by Michael Herr
And they were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be? It absorbed them, inhabited them, made them strong in the way that victims are strong, filled them with the twin obsessions of Death and Peace, fixed them so that they could never, never again speak lightly about the Worst Thing in the World. If you learned just this much about them, you were never quite as happy (in the miserable-joyous way of covering the war) with other outfits. And, naturally, the poor bastards were famous all over Vietnam. If you spent some weeks up there and afterward joined an Army outfit of, say, the 4th or 25th Division, you’d get this:
“Where you been? We ain’t seen you.”
“Up in I Corps.”
“With the Marines?”
“That’s what’s up there.”
“Well, all I got to say is Good Luck! Marines. Fuck that.”
“Khe Sanh is the Western Anchor of our defense,” the Commanding General offered.
“Who told you that?” the Examining Angels replied.
“Why … everybody!”
No Marine ever called it that, not even those officers who believed in it tactically, just as no Marine ever called what happened there for seventy-six days a “siege.” Those were MACV conceits, often taken up by the press, and they angered Marines. As long as the 26th Marines could maintain a battalion outside the wire (the garrison at Khesanville was withdrawn and the town bombed flat, but Marines still patrolled beyond the perimeter and lived on nearby hilltops), as long as planes could re-supply the base, it could not be a siege. Marines may get beleaguered, but not besieged. Whatever one chose to call it, by the time of the Tet Offensive, a week after the shelling of Khe Sanh began, it looked as though both sides had committed themselves on such a scale that engagement was inevitable. No one I knew doubted that it would come, probably in the form of a massive ground attack, and that when it came it would be terrible and great.
Tactically, its value to the Command was thought so great that General Westmoreland could announce that the Tet Offensive was merely Phase II of a brilliant Giap strategy. Phase I had been revealed in the autumn skirmishes between Loc Ninh and Dak To. Phase III (“the capstone,” the general called it) was to be Khe Sanh. It seems impossible that anyone, at any time, even in the chaos of Tet, could have actually called something as monumental (and decisive?) as that offensive a mere diversion for something as negligible as Khe Sanh, but all of that is on record.
And by then, Khe Sanh was famous, one of the very few place names in Vietnam that was recognized by the American public. Khe Sanh said “siege,” it said “encircled Marines” and “heroic defenders.” It could be understood by newspaper readers quickly, it breathed Glory and War and Honored Dead. It seemed to make sense. It was good stuff. One can only imagine the anxiety which the Commander in Chief suffered over it. Lyndon Johnson said it straight out, he did not want “any damn Dinbinfoo,” and he did something unprecedented in the history of warfare. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were summoned and made to sign a statement “for the public reassurance,” asserting that Khe Sanh could and would be held at all costs. (Apparently, Coriolanus had never been required reading at the Point. Noncoms in the field, even grunts with no career ambitions, felt the professional indignity of the President’s gambit, talked of it as something shameful.) Perhaps Khe Sanh would be held, perhaps not; the President had his statement now, and it was signed clearly. If Khe Sanh stood, he would presumably be available for a grin in the victory picture. If it fell, it would not be on his head.
More than any other Americans in Vietnam, Khe Sanh’s defenders became hostages, nearly 8,000 Americans and Vietnamese who took their orders not from the regimental commander in the TOC, nor from General Cushman in Danang nor General Westmoreland in Saigon, but from a source which one Intelligence officer I knew always called “Downtown.” They were made to sit and wait, and Marines defending are like antichrists at vespers. Somehow, digging in seems a soft thing to do, fighting from a hole is like fighting on your knees. (“Digging,” General Cushman said, “is not the Marine way.”) Most of the defenses against artillery were built entirely or substantially reinforced after the heavy shelling began, when the Tet Offensive diverted supply from the air and made Khe Sanh even more isolated. They were built on the scrounge and so haphazardly that the lines of sandbagging had a sensuous, plastic drift to them as they stretched away into the filtered light of mist and dust, the shapes growing dimmer in the distance. If all of the barbed wire and all of the sandbags were taken away, Khe Sanh would have looked like one of those Colombian valley slums whose meanness is the abiding factor, whose despair is so palpable that for days after you leave you are filled with a vicarious shame for the misery you have just tripped through. At Khe Sanh most bunkers were nothing more than hovels with inadequate overhead cover, and you could not believe that Americans were living this way, even in the middle of a war. The defenses were a scandal, and everywhere you could smell that sour reek of obsolescence that followed the Marines all over Vietnam. If they could not hear their own dead from Con Thien, only three months past, how could they ever be expected to hear the dead from Dien Bien Phu?
Not a single round had fallen inside the perimeter. The jungled slopes running up from the bowl of the base were not yet burned over and hung with the flare chutes that looked like infants’ shrouds. Six shades of green, motherfucker, tell me that ain’t something beautiful. There were no heaps of shredded, blood-soaked jungle fatigues outside the triage room, and the wires were not cluttered each dawn with their dead. None of it had happened yet when Khe Sanh became lost forever as a tactical entity. It is impossible to fix the exact moment in time when it happened, or to know, really, why. All that was certain was that Khe Sanh had become a passion, the false love object in the heart of the Command. It cannot even be determined which way the passion traveled. Did it proceed from the filthiest ground-zero slit trench and proceed outward, across I Corps to Saigon and on (taking the true perimeter with it) to the most abstract reaches of the Pentagon? Or did it get born in those same Pentagon rooms where six years of failure had made the air bad, where optimism no longer sprang from anything viable but sprang and sprang, all the way to Saigon, where it was packaged and shipped north to give the grunts some kind of reason for what was about to happen to them? In its outlines, the promise was delicious: Victory! A vision of as many as 40,000 of them out there in the open, fighting it out on our terms, fighting for once like men, fighting to no avail. There would be a battle, a set-piece battle where he could be killed by the numbers, killed wholesale, and if we killed enough of him, maybe he would go away. In the face of such a promise, the question of defeat could not even be considered, no more than the question of whether, after Tet, Khe Sanh might have become militarily unwise and even absurd. Once it was all locked in place, Khe Sanh became like the planted jar in Wallace Stevens’ poem. It took dominion everywhere.
IV
When I think of it quickly, just seeing the name somewhere or being asked what it was like, I see a flat, dun stretch of ground running out in an even plane until the rim of the middle distance takes on the shapes and colors of jungled hills. I had the strangest, most thrilling kind of illusion there, looking at those hills and thinking about the death and mystery that was in them. I would see the thing I knew I actually saw: the base from the ground where I stood, figures moving across it, choppers rising from the pad by the strip, and the hills above. But at the same time I would see the other, too; the ground, the troops and even myself, all from the vantage of the hills. It was a double vision that came to me more than once there. And in my head, sounding over and over, were the incredibly sinister words of the song we had all heard for the first time only days before. “The Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away,” it promised, “Coming to take you away, dy-ing to take you away.…” That was a song about Khe Sanh; we knew it then, and it still seems so. Inside the bunker, one of the grunts has been saying hideous things in his sleep, laugh
ing a bad laugh and then going more silent than even deep sleep permits before starting it up again, and it is more terrible in there than any place I can even imagine. I got up then and went outside, any place at all was better than this, and stood in the dark smoking a cigarette, watching the hills for a sign and hoping none would come because, shit, what could be revealed except more fear? Three in the morning, and my blood is intimate with the chill, host to it, and very willing too. From the center of the earth there is a tremor that shakes everything, running up through my legs and body, shaking my head, yet no one in the bunker wakes up. We called them “Archlights,” he called them Rolling Thunder, and it was incessant during the nights. The bombs would release at 18,000 feet and the planes would turn and fly back to Udorn or Guam. Dawn seems to last until late morning, dusk falls at four. Everything I see is blown through with smoke, everything is on fire everywhere. It doesn’t matter that memory distorts; every image, every sound comes back out of smoke and the smell of things burning.
Some of it, like smoke from an exploding round in the air, breaks cleanly and at a comfortable distance. Some of it pours out of large tubs of shit being burned off with diesel fuel, and it hangs, hangs, taking you full in the throat even though you are used to it. Right there on the strip a fuel ship has been hit, and no one who has heard that can kill the shakes for an hour. (What woke you?… What woke you?) A picture comes in, absolutely still for a moment, and then resumes the motion it once had: a heat tablet, burning in high intensity, covered by a tiny, blackened stove a Marine had made for me two weeks before in Hue out of the small dessert can from a ration box. From this little bit of light I can see the outlines of a few Marines, all of us in a bunker filling with the acrid smoke of the tablet, glad for it because the rations will be hot tonight, glad because we know how safe the bunker is and because we are both private and together, and find a lot of things to laugh about. I brought the tablets with me, stole them from a colonel’s aide in Dong Ha, supercilious prick, and these guys hadn’t had any in days, weeks. I also have a bottle. (“Oh man, you are welcome here. You are definitely welcome. Let’s wait for Gunny.”) The beef and potatoes, the meatballs and beans, the ham and Mothers, all that good stuff, will be hot tonight, and who really gives a fuck about tomorrow night anyway? Somewhere above ground now, in full afternoon light, there is a four-foot stack of C-ration cartons, the cardboard burned away from the metal binding wire, the cans and utility packs lying all around, and on top of it all there is the body of a young ARVN Ranger who had just come over to Bravo Recon to scrounge a few cans of American food. If he’d succeeded, he would have gone back to his unit a celebrity, but as it was he didn’t make out. Three rounds had come in very quickly, neither killing nor wounding any of the Marines, and now two lance corporals are arguing. One wants to put the dead Ranger into a green body bag, the other just wants to cover the body somehow, anyhow, and run it over to the Dink compound. He’s very pissed off. “We keep tellin’ them fuckin’ people to stay with their own fuckin’ outfits,” he says, over and over. Fires eat at everything. There are fires at night, the trees on hillsides kilometers away erupting in smoke, burning. At late morning, the sun burns off the last of the chill and early mist, making the base visible from above until late afternoon, when the chill and the mists return. Then it is night again, and the sky beyond the western perimeter is burning with slowly dropping magnesium flares. Heaps of equipment are on fire, terrifying in their jagged black massiveness, burning prehistoric shapes like the tail of a C-130 sticking straight up in the air, dead metal showing through the gray-black smoke. God, if it can do that to metal, what will it do to me? And then something very near me is smoldering, just above my head, the damp canvas coverings on the sandbags lining the top of a slit trench. It is a small trench, and a lot of us have gotten into it in a hurry. At the end farthest from me there is a young guy who has been hit in the throat, and he is making the sounds a baby will make when he is trying to work up the breath for a good scream. We were on the ground when those rounds came, and a Marine nearer the trench had been splattered badly across the legs and groin. I sort of took him into the trench with me. It was so crowded I couldn’t help leaning on him a little, and he kept saying, “You motherfucker, you cocksucker,” until someone told him that I wasn’t a grunt but a reporter. Then he started to say, very quietly, “Be careful, Mister. Please be careful.” He’d been wounded before, and he knew how it would hurt in a few minutes. People would just get ripped up in the worst ways there, and things were always on fire. Far up the road that skirted the TOC was a dump where they burned the gear and uniforms that nobody needed anymore. On top of the pile I saw a flak jacket so torn apart that no one would ever want it again. On the back, its owner had listed the months that he had served in Vietnam. March, April, May (each month written out in a tentative, spidery hand), June, July, August, September, Octobler, Novembler, Decembler, Janurary, Feburary, the list ending right there like a clock stopped by a bullet. A jeep pulled up to the dump and a Marine jumped out carrying a bunched-up fatigue jacket held out away from him. He looked very serious and scared. Some guy in his company, some guy he didn’t even know, had been blown away right next to him, all over him. He held the fatigues up and I believed him. “I guess you couldn’t wash them, could you?” I said. He really looked like he was going to cry as he threw them into the dump. “Man,” he said, “you could take and scrub them fatigues for a million years, and it would never happen.”
I see a road. It is full of ruts made by truck and jeep tires, but in the passing rains they never harden, and along the road there is a two-dollar piece of issue, a poncho which had just been used to cover a dead Marine, a blood-puddled, mud-wet poncho going stiff in the wind. It has reared up there by the road in a horrible, streaked ball. The wind doesn’t move it, only setting the pools of water and blood in the dents shimmering. I’m walking along this road with two black grunts, and one of them gives the poncho a vicious, helpless kick. “Go easy, man,” the other one says, nothing changing in his face, not even a look back. “That’s the American flag you gettin’ your foot into.”
During the early morning of February 7 something so horrible happened in the Khe Sanh sector that even those of us who were in Hue when we heard news of it had to relinquish our own fear and despair for a moment to acknowledge the horror and pay some tribute to it. It was as though the very worst dream any of us had ever had about the war had come true; it anticipated nightmares so vile that they could take you off shuddering in your sleep. No one who heard it was able to smile that bitter, secret survivor’s smile that was the reflex to almost all news of disaster. It was too awful even for that.
Five kilometers southwest of the Khe Sanh Combat Base, sitting above the river which forms the border with Laos, there was a Special Forces A Camp. It was called Langvei, taking its name from the small Montagnard village nearby which had been mistakenly bombed a year before by the Air Force. The camp was larger than most Special Forces camps, and much better built. It was set on twin hills about 700 meters apart, and the vital bunkers holding most of the troops were on the hill nearest the river. It was manned by twenty-four Americans and over 400 Vietnamese troops. Its bunkers were deep, solid, with three feet of reinforced concrete overhead, seemingly impregnable. And sometime after midnight, the North Vietnamese came and took it. They took it with a style that had been seen only once before, in the Ia Drang, attacking with weapons and tactics which no one imagined they had. Nine light tanks, Soviet T-34’s and 76’s, were deployed east and west, closing on the camp so suddenly that the first sound of them was mistaken by the Americans for a malfunction of the camp generator. Satchel charges, bangalore torpedoes, tear gas and—ineffable horror—napalm were all hurled into the machine-gun slits and air vents of the bunkers. It took very little time. An American colonel who had come on an inspection visit to Langvei was seen charging the tanks with nothing but hand grenades before he was cut down. (He survived. The word “miracle” doesn’t even
apply.) Somewhere between ten and fifteen Americans were killed, and as many as 300 of the indigenous troops. The survivors traveled all night, most of them on foot through NVA positions (some were picked up later by choppers), arriving at Khe Sanh after dawn, and it was said that some of them had become insane. At the same time that Langvei was being overrun, Khe Sanh received the most brutal artillery barrage of the war: 1,500 rounds that night, six rounds a minute for more minutes than anyone could bear to count.
The Marines at Khe Sanh saw the Langvei survivors come in. They saw them and heard about them up in their Special Forces compound, holding off all visitors at rifle point, saw their faces and their unfocused stares, and they talked quietly among themselves about it. Jesus, they had tanks. Tanks!… After Langvei, how could you look out of your perimeter at night without hearing the treads coming? How could you patrol in the dark without remembering every story you ever heard about ghostly enemy helicopters flying the fringes of the Z? About the trails cut in the floor of the A Shau Valley, big enough to hold trucks? About the complete fanaticism of attackers who were doped to the eyeballs (sure they smoke dope, it gets them crazy), who ran pushing civilian shields forward, who chained themselves to their machine guns and died right there rather than fail, who had No Regard For Human Life?
