by Robert Pisor
Once, they passed through the middle of a Marine combat operation, smiling and waving at the open-mouthed young men who crouched in flak jackets along the sides of the road. “It must be a USO show,” one awed Marine said as they drove past.
Marine patrols pushing tentatively along the narrow native trails west of the combat base sometimes came upon Carolyn Miller striding along the same path, a bundle of books under one arm.
Colonel Lownds called on the Millers to scold them in a friendly, but concerned, way—and to deliver a bag of fresh groceries. The 3rd Marine Division’s commanding general, Bruno Hochmuth, had been sending food packages to the Millers since August when Route 9 was cut.
“What a treat that was!” Carolyn recalled. “John and I used to laugh that we were probably the only people in the world who had groceries delivered by a Marine colonel.”
General Tompkins assumed command of the division in December after Hochmuth became the first American general to be killed in Vietnam when his helicopter exploded in mid-air near Hue.
Two days after Christmas, as Dabney and the new Third battalion scouted an assault route into Laos, Westmoreland cabled Washington with a detailed proposal for a strike across the border.
On New Year’s Day, Marine Chaplain Ray Stubbe hitched a ride from the combat base to town to sample the soup at Howard Johnson’s. He walked back, an hour’s stroll that took him past the Poilane villa.
The next evening, at 8:30, a sentry dog on the western perimeter of the base stiffened, then alerted his handler to movement outside the defensive wire. A few minutes later six men appeared out of the darkness, stopped, and began talking quietly as they studied the Marine defenses. Second Lieutenant Niles B. Buffington took a squad to investigate and, to his astonishment, found “six men dressed like Marines.” When one of the figures reached toward his belt, the Marines opened fire—killing all but one of the intruders. Documents on the bodies identified the dead men as enemy regimental officers.
Extraordinary excitement crackled in the stale air of the Marines’ command bunker when Lownds’ staff realized who had been killed. These Marines were career officers who had trained and prepared all of their adult lives for battle. They looked at the shattered bodies of their peers and knew the waiting was nearly over.
News of Buffington’s score raced up the chain of command to Saigon. Almost immediately, additional evidence arrived to confirm the unprecedented intelligence coup.
Intelligence sources reported that two regiments of the North Vietnamese Army’s 325C Division had crossed into South Vietnam about fifteen miles northwest of Khe Sanh and that two regiments of the NVA’s 320 Division had crossed the DMZ to take up positions fifteen to twenty miles to the northeast—“within easy reinforcing range.” Then came word from the earphoned technicians who listened in on enemy communications: a Front Headquarters had been established across the border in Laos to direct operations of the 325C Division and of a third division, the 304.
A photo analyst in Saigon discovered a new road snaking down out of the jagged Laotian mountains to a trail head inside Vietnam—just fifteen miles from Khe Sanh. Another road was discovered, crossing the border eight miles from the combat base.
To the astonishment of the American command, “hostile units seemed to be materializing all along the line of bases . . . just south of the DMZ.”
It hardly seemed possible, yet the evidence pointed toward a major North Vietnamese offensive against Marine positions in South Vietnam at the very instant Westmoreland was preparing a major offensive against enemy positions in Laos.
Westmoreland changed his plans. If the North Vietnamese wanted to belly up to American defensive positions the way they had at Dak To and Loc Ninh, he would be pleased to accommodate them. The massing of enemy forces was “a very real threat to the Marines at Khe Sanh,” but it was “an undeniable opportunity to direct concentrated air strikes against known enemy positions on a sustained basis.”
On January 5, Westmoreland initiated planning for a massive bombing campaign. Colonel Lownds learned about it, and drove immediately to the Millers’ house to urge them to leave Khe Sanh until the battle was over. He had adopted the missionaries after General Hochmuth’s death, sent American television crews to film their work with the Bru, and passed the hat in his regiment to buy equipment for their schools. He did not want to see them killed.
On January 6, the concept now clear in his mind, Westmoreland chose Niagara as the code name for the bombardment program.
Very quickly, American intelligence filled in important details on the gathering enemy force. The 325C Division was a veteran of the Hill Fights, while the 304 Division was new to South Vietnam. The intelligence teams’ reference books identified the 304 as “a veteran of Dienbienphu.” The two infantry divisions, with up to 20,000 men, would be supported by the North Vietnamese Army’s 68th and 164th Artillery Regiments and, possibly, armored units. The 320 Division seemed to have settled down north of the Rockpile, but it was within striking distance of Khe Sanh. The 324 Division was working in a supply role along the hidden roads in Laos. The total enemy force that might be available for battle could go as high as forty thousand troops.
The target was so huge, so alluring after the long years of empty sweeps and patrols, that Westmoreland on January 8 ordered all intelligence gathering activities to focus on Khe Sanh.
• • •
LOCATING THE ENEMY force proved to be difficult.
Marine patrols kept running into the enemy’s counter-reconnaissance screen—a thin row of pickets who quickly detected American scouting parties. Patrolling became “a very hazardous business,” and Colonel Lownds often spent great quantities of ammunition and sometimes a helicopter or two to extract hard-pressed recon teams from the field.
A few shells began to fall on the combat base as enemy gunners registered their weapons on the American positions.
“They’re going to attack,” Lownds told his staff on January 10, “and we’re going to inflict a heavy loss on them.”
The colonel was increasingly apprehensive about the approaching test of arms. On January 13 he ordered every Marine on the base to begin wearing his flak jacket and carrying his rifle at all times.
Lownds felt thin on the ground. His Marines seemed scattered from hell to breakfast, and he did not relish the thought of ten thousand North Vietnamese crashing into one of his outposts. He did not have all his people tucked into a single, impregnable fortress; the tactical situation required him to fragment his forces.
“Both General Tompkins and Colonel Lownds were well aware of what had happened at Dienbienphu when the Viet Minh owned the mountains and the French owned the valley,” a Marine staff officer explained. “It was essential that the hills around Khe Sanh remain in the hands of the Marines.”
Captain Dabney and India Company, 300 men including radio spooks and artillery units, held the top of Hill 881 South, the westernmost American position in South Vietnam, the end of the line. Lownds would send another 100 men to bolster Dabney’s force in the next few days, but India Company was just going to have to make do. The hill was only four miles from the combat base, but there was no realistic chance of overland reinforcement—not through that terrain of twisted liana, clumps of bamboo, thorn trees, thick brush, slippery red mud, and deep grass. Not without grievous casualties. General Tompkins, exploring every contingency, had already thought the unthinkable: that Dabney might have to be sacrificed.
A little closer to the combat base, a thousand yards due east of Dabney, was Hill 861, another dominant terrain feature considered vital to the defense of the airfield. Captain Norman J. Jasper Jr. and 200 men of Company K were dug into its crown, supported by two heavy mortars.
A single platoon of less than fifty men on Hill 950 protected the antennas that relayed Marine messages to Dong Ha.
Lownds felt more secure about the defensive prowess of the combat base, where he had eighteen 105mm howitzers, six 155mm guns, six 4.2-inch mortars
and even six tanks that had been stranded at Khe Sanh when Route 9 was cut. One valued item in his arsenal was the Ontos, a squat, ugly vehicle that mounted six 106mm recoilless rifles. Lownds had ten of these highly-mobile, tracked killers—and enough flechette ammunition to pin the entire North Vietnamese Army to the face of Co Roc Mountain.
The colonel could call for covering fire from the sixteen 175mm guns at Camp Carroll and the Rockpile—or he could crook his finger and undam the torrent of aerial firepower that waited in the skies over Khe Sanh.
Nevertheless, Lownds enthusiastically welcomed the arrival on January 16 of another thousand men, the second battalion of his own regiment. The Rao Quang River, which flowed right past the combat base, came down out of the mountains in a deep jungled ravine that could allow a large enemy force to approach Khe Sanh undetected. Lownds sent the new battalion to Hill 558 which overlooked the river valley and plugged the Rao Quang gap. The new position could also support Hill 861.
Westmoreland and his top Marine and Air Force adviser had carefully weighed the addition of one thousand men at Khe Sanh, and finally decided that prudence required reinforcement. The problem was supply. The food and ammunition required to support another battalion would push Air Force resupply capabilities closer to the red line, but it could be done. It had to be done.
The Marines hunkered down to await the onslaught.
“My whole plan for the defense of Khe Sanh [is] to make the enemy come to us,” declared General Tompkins, reflecting West-moreland’s concept of Khe Sanh as a bait that would “lure the enemy to their deaths.” Major Mirza M. Baig, who coordinated intelligence reports with firepower missions in Lownds’ command bunker, explained it best:
“Our entire philosophy [is] to allow the enemy to surround us closely, to mass about us, to reveal his troop and logistic routes, to establish his dumps and assembly areas, and to prepare his siege works as energetically as he desires. The result [will be] an enormous quantity of targets . . . ideal for heavy bombers.”
Colonel Lownds studied reports from the Special Forces team at Lang Vei, and matched them to rumors picked up by Marine civic action teams in the Bru hamlets. The U.S. Army advisers in town passed along information they heard in the South Vietnamese district headquarters, and the SOG people at Fort Dix grilled wandering Montagnards for news. Patching it together with the intelligence captured on spy-plane film and radio-intercept tapes, the Marines managed to find twelve targets for large B-52 raids in mid-January, but Lownds still did not know where his enemy hid.
On January 18, Westmoreland decided that the looming battle at Khe Sanh was so important and the detection of enemy movement so critical that he would risk compromising his most-secret intelligence-gathering weapons: seismic/acoustic sensors.
These devices were so highly classified that only one officer in Lownds’ entire regiment had ever heard of them. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater believed the sensors represented “one of the greatest steps forward in warfare since gunpowder.”
The sensors had been developed for an electronic barrier system first proposed by Defense Secretary McNamara. Depressed by rising American combat casualties along the DMZ, McNamara had suggested pulling the Marines back from the line of outposts and letting electronic equipment monitor enemy movement. Construction of “McNamara’s Wall” had been abandoned by January of 1968—the military did not like the idea and the secretary was on his way out—but the sensors had survived its demise.
Air Force operatives had been using the sensors for months to monitor southbound truck traffic on the network of roads inside Laos known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The equipment was so good that Westmoreland had reports on his desk showing that 1,116 enemy trucks rolled past Khe Sanh in October, 3,823 trucks in November, and 6,315 trucks in December.
Planes and helicopters planted the sensor devices by simply pitching them out the door at precisely mapped locations near known enemy trails.
Seismic sensors plummeted down in freefall to stick deeply in the earth on a steel spike. The jolt activated a mechanism which deployed a broadcast antenna. Whenever a truck rumbled past, or a nearby enemy force started to dig bunkers, or five hundred troops marched down the trail, the sensor picked up the vibrations and radioed the information to American intelligence.
Acoustic sensors drifted down by parachute to hang in trees above enemy roads and base areas. Air Force technicians could turn these on by remote control and actually listen to enemy conversations; they had once heard the excited voices of enemy soldiers who had spotted an acoustic sensor in a tree, the sounds of axes, and the agonized scream of someone hurt by the falling tree. A delicate crystal inside the sensor self-destructed if anyone tried to open its equipment pod.
The Air Force sowed 250 sensors around Khe Sanh in a few days and, because there was too little time to train the Marines on the complex equipment, continued to operate the detection system. An electronic laboratory circling over Khe Sanh picked up the signals of seismic sensors on the ground and transmitted them to Nakhom Phanom in Thailand where computers in the Infiltration Surveillance Center compared the incoming signals with previously stored sample signals to determine what caused the sensor to activate. The secret detachment in Thailand then relayed the information to the fire control center at Khe Sanh for an artillery mission against the enemy target.
Almost immediately, the sensors began broadcasting reports of enemy movement west and north of Khe Sanh. The Marines quickly switched from harassment and interdiction fire—to aimed fire at sensor-identified targets.
Lownds still didn’t have eyes, but he had ears.
• • •
COLONEL LOWNDS WAS convinced the enemy assault would come on January 20. He was listening very carefully to radio reports from Captain Dabney on the twentieth when John Miller, dispatched to safety two weeks earlier, walked in to say hello. Miller had returned to Khe Sanh to pick up some important materials and a skilled Bru assistant who could help with literacy materials while the Millers were away from the village.
Lownds approved the visit, but urged Miller to fly out that day.
As Lownds listened in the radio room, the Marines at Khe Sanh looked at the new movie schedule posted that morning.
There were six places to see movies at the combat base—this was, after all, war the American way and the Marines could look forward to feature films flown in from the States.
The schedule posted on January 20, 1968, read:
Saturday, Jan. 20 Paradise Hawaiian Style
Sunday, Jan. 21 Murderer’s Row
Monday, Jan. 22 Beau Geste
Tuesday, Jan. 23 One Spy Too Many
Wednesday, Jan. 24 Gunsmoke
4.
“HERE THEY COME!”
At two o’clock in the afternoon of January 20, Colonel Lownds and his staff paced restlessly in the command bunker listening to radio reports from Captain Dabney’s fight on Hill 881 North. The battle had been going on for more than four hours. Repeated airstrikes had failed to relieve the pressure on India Company. Perhaps the battle for Khe Sanh was about to begin.
At that instant, tense Marines on the combat base perimeter spotted a white flag waving in the scrub brush off the eastern end of the airstrip.
An enemy soldier in a green camouflage uniform and bush hat stepped into the open, raising the white flag with one hand and gripping an AK-47 assault rifle with the other. Covered instantly by the rifles and machine guns of thirty Marines, he walked slowly toward the American lines. A pair of Ontos waddled over, grunting and clattering, to train ninety-six thousand steel darts at the first live North Vietnamese Army officer these Marines had ever seen.
First Lieutenant La Than Tonc, which is how he introduced himself, turned out to be the Sutter’s Mill of intelligence finds.
Indeed, the deserter’s revelations were so extraordinary that at first the Marines doubted him. How could a mere lieutenant know such detail? And he seemed so eager.
“I decided that we would accept the
information as valid,” said General Tompkins. “We had nothing to lose and stood to gain a great deal.
“I recalled that sometime before—at Dak To in the Highlands—a similar event had occurred. The Army staff tended to believe the information was too good to be true and should be discounted. The commanding general ruled otherwise, and events vindicated his judgment.”
La Than Tonc’s information was breathtaking: no less than “a detailed description of the forthcoming Communist offensive”—not just at Khe Sanh but throughout all of I Corps.
The first assaults would begin precisely a half-hour past midnight, the enemy officer said. North Vietnamese troops would strike at Hill 881 South, Hill 861, and the combat base itself. After crushing the defenders at Khe Sanh, the enemy tidal wave would roll east and south to capture all of Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces, finally raising the gold-starred, red and blue Liberation flag in Hue.
Lownds moved on the tactical information instantly.
Captain Dabney was angrily demanding more air support to quell the fire that raked his position on Hill 881 North. At three in the afternoon, as interrogators worked with Lt. Tonc, a medical evacuation helicopter had refused to pick up his wounded because of heavy enemy fire. It would be stupid for India Company to meet a North Vietnamese Army regimental assault in such an exposed position when the company had prepared defenses in depth atop Hill 881 South. Lownds recalled Dabney at once.
The colonel shared his timely news with the Special Forces commander, the American advisers in Khe Sanh village, and General Tompkins. He ordered the Officers’ Club and all six movies closed until further notice, and placed the base and the hilltop outposts on Red Alert.
But La Than Tonc had only begun to talk.
With some pride he identified himself as the commanding officer of the 14th Anti-Aircraft Company, currently in support of the 95C Infantry Regiment of the 325C Division. Here was hard information that the cool, tough, professional unit that had hurt the Marines in the Hill Fights was back at Khe Sanh.
