by Michael Herr
Because the Highlands of Vietnam are spooky, unbearably spooky, spooky beyond belief. They are a run of erratic mountain ranges, gnarled valleys, jungled ravines and abrupt plains where Montagnard villages cluster, thin and disappear as the terrain steepens. The Montagnards in all of their tribal components make up the most primitive and mysterious portion of the Vietnamese population, a population that has always confused Americans even in its most Westernized segments. Strictly speaking, the Montagnards are not really Vietnamese at all, certainly not South Vietnamese, but a kind of upgraded, demi-enlightened Annamese aborigine, often living in nakedness and brooding silence in their villages. Most Vietnamese and most Montagnards consider each other inferior, and while many Montagnards hired out as mercenaries to the American Special Forces, that older, racially based enmity often slowed down the Allied effort. Many Americans considered them to be nomadic, but the war had had more to do with that than anything in their temperament. We napalmed off their crops and flattened their villages, and then admired the restlessness in their spirit. Their nakedness, their painted bodies, their recalcitrance, their silent composure before strangers, their benign savagery and the sheer, awesome ugliness of them combined to make most Americans who were forced to associate with them a little uncomfortable over the long run. It would seem fitting, ordained, that they should live in the Highlands, among triple canopies, where sudden, contrary mists offered sinister bafflement, where the daily heat and the nighttime cold kept you perpetually, increasingly, on edge, where the silences were interrupted only by the sighing of cattle or the rotor-thud of a helicopter, the one sound I know that is both sharp and dull at the same time. The Puritan belief that Satan dwelt in Nature could have been born here, where even on the coldest, freshest mountaintops you could smell jungle and that tension between rot and genesis that all jungles give off. It is ghost-story country, and for Americans it had been the scene of some of the war’s vilest surprises. The Ia Drang battles of late 1965 constituted the first and worst of these surprises. They marked the first wholesale appearance of North Vietnamese regulars in the South, and no one who was around then can ever forget the horror of it or, to this day, get over the confidence and sophistication with which entire battalions came to engage Americans in a war. A few correspondents, a few soldiers back for second and third tours still shuddered uncontrollably at what they remembered: impromptu positions held to the last man and then overrun; Americans and North Vietnamese stiff in one another’s death embrace, their eyes wide open, their teeth bared or sunk deep into enemy flesh; the number of helicopters shot down (relief mission after relief mission after relief mission …); the NVA equipment hauls which included the first AK-47 assault rifles, the first RPG-7 rockets, the hundreds of aluminum grave markers. No, a lot of the ones who saw that, the toughest of them, didn’t even like to talk about it. The very best of our divisions, the 1st Air Cavalry, was blooded in the Ia Drang that autumn, and while the official number of dead was released at around 300, I never met anyone who had been there, including officers of the Cav, who would settle for less than three or even four times that figure.
There is a point of view that says that the United States got involved in the Vietnam War, commitments and interests aside, simply because we thought it would be easy. But after the Ia Drang, that first arrogance sat less and less well about the shoulders of the Command; it never vanished. There was never again a real guerrilla war after Ia Drang, except in the Delta, and the old Giap stratagem of interdicting the South through the Highlands, cutting the country in two, came to be taken seriously, even obsessively, by many influential Americans.
Oh, that terrain! The bloody, maddening uncanniness of it! When the hideous Battle of Dak To ended at the top of Hill 875, we announced that 4,000 of them had been killed; it had been the purest slaughter, our losses were bad, but clearly it was another American victory. But when the top of the hill was reached, the number of NVA found was four. Four. Of course more died, hundreds more, but the corpses kicked and counted and photographed and buried numbered four. Where, Colonel? And how, and why? Spooky. Everything up there was spooky, and it would have been that way even if there had been no war. You were there in a place where you didn’t belong, where things were glimpsed for which you would have to pay and where things went unglimpsed for which you would also have to pay, a place where they didn’t play with the mystery but killed you straight off for trespassing. The towns had names that laid a quick, chilly touch on your bones: Kontum, Dak Mat Lop, Dak Roman Peng, Poli Klang, Buon Blech, Pleiku, Pleime, Plei Vi Drin. Just moving through those towns or being based somewhere above them spaced you out, and every time I’d have that vision of myself lying dead somewhere, it was always up there, in the Highlands. It was enough to make an American commander sink to his knees and plead, “O God! Just once, let it be our way. We have the strength, give us the terms!” Not even the Cav, with their style and courage and mobility, were able to penetrate that abiding Highland face. They killed a lot of Communists, but that was all they did, because the number of Communist dead meant nothing, changed nothing.
Sean Flynn, photographer and connoisseur of the Vietnam War, told me that he once stood on the vantage of a firebase up there with a battalion commander. It was at dusk, those ghastly mists were fuming out of the valley floor, ingesting light. The colonel squinted at the distance for a long time. Then he swept his hand very slowly along the line of jungle, across the hills and ridges running into Cambodia (the Sanctuary!). “Flynn,” he said. “Somewhere out there … is the entire First NVA Division.”
O dear God, just once!
III
Somewhere Out There, within artillery range of the Khe Sanh Combat Base, within a twenty-mile radius, a day’s march, assuming the “attack posture,” concealed and silent and ominous, lay five full divisions of North Vietnamese Regulars. This was the situation during the closing weeks of 1967:
Somewhere to the southwest was the 304th NVA Division. Due east (somewhere) was the 320th. The 325C was deployed in an unknown fashion to the northwest, and the 324B (a cause for real alarm among enemy-division buffs) was somewhere to the northeast. There was also an unidentified division just the other side of the Laotian border, where their big artillery had been dug so deeply into the mountainsides that not even our B-52’s could harm them. All of that terrain, all of that cover, ridge after ridge, murderous slides and gorges, all cloaked by triple canopy and thick monsoon mists. And whole divisions were out there in that.
Marine Intelligence (While I see many hoof-marks going in, I see none coming out), backed by the findings of increasing Air Force reconnaissance missions, had been watching and evaluating the build-up with alarm since spring. Khe Sanh had always been in the vicinity of major infiltration routes, “sat astride” them, as the Mission put it. That slight but definite plateau, rising abruptly from the foothills bridging Laos and Vietnam, had been of value for as long as the Vietnamese had been at war. The routes now used by the NVA had been used twenty years earlier by the Viet Minh. Khe Sanh’s original value to the Americans might be gauged by the fact that in spite of the known infiltration all around it, we held it for years with nothing more than a Special Forces A Team; less than a dozen Americans and around 400 indigenous troops, Vietnamese and Montagnard. When the Special Forces first moved in there in 1962, they built their teamhouse, outbuildings, club and defenses over bunkers that had been left by the French. Infiltrating columns simply diverted their routes a kilometer or so away from the central Khe Sanh position. The Green Berets ran out regular, extremely cautious patrols. Since they were almost always surrounded by the infiltrators, Khe Sanh was not the most comfortable duty in Vietnam, but there was seldom anything more than the random ambush or the occasional mortaring that was standard for A Teams anywhere in-country. If the NVA had considered Khe Sanh tactically crucial or even important, they could have taken it at any time. And if we had thought of it as anything more than a token outpost—you can’t have infiltrators
running around without putting someone in there for a look—we could have created it as a major base. No one builds bases like Americans.
In the course of routine patrols during the early spring of 1966, Special Forces reported what appeared to be a significant increase in the number of enemy troops in the immediate Khe Sanh area, and a battalion of Marines was sent to reinforce the patrols. A year later, in April and May of 1967 during large but routine Search-and-Destroy operations, the Marines found and engaged battalion-strength units of North Vietnamese holding the tops of Hills 881 North and South, and a lot of people were killed on both sides. The battles grew into the bloodiest of the spring. The hills were taken and, weeks later, abandoned. The Marines that might have maintained the hills (Where better to observe infiltration than from a vantage of 881 meters?) were sent instead to Khe Sanh, where the 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 26th Marine Regiment rotated, increasing their harassment of the NVA, hoping, if not to drive them out of the sector, to at least force their movements into predictable patterns. The 26th, a hybrid regiment, was formed out of the TAOR of the 5th Marine Division, a numerical designation which remained on paper even after the actual command of the regiment became the responsibility of the 3rd Marine Division, headquartered at Dong Ha, nearby in the DMZ.
By summer, it became obvious that the battles for 881 North and South had engaged a relatively small number of the enemy thought to be in the area. Patrols were stepped up (they were now thought to be among the most dangerous in I Corps), and additional elements of the 26th Marines were airlifted into what was now being called the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The Seabees laid down a 600-meter tarmac airstrip. A beer hall and an air-conditioned officers’ club were built, and the regimental command set up its Tactical Operations Center in the largest of the deserted French bunkers. Yet Khe Sanh continued to be only a moderate, private concern of the Marine Corps. A few old hands in the press corps knew vaguely about the base and about the small ville of about a thousand Montagnards which lay four kilometers to the south. It was not until November, when the regiment had grown to full and then reinforced strength (6,000 Marines, not including units added from the 9th Marine Regiment), with 600 Vietnamese Rangers, two detachments of Seabees, a helicopter squadron and a small Special Forces Compound, that the Marines began “leaking” the rather remarkable claim that by building up the base we had lured an unbelievable number of enemy to the area.
It was at about this time that copies of the little red British paperback edition of Jules Roy’s The Battle of Dienbienphu began appearing wherever members of the Vietnam press corps gathered. You’d spot them around the terrace bar of the Continental Hotel, in L’Amiral Restaurant and Aterbea, at the 8th Aerial Port of Tan Son Nhut, in the Marine-operated Danang Press Center and in the big briefing room of JUSPAO in Saigon, where every afternoon at 4:45 spokesmen conducted the daily war briefing which was colloquially referred to as the Five O’Clock Follies, an Orwellian grope through the day’s events as seen by the Mission. (It was very hard-line.) Those who could find copies were reading Bernard Fall’s Dien Bien Phu book, Hell in a Very Small Place, which many considered the better book, stronger on tactics, more businesslike, with none of the high-level staff gossip that made the Roy book so dramatic. And as the first Marine briefings on Khe Sanh took place in Marine headquarters at Danang or Dong Ha, the name Dien Bien Phu insinuated itself like some tasteless ghost hawking bad news. Marines who had to talk to the press found references to the old French disaster irritating and even insulting. Most were not interested in fielding questions about it, and the rest were unequipped. The more irritated they became, the more the press would flaunt the irritant. For a while it looked like nothing that had happened on the ground during those weeks seemed as thrilling and sinister as the recollection of Dien Bien Phu. And it had to be admitted, the parallels with Khe Sanh were irresistible.
To begin with, the ratio between attackers and defenders was roughly the same, eight to one. The terrain was hauntingly similar, although Khe Sanh was only two square miles inside its perimeter, as opposed to the sprawl of Dien Bien Phu. The weather conditions were the same, with the monsoons favoring the attackers by keeping American air activity at a minimum. Khe Sanh was now encircled, as Dien Bien Phu had been, and where the initial attacks of March 1954 had been launched from Viet Minh trenches, the NVA had begun digging a network of trenches that would soon approach to within a hundred yards of the Marine wire. Dien Bien Phu had been the master plan of General Vo Nguyen Giap; rumors splintered from American Intelligence suggested that Giap himself was directing the Khe Sanh operation from a post somewhere above the DMZ. Given the fact that a lot of Marine officers did not understand what we were doing at Khe Sanh in the first place, the repeated evocations of Dien Bien Phu were unnerving. But then, on what briefers liked to call “our side of the ledger,” there were important differences.
The base at Khe Sanh was raised, if only slightly, on a plateau which would have slowed a ground attack and given the Marines a gentle vantage from which to fire. The Marines also had a massive reaction force to count on, or at least to hope for. For publication, this consisted of the 1st Air Cavalry Division and elements of the 101st Airborne, but in fact the force numbered almost a quarter of a million men, men at support firebases across the DMZ, planners in Saigon (and Washington) and, most important of all, pilots and crews from headquarters as far away as Udorn, Guam, and Okinawa, men whose energies and attentions became fixed almost exclusively on Khe Sanh missions. Air support was everything, the cornerstone of all our hopes at Khe Sanh, and we knew that once the monsoons lifted, it would be nothing to drop tens of thousands of tons of high explosives and napalm all around the base, to supply it without strain, to cover and reinforce the Marines.
It was a comfort, all of that power and precision and exquisitely geared clout. It meant a lot to the thousands of Marines at Khe Sanh, to the Command, to correspondents spending a few days and nights at the base, to officials in the Pentagon. We could all sleep easier for it: lance corporals and General Westmoreland, me and the President, Navy medics and the parents of all the boys inside the wire. All any of us had to worry about was the fact that Khe Sanh was vastly outnumbered and entirely surrounded; that, and the knowledge that all ground evacuation routes, including the vital Route 9, were completely controlled by the NVA, and that the monsoons had at least six weeks more to run.
There was a joke going around that went like this: “What’s the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts?” “The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.” Dig it! the grunts would say, digging it just as long as they didn’t have to hear it from outsiders, from “non-essential personnel” like the Army or the Air Force. For them it was only good as a joke when it also had that touch of fraternal mystery. And what a fraternity! If the war in I Corps was a matter for specialization among correspondents, it was not because it was inherently different as war, but because it was fought almost exclusively by the Marines, whose idiosyncrasies most reporters found intolerable and even criminal. (There was a week in the war, one week, when the Army lost more men killed, proportionately, than the Marines, and Army spokesmen had a rough time hiding their pride, their absolute glee.) And in the face of some new variation on old Marine disasters, it didn’t much matter that you knew dozens of fine, fine officers. Something almost always went wrong somewhere, somehow. It was always something vague, unexplainable, tasting of bad fate, and the results were always brought down to their most basic element—the dead Marine. The belief that one Marine was better than ten Slopes saw Marine squads fed in against known NVA platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off. That belief was undying, but the grunt was not, and the Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans. There were always plenty of stories about entire squads wiped out (their mutilated bodies would so enrage Marines that they would run out “vengeance patrols” w
hich often enough ended the same way), companies taking 75 percent casualties, Marines ambushing Marines, artillery and airstrikes called in on our own positions, all in the course of routine Search-and-Destroy operations. And you knew that, sooner or later, if you went with them often enough, it would happen to you too.
And the grunts themselves knew: the madness, the bitterness, the horror and doom of it. They were hip to it, and more: they savored it. It was no more insane than most of what was going down, and often enough it had its refracted logic. “Eat the apple, fuck the Corps,” they’d say, and write it up on their helmets and flak jackets for their officers to see. (One kid tattooed it on his shoulder.) And sometimes they’d look at you and laugh silently and long, the laugh on them and on you for being with them when you didn’t have to be. And what could be funnier, really, given all that an eighteen-year-old boy could learn in a month of patrolling the Z? It was that joke at the deepest part of the blackest kernel of fear, and you could die laughing. They even wrote a song, a letter to the mother of a dead Marine, that went something like, “Tough shit, tough shit, your kid got greased, but what the fuck, he was just a grunt.…” They got savaged a lot and softened a lot, their secret brutalized them and darkened them and very often it made them beautiful. It took no age, seasoning or education to make them know exactly where true violence resided.
