Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  War in Vietnam was always bloody. The North Vietnamese maintained a museum in Hanoi that celebrated the sacrifices of national heroes. It was a building filled with drawings and paintings and sketches and poems and photographs of death: beheadings, impalements, suicides, disembowelings, immolations, dismemberings, and boilings in oil. The Vietnamese were imaginative in these matters. An emperor had once submitted a French priest to the Death of a Thousand Cuts—tearing his thighs with five pairs of hot pincers, amputating his eyebrows, hacking off his breasts and buttocks, tearing away the remaining flesh on his legs, quartering the corpse, parading the head—and then grinding the skull to powder and throwing it in the sea.

  The Hanoi museum was a record of twenty centuries of warfare and suffering, of betrayal and victory, and the latest exhibitions featured Cluster Bomb Units, rocket fins, airplane parts, and photographs of bombed-out buildings and maimed children. The Americans quickly zippered their dead into opaque body bags; the Vietnamese displayed their dead—the faces twisted in agony, the limbs torn away, the blood still fresh.

  It was the history of the Vietnamese people. A perfect understanding of the sacrifices of their forebears could steel North Vietnam’s people for the trials to come. They had been driven into the mountains by invaders for two thousand two hundred years; the national slogan since the Americans started bombing had been, simply, “Prepare for the Worst.”

  • • •

  VO NGUYEN GIAP uniquely mirrored the history of Vietnam. He had lived in the mountains for more than ten years, hiding in caves and running from enemy patrols. His iron will had been forged in French jails, years of exile, and terrible defeats on the battlefield.

  During the years that his Western military contemporaries moved vast modern armies into textbook battles on the plains of Europe, Giap padded narrow mountain paths in sandals cut from truck tires and puzzled over the problems of supply: if one porter can carry fifty-four pounds of rice fifteen miles a day, or twelve miles a night, then how many porters must begin working and when must they begin working to sustain a 400-man combat unit in a ten-day assault on a target 130 miles away? Even now with the duties of minister of defense, he fussed over tactical details, logistics problems and, especially, combat spirit.

  Born in 1912 on a small farm in Quang Binh province, Giap was serving a three-year prison sentence for anti-French demonstrations before he was eighteen years old. He had distinguished himself as a student and when the French released him early “for good behavior” he enrolled at the University of Hanoi. He and Pham Van Dong published anti-imperialist newspapers in 1936 and 1937 and, as leaders in Vietnam’s tiny Communist Party, came under surveillance by the French secret police. The two-volume study of the role of peasants in Vietnamese history, published under pseudonyms in 1938, was considered by the French to be a guidebook to revolution; the entire press run was seized and destroyed.

  Giap won a degree in law and political economics, the highest awarded by France in Indochina. Newly married to the daughter of the dean of the faculty of letters, he began teaching history at the Thanh Long private school in Hanoi in 1938. Ho Chi Minh, the father of the independence movement, had disappeared into the gloomy prisons of Chiang Kai-shek’s China; the flame of revolution guttered.

  In May of 1940, Giap narrowly escaped lightning police raids on Communist Party activists. His wife was caught and sentenced to fifteen years; she died in prison. His sister was guillotined. Giap hurried toward the Chinese border, jumping from the train to avoid police searches. Near the end of the trip, when he faced the added peril of hostile Chinese patrols, he crossed a river on a bamboo raft.

  He was twenty-seven years old when he finally reached the campfires of other Vietnamese refugees in China. He was very slender, hardly five feet tall, with dark eyes and dark eyebrows and dark hair, and so handsome that Ho Chi Minh teased him: “Vo Nguyen Giap is still beautiful like a girl.” They shared household tasks in exile—except for Giap, whose cooking was so terrible that he was sentenced to full-time dishwashing.

  Giap had been prepared to seek training with Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army when Chiang Kai-shek pressed new attacks into southern China in 1941 and he was driven, a seed on the winds of war, to Tsingsi and then Kweilein—just thirty miles from the border with Vietnam. Here he began to study the problems of tactics and strategy, of recruitment and training, of weapons and supplies. He obtained books on Western military thought, and he studied Mao’s manuals on people’s revolutionary war.

  Japan ruled Vietnam during these years. Troops of the Rising Sun had moved into Indochina when France surrendered to Germany.

  Giap found young people among the many Vietnamese refugees in the border region, fired them with the spirit of struggle against the Japanese and French, and sent them back into the northern provinces to excite the people with a message of liberation. He trained fifty of these cadre every month, giving them courses in simple tactics and showing them how to organize youths and farmers and women for the revolution.

  He worked for three years in his mountain exile, writing training manuals, organizing propaganda teams, publishing a small newspaper with articles on women’s organizations and tips on village defense—building an army on hope until he could get guns.

  In February of 1944, twenty groups of “Southward Marchers” were represented at Tet celebrations in Giap’s headquarters. He electrified the group by announcing that the years of waiting were over: it was time to strike. Ho Chi Minh, gaunt from years in jail, stumbled out of the woods before the offensive could be launched. He reviewed the plans, then criticized Giap for not properly preparing the people or the eager combatants for a long war against a powerful enemy. Only those with a single-minded commitment to the struggle would be able to remain strong, Ho Chi Minh warned.

  Giap releashed his cadre, intensified their training, and searched among them for “the most ardent.” He believed that soldiers with the highest combat spirit could defeat stronger forces. He wanted soldiers who understood that a war of liberation was a life struggle that could only end in victory or death. From the beginning, Giap prepared his soldiers for hardship.

  He planted the seeds for his army in the very first combat operation of the war for independence, in December of 1944. He chose “the most resolute” recruits for the operation, rehearsed them repeatedly on sand-table models—and he picked Christmas Eve for the attack, when the French defenders might be misty with nostalgia or sleepy with drink. This platoon-sized raid against two isolated outposts in the northern mountains is as celebrated in Hanoi as Lexington-Concord is in Boston.

  “We forgot we were only thirty-four human beings,” Giap wrote, years later. “We imagined ourselves to be an army of steel not to be defeated by any force. . . . Confidence, eagerness, prevailed.”

  This was the spirit that fired the People’s Army of Viet Nam. The commander in chief wanted total commitment—literally ascetic dedication—from his soldiers.

  Giap-trained cadre were so scrupulously correct with Thó Montagnards—who lived in the northern mountain region most vital to Giap in the early years—that Thó women came to believe the young men had been “made without cocks.” And Laotians who had fought beside the North Vietnamese were amazed their Puritanism. “The Vietnamese are prepared to sacrifice their lives for their duty,” one Laotian officer told American interrogators. “They fight with great devotion, never complaining about their problems. They don’t drink, and women are against regulations.”

  There was no one-year tour in this army, no rest and recreation in Kuala Lumpur, no beer, no mail, no medicine. And no home leave until the war was over.

  • • •

  BY THE MIDDLE of 1945, Giap commanded several thousand guerrillas by runner—he had no radio—and had established Vietnamese control in five northern border provinces despite the best efforts of the Japanese Army’s 21st Division. It was still a rag-tag army—the widely scattered forces carried forty kinds of rifles from eight foreign countries—but when
American atomic bombs knocked Japan out of the war, Giap pushed his troops through the night to be first in Hanoi.

  He found chaos in the first months after the end of World War II. Demoralized Japanese troops roamed the countryside, some of them killing and looting. The victorious Allies had asked Chiang Kai-shek to restore order in North Vietnam, and more than 100,000 Chinese soldiers had turned away from Mao Tse-tung’s growing Red Army to bring typhoid and terrorism to the streets of Hanoi. Floods had damaged rice crops, and serious food problems loomed. The French, aided by a temporary British administration in Saigon, were moving quickly to reestablish colonial rule in the southern part of Vietnam.

  Ho Chi Minh did not come down from the mountains. The frail leader of the revolution was sick again, and Giap found him lying on a bamboo cot, weakly sipping a gruel of rice and pulverized roots that had been dug from the jungle floor by a Chinese herb doctor. Ho listened to Giap’s report and then said the fight for independence was to continue “even if the Annamite mountains go up in flames.”

  And so Vo Nguyen Giap, newly titled minister of interior, stood at rigid attention with two of his aides while the flag of liberation was raised, and a free Vietnam was formally proclaimed. Beside him stood a U.S. Army major named Archimedes Patti, one of several OSS officers who had parachuted into Vietnam late in the war to give Giap American aid in the fight against the Japanese.

  Giap set off immediately to assess the situation in the country. As he drove south on Route 1, he mused that the French had a professional army with modern aircraft, warships, tanks, and artillery, while his own forces carried homemade muskets, long and short Japanese rifles, and some 1903 and 1917 Remington rifles from the U.S. And yet, he noted with satisfaction, the French were discovering that the People’s Army—the Viet Minh—“no longer scattered like a flock of sparrows” when attacked.

  The general visited Hue for the first time since he was a schoolboy, met with Montagnard leaders in the Highlands, talked with young girls in the central provinces who had cut their long black hair to show their commitment to the fight against the French, twice visited battlefields, and once heard “the hissing of bullets” only inches away.

  When Giap told Ho Chi Minh about the commitment of the people but the unequal odds in the military struggle, Ho answered:

  “Fighting will continue as long as we hold one inch of ground, as long as there remains one citizen.”

  The chaos in the north was beyond the capacity of the tiny Ho Chi Minh government and its small guerrilla army. Disease and hunger and the roaming troops of four nations had produced near anarchy. The French had already landed 35,000 troops in the south, and were poised to land at Haiphong. The Viet Minh leadership, with no real alternative, agreed to permit the return of French troops during negotiations to establish an independent Vietnam.

  News that the French would return drew an angry crowd of more than 100,000 to the square in front of Hanoi’s Municipal Theater on the afternoon of March 6, 1946. The mob scented betrayal, but Vo Nguyen Giap’s burning intensity worked as well in the open air as it did in a conference room. He explained that the international situation was not favorable to immediate independence, and that resistance offered little prospect of victory—but the certainty of great suffering. He called the agreement with the French “a Vietnamese Brest-Litovsk,” comparing it to the truce that Lenin arranged to halt the German invasion of Russia while he consolidated his political revolution. Giap promised the crowd that the fight for freedom would continue; he would personally head the National Resistance Committee while the French were in Vietnam.

  A week later Giap went to the Haiphong docks to call respectfully on French General Philippe Leclerc, who was watching the offloading of high-quality military equipment. Leclerc was eager for this meeting because of what General Douglas MacArthur of the United States had told him:

  “If you expect to succeed in overcoming the resistance of your enemy [in Vietnam], bring soldiers and then more soldiers, and after that still more soldiers. But you probably still will not succeed.”

  Leclerc emerged from his office to meet this unbeatable foe—and found a five-foot-tall, one-hundred-pound “Minister of Defense” in a white duck suit and club-striped tie, wearing a trilby hat. Some military critics believe the French military effort in Indochina never recovered from this first moment of incredulity.

  Giap had been deferential in Haiphong—Leclerc was a genuine war hero—but when they met again in Dalat six weeks later to argue military lines of responsibility, Giap was “rough, vehement, and provocative.” Ten Vietnamese arrived for the conference, but Giap quickly emerged as the most forceful speaker. He harshly denounced the French for the cruelty of their military operations in the south. He told news reporters about the jailing and death of his wife and the years of struggle in the mountains. Through it all his broad forehead remained smooth. It was here that he was named Volcano Under the Snow.

  The rest of 1946 was an ill-concealed race toward war. Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong went to France to try to win guarantees of national sovereignty; Giap and other deputies disarmed non-Communist nationalist groups, closed antagonistic newspapers, arrested leaders of opposition parties, and drove political enemies into exile. It was a time of choosing and Giap did not shrink from spilling blood. In the Delta, south of Saigon, old enemies sent foes “crab fishing”—tying them together in bundles, like logs, and throwing them into the Mekong to float to sea while slowly drowning. In November, the French heavy cruiser Suffren fired its big guns into a section of Haiphong and killed more than 6,000 Vietnamese.

  The French took over security patrols in Hanoi, and Giap answered by erecting barricades in the streets—and by ordering the people to punch holes in the adjoining walls of their homes and shops so Viet Minh troops could move quickly through the city without using the streets.

  Giap sent a note to the French commander on December 19 and proposed an easing of tensions: why not let the French soldiers, restricted to barracks on war footing for more than a week, circulate in the city again? After all, it was only a week to Christmas. By 6 P.M., the bars and brothels and shops of Hanoi were alive again, and lights sparkled on all the main streets of the city.

  A Viet Minh demolition team destroyed the electric power plant at 8 P.M., and Hanoi was plunged into darkness. Bands of screaming militiamen threw themselves at army bases, police posts, and civilian compounds in the city. Within hours French soldiers and citizens were defending themselves from attack all across the country. Hue held out until February, when the garrison was finally relieved.

  Giap preserved the heart of his army by scattering it again in the northern provinces—“a knotted tangle of 4,000 foot mountains, limestone caves . . . with eighty inches of rain, a protective blanket of fog six months of the year, and rivers and stream everywhere. . . .” Twenty thousand of his soldiers did not yet have weapons, and Giap and Ho Chi Minh needed time to build the army and to prepare the people for a long war. Now was the time for hiding.

  The French made daring parachute raids into the jungled mountains of North Vietnam, and once drove Giap into a “last ditch” hiding place. The general counterattacked savagely; motorized Moroccan Colonial Infantry Regiment saved the exhausted paratroopers at the last moment only by smashing through a to-the-death blocking effort by Viet Minh soldiers.

  Vo Nguyen Giap spent 1947–1950 in contemplation, studying his enemy and testing tactical ideas, recruiting and training new soldiers, looking always for the “most ardent” cadre. It was a rare opportunity for a military commander at war and, for Giap, an absolutely essential learning period. Just a few years before he had led a thirty-four-man platoon into combat; now he commanded more than 50,000 troops. It would take time to build popular fervor, to organize local guerilla bands and regional militia companies—and to train and equip the large mobile units of his main forces for combat with the French Army.

  This was a time for building political strength. In a long war, Giap believed, i
t was political strength that prevailed—not military strength.

  Viet Minh recruits swore an oath “to respect the people, to help the people, to defend the people, . . . to win the confidence and affection of the people, and to achieve a perfect understanding between the people and the Army.” And from the earliest days of this army, a political officer shared hardship and responsibility with the military officer in every unit. The political officer organized days of army assistance to the people to plant or harvest rice, to strengthen flood-control dikes, or to improve trails and roads, and his work encouraged the people to open their homes and share their meals with soldiers of the army. Beside every regimental, battalion, and company commander in the People’s Army stood a political officer whose permission, support, and assistance were required before the undertaking of any military operation.

  Giap had strongly emphasized the essential role of the people in a protracted war in a small book he wrote in 1950. A long-term resistance, he wrote, “requires a whole system of education, a whole ideological struggle among the people. . . .

  “Without the people, we shall have no information [about the enemy], we shall be able neither to preserve secrecy nor carry out rapid movements. The people suggest strategems and act as guides. They find liaison officers, hide us, protect our activities, feed us, and tend our wounded.”

  It was imperative, therefore, that the army respect the people. Soldiers had to be politically aware as well as militarily adept. “Political work in the ranks is of the first importance,” Giap concluded. “It is the soul of the Army.”

  The Americans would try to wage a war in Vietnam without disrupting the daily routine of American citizens. Giap could not conceive of such a war. From the first tentative guerrilla actions in 1941—indeed, from the beginnings of Vietnamese history in the third century B.C.—success in war had always required the total commitment of the people.