Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

  Captain Breeding and E Company, who had thrown back the enemy attack on Hill 861 in early February, once went without water for days. When the supply helicopter finally arrived, it was panicked by enemy fire and cut loose its cargo from two hundred feet up. The plastic water containers burst apart in mid-air as the parched Marines watched.

  “One of the prettiest waterfalls I’ve ever seen,” said Breeding.

  India Company pumped itself up for each day’s trial with a brazen flag ceremony designed to thumb Marine noses at the North Vietnamese. “Attention to Colors!” Dabney shouted early each morning. Every man would stand straight—though dirty, unshaven, and often in rotting fatigues—while two Marines tied a shredded United States flag to a radio antenna and then raised the antenna. Second Lieutenant Owen S. Matthews lifted a bugle and played a truncated version of “To the Colors.”

  The first, heavy metallic “Thonk” sounded in the Horseshoe, then again, and again.

  In exactly twenty-one seconds, the Marines knew, the first 120mm shells would hit the hilltop. The instant Matthews dropped the bugle, every man dived for cover as “huge explosions walked across the hilltop spewing black smoke, dirt, and debris into the air.”

  India liked to wave a pair of red silk panties on a long pole after the morning shelling. It was “Maggie’s Drawers,” the traditional signal on firing ranges for a miss. Some Marines just stood and jabbed stiff middle fingers in the air, shouting obscenities at the North Vietnamese.

  The enemy was hurting, too.

  Once the clouds suddenly parted, exposing a North Vietnamese platoon climbing a nearby hill. Artillerymen on 881 South quickly knocked aside the parapet, depressed the howitzer’s barrel, and slammed a dozen rounds of direct fire fused shells into the unit—killing them all.

  After one unusually heavy bombing on 881’s slopes, a six-foot tall, beautifully-muscled, dark-haired North Vietnamese soldier—nude, without a mark on his body—walked into the perimeter and stood trembling as the Marines gathered around. When a shell hit nearby, he squatted reflexively and began to defecate and urinate uncontrollably.

  The Marines on 881 South hunted down North Vietnamese snipers with a 106mm recoilless rifle—blasting the sniper and the tree he sat in into bloodied splinters. When the North Vietnamese installed a rifleman who failed to hit a single Marine even with thirty shots a day, India Company let him live.

  The combat base also had a pet sniper.

  A North Vietnamese soldier had lugged a .50 caliber machine gun to a spider hole not much more than two hundred yards from the perimeter. Every day and night he fired at the Marines or at arriving and departing aircraft. The Marines actually caught glimpses of his face through the scopes on sniper rifles, but neither marksmen nor mortars nor recoilless rifles could knock him out. Finally, napalm was called in. For ten minutes the ground around the sniper’s position boiled in orange flame and black smoke, the vegetation crisping and the soil itself seeming to burn. When the last oily flames flickered out, he popped out of his hole and fired a single round.

  The Marines in the perimeter trenches cheered. They named him Luke the Gook, “and after that no one wanted anything to happen to him.”

  Some of the Marines, dirty and unshaven, lounged in trash-filled bunkers and laughed out loud when asked how their officers might react to their slovenliness.

  “What’s he gonna do to me? Send me to Vietnam?” said one, turning back to the war comic he was reading.

  “I think those North Vietnamese are nervous,” a squad leader said, wondering why the enemy had not attacked. Nearby, a six-foot-high speaker boomed Smokey and the Miracles’ “I Love You, Baby” toward the enemy hills.

  One Marine grumbled aloud in a bunker as the combat base braced for another shelling: “There’s six thousand of us, forty thousand of them. Let’s kill our seven each, and go back to bed.”

  • • •

  IT WAS FALSE confidence.

  The combat base hung by a single thread; not all the B-52s in the Strategic Air Command, and not all the bravado and bravery of young Marines could have prevented the North Vietnamese from turning off the water.

  The Khe Sanh plateau was scored by dozens of creeks and streams, but nearly all the Marine positions were on high ground—militarily sensible, but dry. On the hilltops, where water shared first priority status with ammunition, Marines rigged ponchos to capture moisture droplets in the monsoon mists.

  The combat base drew its water from a small stream about one hundred yards north of the perimeter. This stream fell in sharp waterfalls to the Rao Quang River, frothed down and across the province, and flowed beneath the walls of the citadel in Quang Tri City, where the helicopter pilots ate hot meals and drank cold beer—but the stream rose in the enemy-held hills to the north.

  If the North Vietnamese had poisoned the stream, a fairly basic tactic in siege warfare, the 26th Marine Regiment would have been forced to attempt a breakout.

  “Had we had to fly water into that place in addition to everything else,” said General Tompkins, “we would never, never, have reached the fifty pounds per man per day necessary.

  “Never.”

  General Westmoreland said later he was surprised the enemy didn’t contaminate the combat base water supply.

  • • •

  ON FEBRUARY 21, a little before one in the afternoon, North Vietnamese mortars pounded the 37th ARVN Ranger Battalion, and then eighty enemy soldiers made a desultory probe on the Ranger lines. No casualties were noted.

  On February 23, enemy guns fired the most shells of any one day of the siege: 1,307. American intelligence officers had expected much heavier rocket artillery from two first-line enemy divisions. Still, the shelling triggered two spectacular explosions in the ammunition dump, killed ten Marines and put thirty in Charlie Med.

  On February 25, twenty-nine men from Bravo Company set out from the combat base to look for a small mortar that had been hammering their position with uncanny accuracy. For this first foray beyond line of sight, each man carried five hundred rounds of ammunition and six fragmentation grenades. Two machine gun crews took along eighteen hundred rounds apiece. The patrol was to follow a precise route so that combat base artillery could provide instant supportive fire.

  Minutes after his first radio check, Second Lieutenant Don Jacques, the patrol leader, spotted three North Vietnamese soldiers, without rifles, walking casually up the road from Felix Poilane’s plantation, “trolling along, without a care in the world.” An enemy soldier who had defected to the Americans, one of dozens who worked with the Marines in a program called Kit Carson Scouts, raised his hand in warning, but the sight of live North Vietnamese soldiers after thirty-six days of phantoms was too great a lure. With Lieutenant Jacques leading, the Marines galloped off to capture some prisoners.

  They charged across the plantation road—and into the mouth of a crescent-shaped bunker line. A sheet of rifle fire drove them to the ground.

  “I was up with the radio when I heard a cry behind us,” said John A. Cicala Jr., a corpsman from Detroit who had “Motown Doc” written across his helmet. “It was a guy I once evacuated with infected leech bites. He’d taken a bullet through the left eye and it made a terrible hole in the side of his head.

  “He was gone. I knew he was gone; there was no way we could get a chopper in there.

  “I put a dressing on his head. When I got ready to leave, he asked for his weapon back. I will never forget him saying that.”

  Cicala heard someone else shout “Corpsman!” but when he tried to run forward he was hit in the chest, then spun by a bullet in the kneecap. A grenade went off only a few feet away, and he blacked out.

  One squad tried to work its way around the flank of the enemy position, but bumped into the crescent’s hook: every man was killed.

  A fifty-man relief force sprinted toward the trapped patrol, but ran into “extremely heavy small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar and machine gun fire” as it reached the road. The No
rth Vietnamese had established a blocking force to delay reinforcements.

  With the relief force pinned down and Lieutenant Jacques pleading for help on an open radio channel, Bravo Company prepared to leave the perimeter to go break the ambush.

  Colonel Lownds said no. He had no appetite for feeding troops piecemeal into a battle on the enemy’s ground. The North Vietnamese grip would have to be broken by firepower, he said.

  Fighter bombers and heavy artillery pounded the enemy positions while the surviving Americans pulled back from the ambush site.

  “Are there any more out there?” an officer asked as the last men in the relief force stumbled back. “Is anyone else alive?”

  “I don’t think so,” answered a Marine, “not after the jets got through with the bombs and napalm.”

  Corporal Roland R. Ball, a full-blooded Sioux Indian, came back carrying Lieutenant Jacques’ body and the patrol radio. The Motown Doc made it out by crawling for three hours to reach the base.

  Twenty-five other Marines lay sprawled in death eight hundred yards from the combat base perimeter. They would lie there for more than a month—a canker on the Marines’ cocksureness.

  • • •

  BRAVO COMPANY’S GRIEVOUS loss was not as shocking to commanders at Khe Sanh as the patrol’s discovery of a dozen long trenches that reached like greedy fingers toward the combat base.

  Under cover of fog, the North Vietnamese had been digging zig-zag trenchlines from positions near the Poilane plantation toward the combat base. Some were already a mile long. They wound through the groves of coffee trees, beside the Bru trails, between the bomb craters and creekbeds, and across the access road from Route 9. Some survivors of the double ambush had escaped the killing ground by hiding in the trenches during their return to the base.

  General Westmoreland declared an “immediate emergency.” His scientific advisers hurried to Khe Sanh with seismographic equipment. They ran slender probes into the soil of the plateau to listen for the sounds of digging; the French had lost critically important positions at Dienbienphu when the Vietnamese tunneled beneath them—and dynamited them off the face of the earth. West-moreland also ordered the Air Force and Marine air staffs to increase the bombing.

  Westmoreland in mid-February had told General Momyer that he was unhappy with the B-52 results. He suggested the big bombers start working inside the two-mile limit established to protect friendly troops. The Air Force was nervous about using strategic bombers for close support of ground troops, but prepared to go ahead after the discovery of the trenches.

  The B-52s made their first close-in runs on the plateau on February 27—and the Marines loved it. They came out of their bunkers, and stood atop the sandbagged trench lines and cheered as hundreds and hundreds of almost simultaneous explosions hurled trees and brush and fountains of red earth into the sky. The big planes flew 589 close-in bombing missions over Khe Sanh during the siege. “One hiccup,” said an Air Force commander who flew Sky Spot, “and we would have decimated the base.”

  Yet the bombing had little effect on the trenchlines. They advanced as much as one-hundred yards a night, and some began to branch into headers and T’s—the final stages before assault ramps were built. Navy jets put one-thousand-pound delayed-fuse bombs into the enemy positions to erupt “like a string of volcanos.” Other planes spilled drums of jellied gasoline into the trenches until the petroleum was puddled everywhere—then touched off a napalm tornado with a white phosphorus rocket.

  At night, Marines on the southern perimeter could see red and white lights bobbing down the trenches as the North Vietnamese pushed their lines forward. “God,” marveled a sentry on the line, “they don’t even care about being seen.”

  To save his soldiers from the firestorm at Dienbienphu, General Vo Nguyen Giap had put laborers into the front line to dig trenches to the very face of the French defenses. Now, with exactly fourteen days to go to the anniversary of the Vietnamese attack on Dien bienphu, the Marines watched in fascination as the trenches moved toward them “like long, thin arms, with fingers on the end.” Dac cong rattled the wire in some sections of the perimeter—and removed mines and flares from other sectors without a sound.

  On the last day of February, the fortieth day of the siege, the trenches reached to within 350 feet of the combat base.

  The Marines braced for the terrible rush that would finally bring them face to face with their enemy.

  10.

  THE FALSE FINISH

  The whole world was watching.

  During February and March, the siege at Khe Sanh was a cover story in Newsweek and Life, the lead story in half the reports from Vietnam by the “CBS Evening News,” and the top story in dozens of page one accounts in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, the Kansas City Star, the Rocky Mountain News—and hundreds and hundreds of other newspapers across America. Walter Cronkite described it as a “microcosm” of the Vietnam war, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy called it an example of the folly of U.S. involvement.

  “The forthcoming battle at Khe Sanh, all neatly being arranged under the eyes of television cameras, [has] swelled to near-Gettysburg proportions,” the New York Daily News, the nation’s largest newspaper, reported in early February. “Gettysburg . . . is the way the fight at Khe Sanh is developing in the public mind. A major victory would ease a lot of frustration around the countryside at home.”

  It was already a battle of firsts—the first time a field commander had begun preparations for the tactical use of nuclear weapons, the first sustained use of B-52 strategic bombers for close-in support of ground troops, the first deployment in combat of the seismic / acoustic sensors, the first use of the secret “Firecracker” artillery shell, and the first time a Commander in Chief had insisted on written assurances from his generals that a battle would be won.

  “No single battle of the Vietnam War has held Washington—and the nation—in such complete thrall as has the impending struggle for Khe Sanh,” said Time in mid-February.

  President Johnson focused the country’s attention even more intently on the combat base when he flew to California February 19 to personally wish “Godspeed” to a Marine regimental landing team being rushed to I Corps.

  “This is a decisive time in Vietnam,” the President told the Marines. “The eyes of the nation and the eyes of the entire world—the eyes of all of history itself—are on that little brave band of defenders who hold the pass at Khe Sanh. We do not doubt the outcome.”

  Colonel Lownds accepted the challenge with firm, blunt optimism. “My mission is to stay here, damn it, and we’re going to stay here. What’s there to panic about? That’s our job. That’s what we get paid for.

  “It’s only a question of how much Giap is willing to lose. I would hope it would cost him 40,000 or 50,000 men, maybe more.”

  Yet at the back of every military mind, and lodged irretrievably in the American consciousness, was the unspoken, unspeakable, possibility that Khe Sanh could fall. No one ever put it more starkly than the wide-eyed, war-awed correspondent for Esquire magazine:

  What if those gooks that you think are out there are really out there? What if they really want Khe Sanh, want it so badly that they are willing to maneuver over the triple lines of barbed wire, the German razor wire too; over barricades formed by their own dead (a tactic, Colonel, favored by your gook in Korea), coming in waves, human waves, and in such numbers that the barrels of our .50 calibers overheat and melt and all the M-16s are jammed, until all of the death in all of the Claymore mines on our defenses has been spent and absorbed? What if they are still coming, moving toward the center of a base so smashed by their artillery that those pissy little trenches and bunkers that your Marines half got up are useless, coming . . . coming at you 20,000 to 40,000 strong? And what if they pass over every barricade we can put in their way . . . and kill every living thing, defending or retreating . . . and take Khe Sanh?

  In the afternoon of the last da
y of February, the sensors along Route 9 began to broadcast alerts in sequential order from Lang Vei toward Khe Sanh Village and then on to the combat base. To the earphoned analysts deep underground in the Fire Support Control Center, it sounded like a regiment on the march. At any instant, they warned, 1,500 North Vietnamese soldiers might burst from the fog.

  Colonel Lownds put the base on Red Alert; for only the second time in the siege, every able man took a place in the fighting trenches.

  For DEROS counters, February 29 was a bitter extra, a Leap Year “gift” that meant they would serve thirteen months and one day in Vietnam while most Marines would serve thirteen months. Army soldiers served 365 days, so the extra day had no effect on their tour of duty. It was one more bit of evidence that Marines always got the dirty end of the stick, one more confirmation that they were truly grunts, that they might have to fight and die on a day that wasn’t even supposed to be on the calendar.

  Every mortar and artillery battery fired continuous volleys along the enemy’s presumed approach route. Radar-guided fighter bombers lowered through the fog every few minutes, and two flights of B-52s were diverted from other targets to bring their strings of bombs to within eight hundred yards of the Marine perimeter.

  More than 6,000 U.S. Marines were staring into the fog when 78 North Vietnamese suddenly jumped from a concealed trenchline and charged the ARVN Rangers. Massed rifle fire from the South Vietnamese troopers dropped the attackers before they had penetrated even the outermost barbed wire barrier. Two dozen enemy soldiers tried the Rangers again a half hour before midnight, and a dozen weakly probed the ARVN position at 3:15 A.M. The South Vietnamese reported 78 enemy dead.