by Robert Pisor
It was now clear to the President that the American people did not want to pay the current high costs of the war, and that they were firmly opposed to higher costs when it was impossible to guarantee a successful conclusion
Troops already in the pipeline would swell American strength in Vietnam to 549,000, a new President would send B-52s to bomb Hanoi, the American death toll would rise past 55,000, and the war would continue for years—but these stressful days in February and March of 1968 were the turning point: America had reached the end of the line.
On March 31, President Johnson told the nation he was stopping the bombing of North Vietnam, and that he was ready to go “to any forum at any time to . . . bring this ugly war to an end.”
And then the President added the words that shocked some of his closest friends and advisers:
“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President. . . .”
Westmoreland felt betrayed.
“It was like two boxers in a ring, one having the other on the ropes, close to a knock-out,” the general said, “when the apparent winner’s second inexplicably throws in the towel.” But Westmoreland wouldn’t let it spoil Pegasus.
On April first, at exactly seven in the morning, the 1st Marine Regiment attacked west on Route 9, and the 1st Air Cavalry Division leapfrogged to new landing zones halfway to Khe Sanh. The relief force encountered no resistance, but this was a military operation for cameras and politicians—not for war.
The commander of the 1st Air Cav, Lieutenant General John J. Tolson, knew it was a charade. He had read the intelligence reports and he did not expect to find any North Vietnamese at Khe Sanh. Still, he understood the need to get the Marines moving again.
General Tolson had been horrified when he first flew into the Combat Base to discuss Operation Pegasus:
“It was the most depressing and demoralizing place I ever visited,” he said. “It was a very distressing sight, completely unpoliced, strewn with rubble, duds and damaged equipment, and with the troops living a life more similar to rats than human beings.”
Most U.S. Army officers were shocked by Marine tactics and leadership. The man that Westmoreland sent north to coordinate Army and Marine operations in northern I Corps, Lieutenant General William B. Rosson, was most diplomatic when he suggested the Marines had “not sufficiently prepared their troops for the kind of war . . . that has evolved along the DMZ.”
In the first ten days of March, Westmoreland firmly established his ascendancy over the Marines, first by taking over their air assets and then by naming an Army general to direct military activities in the north. The Marines had fought all the way to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to hold on to their aircraft. Westmoreland was adamant, however, and for the first time in his years of frustration in Vietnam, he considered resigning. Here was an issue for which he would fall on his sword. The Joint Chiefs of Staff shied away.
The Marines had lost every political battle, and they could see the dirty end of the stick about to be pushed at them again. They had not wanted to defend Khe Sanh in the first place, and then they were criticized for not defending it well. Now, with the 1st Air Cavalry Division on the way, they were almost certainly going to be “rescued.”
It would be the final humiliation. General Cushman was insistent at every planning meeting for Pegasus: “I want . . . no implication of a rescue or breaking of the siege by outside forces.”
And so, two days before Pegasus was launched from Ca Lu, the Marines at the combat base undertook their first offensive strike of the siege. It was to be a revenge raid.
Bravo Company had lost more than 50 dead and 135 wounded to enemy shelling, and 25 of its men still lay in the crescent-shaped killing ground south of the combat base. The company had been mauled, yet few of its men had even seen the North Vietnamese. The dark mood of Bravo grunts would poison Marine morale unless the company had a chance “to settle an old score.”
The first offensive action at the combat base would be a punishment raid against the North Vietnamese who had ambushed Lieutenant Jacques’ patrol.
The battalion commander and his staff worked for a month to plan the attack. Nine artillery and mortar batteries would fire support missions every inch of the way, with jet bombers and the 175mm guns multiplying the shielding shrapnel. Captain Kenneth W. Pipes and Bravo Company would advance within a moving double-box of protective fire all the way to the target.
At 0800, the men of B Company rose from the concealing slopes of a draw and crossed the Poilane Plantation road under cover of heavy fog. Volleys of artillery shells threw up gouts of red earth just seventy-five yards ahead of them, and on both flanks. Four 106mm recoilless rifles and six heavy machine guns poured direct fire into the enemy positions. The Marines fixed bayonets. When the artillery boxes collapsed behind the enemy bunker line to cut off reinforcements, Bravo Company charged over the same ground that had claimed the lost patrol.
Suddenly, the fog lifted.
Enemy mortarmen quickly launched dozens of shells, and one of the first landed in the middle of Bravo’s command group. The radio observer was killed instantly, and so was the forward observer for the heavy mortars. Captain Pipes took a fragment through the upper arm that lodged in his chest two inches from his heart.
Pipes stayed on his feet, and urged his men forward. In the early planning for this attack, the battle maps had been sectioned into general fire zones that were designated by fruit names—Apples, Oranges, Grapes. With the forward observers dead, it was impossible to make fine adjustments in the supporting fire; Pipes cradled the radio in his good arm, pressed the “Talk” button, and told the guns to “Fire Apples,” or “Fire Grapes.”
Bravo Marines swarmed into the enemy trench lines, pinning down the defenders with machine gun and automatic rifle fire while fellow Marines seared and blasted each North Vietnamese bunker with flame throwers, grenades, and satchel charges. “The men carried out their grisly work for over three hours,” the Marine history recorded, “and by noon the trench-works had become a smoking tomb for 115 North Vietnamese.”
The dead Marines of the lost patrol were recovered where they fell, their wallets, watches, rings, and dog tags undisturbed.
Bravo’s raid was celebrated at Khe Sanh as “a brilliant feat,” and “the only really successful attack against the enemy.”
A cable arrived from Saigon bestowing a Meritorious Unit Commendation on Pipes’ Marines:
“Officers and men of Company B, 1st Battalion, 26th Regiment, United States Marine Corps, deserve highest praise for aggressive patrol action north of Khe Sanh on 30 March. Heavy casualties inflicted on a bunkered and entrenched enemy force indicated typical Marine ésprit de corps and professionalism.
“Well done.”
It was signed:
GENERAL WILLIAM C. WESTMORELAND, COMMUSMACV.
In the early days of April, the battalions of the 1st Air Cavalry Division moved closer to the combat base—once landing as close as five hundred yards from the perimeter wire.
The cavalrymen found an awesome ruin, “a wasteland of interlocking craters.” “By now,” a Marine historian wrote, “the verdant green hillsides, once the site of the best coffee plantations in Indochina, had been pounded into a red orange moonscape.”
General Tompkins, whose roots were in rural South Carolina, had described Khe Sanh in January as a beautiful place where the forest was full of game and the streams were full of trout. Now, he said, “the place was absolutely denuded. The trees were gone . . . everything was gone. Pockmarked and ruined and burnt . . . like the surface of the moon.”
The first Americans into Khe Sanh Village found a shattered ruin without a sign of life—and bomb craters big enough for entire houses. “The ville was all rubble, bodies, nothing. . . .”
General John Tolson could hardly wait to put his division to more useful work. The 1st Air Cavalry was trained and equipped for heavier duty than a Potemkin relief operation.
The Marines showed the same fixed-grin enthusiasm. As far as they were concerned, “the enemy threat had been squelched weeks before Pegasus had gotten off the ground.” They “had not been rescued from anything.”
Still, even with the enemy gone, the charade had to be carried through to the end.
On April 8, air cavalrymen completed a sweep of Route 9 and met a Marine company from the combat base. Some of the soldiers and Marines mugged for the television cameras and still photographers, but most just “shrugged indifferently.”
On April 9, for the first time in forty-five days, not one enemy shell fell on the combat base.
On April 11, General Westmoreland, who had flown to Washington especially for the occasion, stood on the White House lawn with President Johnson to announce the formal link-up of Colonel Lownds’ 26th Marines and the roadbuilders of the 11th Marine Engineer Battalion. Route 9 was open to traffic, he declared.
Westmoreland told the story of the battle of Khe Sanh in considerable detail. It was, in a way, a summing up of his years in Vietnam. He was coming home soon, and this would be his last great battle. His report was written in tons; it described a battle of superlative feats and numbers—of war the American way.
Every branch of American arms had played a vital role in the victory, the general said proudly, beginning with the Marines’ “heroic defense.”
The combat engineers had performed a “herculean task” by replacing nine bridges, constructing seventeen bypasses, and rebuilding eight miles of roadway to reopen Route 9 in less than two weeks.
The resupply effort, Westmoreland said, “stands as the premier logistical feat of the war.”
Marine and Army artillery had distinguished themselves by firing 158,891 shells during the siege—answering every enemy shell with more than ten. The Air Force made 9,691 fighter bomber attacks at Khe Sanh, the Marines 7,078, and the Navy 5,337—delivering 39,178 tons of bombs, rockets, and napalm, contributing their share to what Westmoreland called, with satisfaction, “one of the heaviest and most concentrated displays of firepower in the history of warfare.”
“The key to success,” Westmoreland asserted, “the big gun, the heavyweight of firepower, was the tremendous tonnage of bombs dropped by B-52”—75,000 tons in 2,602 sorties.
Westmoreland had been more critical in February when the North Vietnamese buildup seemed immune to the bombing. Furthermore, recent battlefield interrogations had turned up persuasive evidence that the B-52 missions had been compromised.
North Vietnamese Army Lieutenant Le Thanh Dong, a thirty-three-year-old officer who had surrendered in mid-March, told his captors that he had gotten warnings up to twenty-four hours before a B-52 strike. He credited foreign agents who, he said, sent timely information through the Central Security Service in Hanoi.
Captain Nguyen Cong Tan, who had commanded a North Vietnamese intelligence operation before he defected, claimed he had been aware of take-off times and targets for B-52 missions. Four other captives claimed in separate interviews that their units had received the tentative coordinates of B-52 raids, and warned to move if they were in a target area.
One high-ranking North Vietnamese officer said he thought it was “ludicrous” to use the big bombers to support troops in combat. “The extreme measures used to insure that American troops will not be on the receiving end are so elaborate that the element of surprise is completely lost,” he said.
In late March, Hanoi Radio broadcast a poem it said had been written by troops at the Khe Sanh front:
The Yanks have modern B-52s
Of which they make a bugaboo
But woe to the GIs
When we opened fire
On the front of Highway Nine.
How they wept and cried!
And us, clean-shaven,
We asked them after each battle:
What can cause more trouble
Our cannon or your B-52?
Captain Phan Van Hong, who had commanded enemy infantry at Khe Sanh, told American interrogators that he had received “frequent, timely, and accurate warnings” of B-52 raids either by telephone or radio “at least two hours before the strike.”
But the formal relief of the siege and the unchallenged success of Operation Pegasus was a time for celebration—not for questions or doubts. In General Westmoreland’s final summary, the B-52 strikes were “decisive,” and they eclipsed any other element in the battle.
Westmoreland told the pilots and crews of B-52 bombers on Guam: “Without question, the amount of firepower put on that piece of real estate exceeded anything that had ever been seen before in history by any foe, and the enemy was hurt, his back was broken, by airpower . . . basically the fire of the B-52s.”
“It was a battle won by you,” Westmoreland told the bomber crews, “and exploited by the 1st Air Cavalry Division of the United States Army, and the Marines.”
• • •
THE SUN CAME out at Khe Sanh. The enemy shelling ceased, the airfield was reopened to C-130s, and Colonel Lownds turned command of the regiment over to his replacement.
Now was the time to compose the recommendations for honors and medals: a Navy Cross for Colonel Lownds, a Presidential Unit Citation for the 26th Marine Regiment, and, for Westmoreland, elevation to Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.
It was almost over.
11.
ONE MORE TIME
Captain William Dabney stood on the crest of Hill 881 South in the chill midnight darkness, watching men with rifles stumble past in the gloom. It was the first few minutes of Easter Sunday, April 14. The Marines were moving out early to reach jumpoff points for a dawn assault on 881 North.
There was symmetry—and irony—in fighting the last battle on Hill 881 North.
India Company had opened the siege here on January 20 when it bumped into the infantry screen for an enemy rocket regiment. For eighty-four days, India had stared at the mountain’s misted slopes, dueled with its snipers, and counted the thousands of rockets that lifted from its summit and sides.
India wouldn’t be going today; the company would provide direct fire support to the Third Battalion. This time, three companies would go instead of three platoons—600 men instead of 185.
Dabney wouldn’t be going, either. He had been relieved a few hours before, and placed on the promotion list for Major. Colonel Lownds was also gone; he had turned the 26th Regiment over to Colonel Bruce Meyers on April 12.
Like Bravo Company’s foray, the Easter Sunday attack was to be a punishment raid—a chance to strike directly at an unseen enemy, to settle an old score.
Few of the young Americans who crouched in the bombed wasteland at the foot of 881 North this Sunday morning in April knew that other Americans had crouched in the same place twice before in the last year.
Forty-nine weeks earlier, two Marine battalions had attacked this same hill—and suffered the heaviest casualties of the war in the Hill Fights. During the battle, a prominent Bru leader named Anha tried to tell the Marines about a tunnel that ran through the mountain. Anha’s father had been foreman on the plantation of Madame Bordeauducq, and Anha had been like a brother to Felix Poilane. He knew about the tunnel—really a warren of caves—because many of the Bru people had hidden their precious kettles there.
A Marine major, who thought Anha was Vietnamese, had brushed the information aside.
News of the heavy Marine losses swept quickly through the Bru hamlets the next day, and dominated conversations in the village. Carolyn Miller and her husband had visited the Poilanes that afternoon, and found Felix particularly upset by reports that more than one hundred Marines had died. He expressed his regret to the Millers, countrymen of the fallen soldiers, and then he asked:
“Why don’t they ask for guides from the local people?
“They probably thought that after all that bombing it would be safe to go up, but any Bru person could have told them that the mountain is full of caves. The North Vietnamese undoubtedly just retreated int
o the caves until the bombing was over, and were there to meet them when they sent in ground forces.”
The French plantation owner was treated with cold suspicion during these tense weeks of combat, and he did not feel he could offer suggestions to the Americans—and be believed.
Captain Dabney had not known about the caves when he took India Company up 881 North on January 20.
The 600 Marines waiting for dawn on Easter Sunday morning didn’t know about the caves, either.
The Americans would retire from Hill 881 North, from the Khe Sanh Plateau, from I Corps, and from Vietnam without ever learning that North Vietnamese Army troops moved below this battlefield—in tunnels and caves secure from heavy bombing.
• • •
THE MEN OF the Third Battalion looked ragged as they crouched in the tall grass, waiting for the signal to move out. They were tired, dirty, hollow-eyed, and some showed huge body sores—souvenirs of trench life with too little water. They’d been living on combat rations for months. Many wore ripped or rotting uniforms, although in some units there were more replacements than veterans. India Company, for example, had placed 167 dead or wounded men on medical evacuation helicopters during the siege—out of a roster strength of 185 men.
The new colonel helicoptered to 881 South where he could personally supervise the final attack of the Khe Sanh campaign. He had doubled the normal prep fires for this operation, adding the 1st Air Cavalry Division’s eight-inch guns and 155 howitzers to the usual Khe Sanh mix of Marine mortars, 105s and 155s and the Army’s 175s. Marine fighters put bombs, rockets, and napalm on specific backslope targets. The Marines on Hill 881 South fired directly over the heads of the attackers, leading them up the slopes with massed direct-fire volleys from eight 106mm recoilless rifles, two 105 howitzers (the third had been destroyed by an enemy shell) and six .50 caliber machine guns salvaged from downed helicopters.
Several times, when the Marine force paused to consider the proper attack against a line of trees, the eight recoilless rifles simply blew away the tree line.
