought their way into the Vietnamese position, the more resistance they encountered and the worse their situation became. Soon those men still capable of fighting were unable to go forward or back. The fire from the bunkers, foxholes, and trenches in front was withering. Meanwhile, Vietnamese in bunkers the Marines had fought their way past were back in action behind them and had cut off their retreat.

  Krulak’s warning in his strategy paper that the Vietnamese Communists wanted “violent, close-quarters combat” because it “tends to diminish the effectiveness” of air and artillery was turning out to be something of an understatement. The Marines on 881 South were feeling the extent of the diminishment. While Westmoreland had been thinking about ports and warehouses for his attrition machine, the Vietnamese had been learning better ways to fight the Americans. There were not twice as many bunkers on 881 South as the Marines had found on Hill 861, there were ten times as many, and the approximately 250 bunkers on this hill were astonishingly rugged. The smaller ones, apparently two-or three-man affairs, had been constructed with roofs consisting of two layers of logs topped by five feet of dirt. Larger four-man bunkers had still better protection overhead and, before the battle, had served as fairly comfortable living quarters. They were fitted with storage shelves, bamboo-mat floors, and a drainage system to keep them dry. The largest bunkers, clearly the command posts, had roofs with four to eight layers of logs and then four feet of packed earth above the logs. Field telephone wire had been strung throughout the bunker complex so that the NVA battalion, company, and platoon commanders could talk to each other during the battle and they and the forward observers could adjust the mortars by calling instructions to the crews in the pits on the rear slopes.

  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.