Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  The pastoral quality of refreshments in the villa courtyard, like Felix’s easy laughter, masked real tension in the Poilane household. The Air Force pilots wore battle dress, all zippers and map pockets and sheath knives. The genial conversation was punctuated by the crash of artillery at the combat base, less than a mile away.

  Poilane was thirty-six years old. He had spent his life working this land, planting, and nurturing the groves of coffee trees that trembled in a green shimmer beneath the summer sun. The delicate trees, like fine grapevines, need almost a decade of care before they deliver up their treasure. Now, just as he harvested hundreds of tons of rich, red Rubuston and Cherri coffee beans, United States Marines were moving onto his plantation in large numbers, cutting trees for better fields of fire, building mountains of garbage, and harassing his Montagnard workers.

  Furthermore, the burgeoning Marine presence had shattered his plan to get the beans to market.

  In the time before the war, coffee beans from the Khe Sanh plantations traveled west on Route 9 to Savannakhet, the Laotian market town on the Mekong River. The war in Laos had closed that route years ago. Now, it was impossible to go east. The town of Ca Lu was only twelve miles down the road and Quang Tri, the old provincial capital with its moated citadel, was only twenty-five miles beyond that, but these places might as well have been in France.

  In early August, enemy troops had ambushed a large Marine truck convoy on Route 9 near Ca Lu, then destroyed the bridges, blocked the passes, and mined the highway to isolate the combat base at Khe Sanh. Supplied quite easily by air, the Marines suffered few hardships—but the cutting of the road was a disaster for Felix Poilane.

  He was, after all, a farmer. The years of war had drained his resources. The thick-walled, yellow cement villa was beginning to look shabby. His Montagnard workers had gone without their daily pay—rice allotments—for months; the stability of the civilian economy in Khe Sanh was seriously threatened. Felix Poilane’s only hope for income was in the hands of the American pilots in his courtyard. Their huge planes flew empty every day to bases near DaNang and Saigon. And so, he invited them often to his home, generously poured the cool, green drinks, and gave each a small bag of fresh coffee beans as a leavetaking gift.

  Felix Poilane was not yet discouraged. Bad times had visited in Khe Sanh before the autumn of 1967. This, too, would surely pass. He had been born in this beautiful place, one of the many sons of a gentleman botanist who had come here from France in the early 1920s.

  His father, Eugene Poilane, had discovered a place “like Europe, with small valleys, plenty of water and paths and flowers and hills, [with] land as good, as rich and red as in Tuscany.”

  With his wife Madame Bordeauducq, a proud woman who insisted upon keeping her maiden name “to look independent,” Eugene Poilane had cleared the jungle and begun to experiment with different crops. Sometimes, he vanished into the mountains, walking the narrow trails all the way to China, and Burma, and Siam. He returned with newly discovered plants, each wrapped carefully in moist leaves. Between 1922 and 1947, he sent thirty-six thousand samples to a botanical museum in France. He made coffee grow where it had never grown before, and he planted a garden of such rare variety that botanists came from all the countries of the world to visit in Khe Sanh. He cultivated avocado and jackfruit, and he made oranges bloom beside the fragrant white flowers of his coffee trees.

  “He made that plantation entirely himself, loving the land as if he’d been born there,” said a visitor. “People who talk about colonialism when it involves people like Papa Poilane make me laugh. He wasn’t a colonialist. He was a peasant who cultivated the land.”

  Wealthy sportsmen from America and France came to Khe Sanh in the early days to seek tiger pelts, and deer, civets, wild boar, bear, and rare panthers for their trophy rooms. They sailed up the Perfume River to Hue, found rooms at the tennis and swim club maintained for French gentlemen, and admired the flame trees and flowered moats that surrounded the thick, brick walls of the old citadel. It was only thirty-five miles up Highway One to Quang Tri, then thirty-five miles west to Khe Sanh.

  There, they found warm hospitality in the Poilane villa, a house “like the houses in Tuscany or in Auvergne: with a tower in the middle for the pigeons, and a courtyard in front . . . always full of dogs, cats, and chickens.”

  Madame Bordeauducq bore five children in Khe Sanh, and managed the plantation when Papa Poilane disappeared. She often spent long, uncomfortable nights perched in a tree, patiently waiting for a shot at the tigers that terrified her workers. Before her hair was iron grey, she had killed forty-five of them.

  “I don’t like to kill the tigers,” Madame Bordeauducq said, “but they eat up my peasants.”

  The remote valley did not escape World War II. Japanese occupation troops imposed a savage discipline in Vietnam until 1945, then abruptly pulled out. Chinese soldiers from Chiang Kai-shek’s armies moved into the vacuum—and behaved like conquerors until the French reimposed colonial rule in 1947.

  During these years Papa Poilane invited Madame Bordeauducq to leave his house. He married a Nung woman from North Vietnam, and quickly fathered a new family of five. He could sometimes be found in the misty mornings standing amidst his apple trees, wishing for the impossible frost that would give them fruit.

  Madame Bordeauducq moved a thousand yards to the east, cleared the dense brush from the land, and began planting new coffee groves for a plantation of her own. Her son, Felix, joined her, though he often walked next door to consult with his father on farm problems.

  New neighbors and new prosperity came to Khe Sanh after World War II. M. Simard and his wife settled on a coffee plantation west of the village, along the highway to Laos. M. Linares, a wealthy Frenchman of Spanish descent, settled with his Vietnamese wife and numerous children on a coffee plantation east of the village, on the road to Quang Tri and the coast. Linares loved his new home “like a woman,” and he used to tell visitors that he had asked God for only one thing: “I ask to die at Khe Sanh.”

  Benedictine brothers from a monastery in Hue carved out a small plantation between the town and Linares.

  French soldiers built several military outposts near the village, including a handsome concrete bunker and airstrip about a mile north of Route 9, but the First Indochinese War did not touch the families at Khe Sanh until its final year, 1954. Simard’s wife was killed in a Viet Minh mortar attack, and Papa Poilane took a shell fragment in the leg.

  The plantations had thrived again after the French war was over. Vietnamese merchants set up shop in the tiny village to do business with the Bru. Papa Poilane had become a legend, “an extraordinary man unusual in every sense” with a long, white beard and “keen, sparkly eyes.” He loved the Bru people, and it pleased him to let two of their most ancient elephants—each of whom was addressed respectfully as “Grandfather”—graze on the lawns of his villa.

  In 1958, the new South Vietnamese Army sent patrols to Khe Sanh, then up into the mountains to require the Bru to come down and live near the village. The resettlement made it possible for the government to protect the Bru—and to keep them from assisting the North Vietnamese.

  The people of the mountains probably numbered two million or more in the years before the war. They were scattered in tribal clusters throughout the Annamite Mountains, from the border with China in the north to the low foothills in the far south. Dark-skinned, primitive, they had developed distinct tribal identities in the thousand years of their mountain isolation. The Bru, a Montagnard tribe of more than thirty thousand, had never known national boundaries. Now they found their lands divided among Laos, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam—and well-armed soldiers telling them where they could and could not live.

  More than 13,000 Bru lived in the immediate vicinity—“reachable by road” was the South Vietnamese rule—of Khe Sanh village by 1960. Many had been forced to leave rich mountain hamlets that had small orchards, tobacco plots, and gardens.

  Th
e Bru practiced slash and burn agriculture, clearing small patches of jungle to grow rice, sweet potatoes, manioc, and corn. Every adult Bru worked in the rice fields, which had to be moved every two or three years when the soil was exhausted. Fish and game were abundant.

  Even after the resettlement, no Bru lived in Khe Sanh. The Vietnamese lived there, and their contempt for the mountain people was blatant. The Vietnamese traders and small farmers routinely cheated the Bru out of the rice they earned on the coffee plantations. The Montagnards were naïve, unskilled in business matters, and utterly without guile—but they were not stupid. They knew they were being cheated, and they searched for an understanding of behavior alien to their own culture. The conclusion was unanimous, and it could be heard in every household: “The Vietnamese have two gall bladders.”

  The Vietnamese Evangelical Protestant Church sent Pastor Bui Tan Loc as a missionary to the Bru. He tried to learn their language, and he became the first outsider to communicate readily with the mountain people.

  In January, 1962, John and Carolyn Miller came to Khe Sanh to begin fourteen years of work to learn the Bru language, devise a written alphabet and grammar, teach the mountain people how to read in their own language—and then put into their hands the New Testament, in Bru.

  John Miller was thirty when he arrived at Khe Sanh. Born near Allentown, Pa., the seventh of thirteen children, he had served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. While studying at Houghton College in upstate New York, he had decided to devote his life to unknotting the mysteries of unknown, unwritten languages so that their speakers could know the Bible.

  A quiet, shy student, John Miller discreetly courted the college president’s daughter by sending her Bible verses through the mail. Carolyn Paine was more than seven years his junior but she knew her suitor was serious when she read: “I thank God upon every remembrance of you . . . because I have you in my heart.”

  Miller wrote from a jungle training school in Mexico, and then from Vietnam where he had gone in 1959 to work with the Wycliffe Bible Translators. In 1961, Carolyn Paine, her grandmother’s hand-stitched batiste wedding gown carefully folded in her luggage, flew to Saigon to meet and marry a man she had not seen in almost three years. They spoke their vows in the yellow stucco French Protestant Church in Saigon and, shortly afterwards, moved to Hue to study Vietnamese and to prepare for their mission. It was in Hue that they first heard about the mountain people called the Bru.

  The Millers loaded all their belongings and linguistic manuals into a rented truck, headed out across the Perfume River and up Highway 1, then west on the narrow, winding road that led through the mountains and over plunging rivers to Khe Sanh.

  “It always reminded me of Colorado,” Carolyn remembered. “It was so beautiful.”

  They arrived quite late in the afternoon, and drove through Khe Sanh to Lang Bu, a small Bru hamlet a mile and a half past the village on the road to Laos. The Vietnamese truck driver was anxious to get back to civilization. Like many of his countrymen, he feared the climate of the mountains, especially the “poisonous winds” that blew death into the mouth and nose of their victim.

  All one hundred families in Lang Bu turned out to carry the books and furniture and crates and clothing down from the road, across a stream, and up a small hill to the hamlet.

  “It was like a circus coming to town,” Carolyn laughed.

  John Miller sat down with the hamlet’s elders to discuss his need for a permanent home. The Bru listened patiently until one, Khoi No, stood and said he would sell his home for eight thousand piasters and move in with relatives until he could build another.

  Following the custom of barter that was the essence of Vietnamese business relations, Miller offered four thousand. The homeowner looked puzzled and turned to his colleagues on the council. After long argument, the hamlet chief rose and spoke:

  “Khoi No says if that is all you can afford to pay, he will let you have it for that amount.”

  Thus the Millers learned their first lesson of the Bru. Open, innocent, anxious to please, they would literally sell their homes for half their true value to accommodate visitors. Vietnamese traders had prospered on this naiveté for years.

  The next morning the Bru moved Khoi No’s baskets of rice, gourds of rice alcohol, brass gongs, and cooking pots from the house, and moved the Millers in. By afternoon, they were settled in a two-room bamboo and thatch hut built on poles six feet above the ground.

  “Those were golden days,” Carolyn Miller said. “Our neighbors laughed a great deal at our efforts to learn their language and their ways. But they were proud of us, and our presence seemed to give a certain status to their village.

  “Our tape recorder, which sang Bru courting songs and reproduced their musical instruments, was an endless source of fascination.”

  Slowly, painstakingly, the Millers began to record and transcribe the words of Bru rituals, weddings, burials, legends, myths, the names of kitchen utensils, techniques for hunting, and seasons for planting. Khoi No swept the bare ground beneath their home when he swept his own, kept the house in excellent repair, and screened the unending stream of curious visitors who came to see the Millers. One day John Miller fastened a hand-printed sheet of paper to the bamboo wall of the house. It read in Bru:

  “I am standing at the door and calling [Brus do not have doors on which to knock]; if anyone opens the door to me, I will come in.”

  “Look at that!” neighbors exclaimed as they led curious visitors through the Millers’ house. “That’s our language!” None of the Bru, of course, could read. Until the Millers arrived, a written Bru language did not exist.

  There was little time or opportunity for social affairs among the half dozen Westerners in Khe Sanh. Carolyn Miller met Madeleine Poilane, who was about her age, from time to time but she spoke no French and Madeleine spoke little English. The two young women conversed awkwardly in elementary Bru and Franglais.

  In the late summer of 1962, ten U.S. Army soldiers in jaunty forest-green berets drove up Route 9 from the coast to establish a small military outpost. They broomed the cobwebs from the old French bunkers, filled in the eroded gullies on the small airfield, and began to recruit Bru to lead them on long-range patrols deep into the mountains of Laos.

  The passing of the days was measured in long hours of summer sun and the billowing of grey clouds in the monsoon. Margie, the Millers’ first child, was born in 1962. Gordie and Nathan would be born during the years at Khe Sanh. In the spring of 1964 Father Poncet, a priest from Paris, arrived in the village. Quiet, ruggedly handsome, his eyes twinkling in a face half-hidden by a black moustache and beard, Father Poncet wore farm clothing and searched out his parishioners on a motor scooter He became immensely popular among the Bru, but he was greeted most warmly during his daily visits to Felix Poilane’s plantation, where he played with the children and shared memories of Paris in his pure, rarely heard French.

  The idyll of Khe Sanh was shattered in April 1964 when men stepped from the side of the road, ordered Papa Poilane and M. Linares from their car—and riddled Poilane with bullets. The gentle mountain man who had walked Route 9 when it was still a dirt path, the builder of Khe Sanh, the father of two families, was dead.

  • • •

  NOT UNTIL 1966, when American combat troops began to arrive in larger numbers, was General Westmoreland able to turn his attention to the small outpost at Khe Sanh. He was, in fact, growing concerned about the entire northern region.

  Quang Tri Province was only thirty-five miles wide in some places. It was the first barrier to Communist invasion across the De-Militarized Zone. Apart from the Bru in the western mountains, a few vegetable farmers on the broad piedmont, and scattered fishing villages at the river mouths, all of Quang Tri’s 280,000 people lived in a narrow band of rich paddyland between Route 1 and the coast. Slogging French soldiers in the First Indochinese War knew this last area, which stretched south into Thua Thien Province to the former imperial capital at Hue, a
s “la rue sans joie”—an endless series of fortified villages and ambushes, literally “a street without joy.”

  In the first months of 1966, the northern part of South Vietnam was wracked by anti-government protests. ARVN units ignored orders from Saigon, and actually drew guns on several American units. Soldiers joined Buddhists and students in street marches in Hue and DaNang. The USIS library in Hue was torched. At the height of turmoil, U.S. intelligence learned that Vo Nguyen Giap had decided to place the two northernmost provinces under his jurisdiction; henceforth, the North Vietnamese Army would work this battleground—not the Viet Cong.

  “If I were General Giap,” Westmoreland said in February, “I would strike into Quang Tri and Thua Thien Provinces for a quick victory.”

  The general ordered the Marines to “familiarize” themselves with the region—and to take a particularly close look at the western mountains near Khe Sanh.

  The Marines sent Lt. Col. Van D. “Ding Dong” Bell, “a tough officer of the old school,” to stir up a fight with the North Vietnamese regulars reported to be near Khe Sanh. Bell’s battalion of one thousand Marines was set to go on April 5, but had to wait almost two weeks until weather allowed Marine C-130s to land at Khe Sanh. Bell’s Marines thrashed around the countryside for two weeks without enemy contact. He marched the battalion home on Route 9; fifty men collapsed with heat stroke, but “not a shot was fired in anger.”

  Westmoreland remained certain that “trouble was brewing.” The U.S. Army Special Forces team at Khe Sanh boosted its strength to 300 irregulars. An Army intelligence unit called Special Operations Group and “classified higher than SECRET” moved into an old French fort south of Route 9, dubbing their new home “Fort Dix.” A U.S. Navy Mobile Construction Battalion arrived to extend the old French runway from fifteen hundred feet to thirty-nine hundred feet, and cover it with pierced metal planks. Vietnamese government officials and Marine officers urged the Millers to move from Lang Bu. They decided to rent an old stone house near Khe Sanh village from the Nung widow, who still farmed Papa Poilane’s plantation.