Authors: Nigel Cawthorne
Slowly, as the weather improved, more supplies got through and the men on Hill 881S could see well enough to call down accurate air strikes on the NVA. They knew they were winning when, on 1 April, two naked NVA soldiers ran up to their positions in broad daylight, asking to surrender. One was shot in the back by his own troops; Marines crawled out under heavy fire to retrieve the other one. Back in the trench, he seemed calm, until a Marine jet passed overhead, when he threw himself into the corner of the trench quivering uncontrollably. The air strikes were plainly taking their toll.
Although the Marines held on to the high ground overlooking Khe Sanh, which they had taken from the NVA in April and May 1967, the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, eight miles southwest of Khe Sanh down Route 9, was overrun. It had been manned by twenty-two Green Berets and 400 CIDGs when, on 7 February, NVA tanks rolled in across the wire, the first time the North Vietnamese had used armour. The defenders stood no chance. The camp had been established as a base for guerrilla operations against the Ho Chi Minh trail across the border in Laos, not as a defensive position. There was a rudimentary defence plan, though. The commander Captain Frank C. Willoughby could call in artillery support from Khe Sanh, Camp Carroll and the Rockpile, whose guns were pre-registered on positions around the camp. Forward Air Controllers could call in USAF and Marine ground-attack aeroplanes and, if all else failed, Colonel Lownds was to send two rifle companies by helicopter or by foot to Lang Vei.
When the NVA tanks came in, Willoughby called for artillery and air support. None came. He called Lownds, but his request for infantry reinforcements was refused. Lownds thought that the attack might be a feint to draw men away from the defence of Khe Sanh itself and his men were not equipped to fight tanks. Lang Vei was on its own.
As two Soviet-made PT-76 tanks, followed by two platoons of infantry crashed through the perimeter, Sergeant James Holt knocked them out with one of the base's two 105mm recoilless rifles. The tanks' crews, which included three women, bailed out of the burning vehicles. Then Holt spotted a third PT-76 blasting one of the bunkers, traversed the gun, and hit it with his last shot. Minutes later, two more tanks appeared and destroyed the abandoned gun.
Fifteen minutes after the attack had begun, the Special Forces base received some artillery support. The first shells came crashing down outside the perimeter. Willoughby called through corrections and zeroed the artillery on to the main assault. Ten minutes later a Spooky gunship arrived. Even so the tanks pressed on, shelling the emergency medical bunker, taking out a mortar position, and blasting their way into the inner compound. One tank was destroyed with grenades and an LAW rocket fired by an ad hoc tank-killer team under Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel F. Schungel, who had been visiting the base. Seeing their comrades incinerated in the burning PT-76, another crew abandoned their tank, only to be shot as they fled.
Even so the NVA took the camp, all except for the command bunker where Willoughby, seven other Green Berets, the South Vietnamese camp commander, and twenty-five CIDGs held out. The NVA tried to destroy the bunker by driving their tanks over it, then blasting it with grenades, explosives, tear gas, and small-arms fire. Willoughby began destroying documents.
Then the words, 'We are going to blow up the bunker, give up now' in Vietnamese came echoing down the stairwell. After an animated discussion, the CIDGs ran out – only to be cut down by machine-gun fire. There were just eight Americans left alive now, six of whom were wounded. It was then that the NVA began digging their way into the bunker.
Help, however, was at hand. A kilometre to the east was an older camp, manned by Sergeants Richard Allen and Eugene Ashley, and Specialist Joel Johnson, along with around a hundred Lao. They called in strafing runs over the camp, then moved in on foot. They were met with mortar and machine-gun fire, and called in more air strikes. Runners went back to get their 51mm recoilless rifle. With this they breached the bunker line before being halted again. A shell killed Ashley and Johnson and the rest of the men withdrew.
After eighteen hours of siege, Willoughby and his men had run out of food and water. The situation was desperate, so he took desperate measures: he called in an air strike on his own position. This was followed by numerous dummy runs, during which the survivors managed to slip out of the camp, hampered only by gunfire from one bunker. When they reached the old camp they found Colonel Schungel who, despite being wounded three times, was trying to organise another rescue mission. Willoughby told him not to bother – everyone was dead – and called in more air strikes on Lang Vei. More than 200 of Lang Vei's defenders were killed or missing and the camp was lost. On 7 February, Marine helicopters brought out the survivors.
Back at Khe Sanh, the Marines clinging on by their fingertips feared the lifting of the siege, however. If it seemed like they were being rescued by an outside force, the Corps would be humiliated in front of the world. Worse, while the Marines sat watching the remains of 25 of their buddies rotting outside the wire for four weeks, 50 more leathernecks of Bravo Company had been killed and 135 wounded, few of whom had even seen the enemy. Morale in the Marine Corps was at an all-time low. When Lieutenant-General John J. Tolson, the commander of the 1st Air Cavalry, visited Khe Sanh to plan its relief, he said that the base was 'the most depressing and demoralising place I have ever visited. It was a very depressing sight, completely unpoliced, strewn with rubble, duds and damaged equipment, and with troops living a life more similar to rats than to humans'.
But the honour of the Corps had to be upheld and Marine commander General Robert E. Cushman insisted, 'I want no implication of a rescue or breaking the siege by an outside force'.
First the Marine Corps had a score to settle. At 0800 on 30 March, in a thick fog, the men of Bravo Company climbed out of their bunkers and fixed bayonets. While 105mm recoilless rifles poured fire onto the enemy's position, they advanced inside a double box of artillery and mortar fire that kicked up the red earth all around them. But as they reached the enemy lines, the fog lifted and NVA mortar rounds came raining down on them. One of the first to be hit was the command group. The forward observers and the radio operator were killed. A fragment of shrapnel lodged in Captain Pipes two inches from his heart. But he stayed on his feet and urged his men forward. They used automatic fire, satchel charges, grenades, and flame-throwers to clear the enemy trenches. It took three hours. At the end, 115 NVA lay dead. Then Bravo Company returned to Khe Sanh, taking the 25 bodies of their lost patrol with them. While the dead Marines lay outside the wire, the NVA had not had time to pick over the remains and their watches, rings, wallets, and dog tags were still in place. The honour of the Corps had been redeemed on the battlefield.
Two days later, the Marines were allowed to lead the relief operation, Operation Pegasus, when two battalions moved down Route 9 from the east. But even the name of the operation seemed to be designed to humiliate the Marines, as Pegasus, the mythical flying horse, was an insignia of the Air Cavalry. Later that day, the 1st Air Cavalry began its much-publicised leapfrog down Route 9. There were no NVA in the area, but there were plenty of pressmen and TV crews. As they neared the base, landing zones came under fire and at one point the NVA staged a counter-attack, but this was quickly suppressed by a massive air and artillery assault. By 8 April, the road was clear and the Marines had to put on a brave smiles for the TV cameras as lead elements of the Air Cav arrived. To add insult to injury, it was an ARVN company that eventually reached Khe Sanh in force. Then a cocky young Air Cav trooper hung a sign on a Marines' bunker which read: 'Khe Sanh – Under new management, Delta Co, 2/7 Cav'.
By then, the area around Khe Sanh, once compared to the lush hills of Tuscany, was a barren moonscape. Where once there had been forests full of game and streams full of trout, there was no game, no trees, no trout, and no streams. Nevertheless, Westmoreland would appear on the White House lawn and proclaim, 'Victory at Khe Sanh'.
This fooled no one. Although the NVA had been badly mauled, Khe Sanh had shown that the US forces were in fact vulnerable both in conventional warfare and guerrilla warfare, and Khe Sanh was ultimately seen by the American people as a victory for the Communists. Even at the time, it was a hollow victory for the Marines. Two months after it had been relieved, Khe Sanh was abandoned, though it was briefly re-established as logistics base for a disastrous incursion into Laos in 1971. The Hanoi government called the withdrawal from Khe Sanh the US's 'gravest defeat' so far. That same month, June 1968, Westmoreland was rotated home and kicked upstairs to become Army Chief of Staff after a report leaked to
The New York Times
revealed that, even in January, he had no idea that the Tet Offensive was imminent. He was replaced as commander in Vietnam by his deputy General Creighton W. Abrams.
Abrams abandoned Westmoreland's strategy of trying to trap the enemy into large-scale engagements and began a policy of what would be known as Vietnamisation – that is, the replacement of US troops with the ARVN and other South Vietnamese forces. Part of this programme was to encourage the CIDG programme. The loss of Lang Vei was a setback. Then on 12 May 1968, the CIDG camp at Kham Duc was overrun by elements of the 2nd NVA Division. The Green Berets A-105 Detachment there was decimated and a relieving force from the American Division suffered heavy casualties. As a result there was a rout of the CIDGs. With CIDG detachments now under attack from the NVA main force, their casualties grew and they soon ran out of trained and experienced men. The Green Berets could then find little use for them. The mountain tribes who made up the CIDGs had little love for the ethnic Vietnamese and – when they were handed over to the ARVN – they effectively disappeared.
By the time Abrams took over, the 82nd Airborne had arrived in Vietnam and US troops in country topped 495,000 men. Despite the fact that General Westmoreland had declared that the Communists had suffered a 'military defeat' at Tet, they continue to shell South Vietnamese cities and, on 2 March, succeeded in killed 48 men of the US 25th Infantry Division in an ambush at Tan Son Nhut. The body counts continued to climb, showing the Communists' strength had not been diminished.
The ARVN had mobilised an extra 11,000 troops and announced that they planned to invade the North with a 'volunteer force'. The idea was immediately quashed by Washington, who were making peace overtures. Although on 3 May Hanoi agreed that Paris would be the venue for the peace talks, this did not diminish the Vietcong's willingness to fight. Two days later 'mini-Tet' began with ground assaults in Saigon and the shelling of 119 towns, cities, and barracks. The Paris peace talks opened on 10 May amid an air of optimism. The US delegation was headed by 77-year-old Averell Harriman, former Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern affairs in the Kennedy administration, while the North Vietnamese negotiators were led by Xuan Thuy, a former foreign minister. The Americans had checked into hotels, rather than arranging more permanent accommodation, believing that a settlement was only months away. Almost as soon as the talks opened, however, they were deadlocked. The US delegation demanded a withdrawal of the North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. The Communists refused even to discuss the matter. Instead, the North Vietnamese insisted that the Saigon government be reformed to include representatives of the Vietcong, but the Americans rejected this. This stand-off lasted for another five years. During that time, more Americans would be killed in Vietnam than had been lost previously and the US would be torn apart by internal dissent. Meanwhile, the fighting in Saigon had spread to the Tan Son Nhut airbase, the Phu Tho race track and the Cholon district, where the battle climaxed on 12 May with US jets dropping high explosives and napalm. In the countryside, fresh search-and-destroy operations claimed more enemy casualties. In Saigon, a third battle for the city broke out on 25 May. It lasted eleven days with, once again, the heaviest fighting taking place in Cholon.
July began with a lull in attacks by the North, but the VC managed yet another assault on Saigon. Meanwhile Hanoi released three US airmen as a gesture of good will. At the same time in Paris, Xuan Thuy denounced US participation in the war. Despite the talks, Johnson reassured President Thieu that talk of a major change in US policy was 'absolute tommyrot and fiction'.
Vice-President Ky clarified South Vietnam's position when he said, 'The only way to win over the Communists is by military strength. We cannot have a coalition with them'.
The ARVN stepped up its own search-and-destroy missions, claiming dizzying body counts. The response was renewed attacks by the NVA, who besieged the US Special Forces camp in Duc Lap, while the VC once again shelled Saigon. Even Thieu himself seemed to be under threat. After rumours of an attempted coup, he appeared on national TV on 10 October to assure viewers that his government was under no threat. The day before though, he had put his troops in Saigon on a state of maximum readiness.
In August, Johnson urged Hanoi to respond to the limits he had put on the bombing. In September, the nine hundredth US plane was shot down over the North and, on 11 October,
The New York Times
revealed that the US had offered to halt the bombing of the North completely if Hanoi would make concessions. Three days later, the US released 14 North Vietnamese sailors in its own goodwill gesture. US forces continued fighting on the ground but, on 31 October, just five days before the US election, President Johnson tried to jump-start the talks again. He went on national TV to announce a complete halt to the bombing campaign against the North. All naval and artillery bombardments would also cease as part of his policy of 'de-escalating the war and moving seriously toward peace'. Bombing had ended at 0800 Eastern Standard Time that morning. Since 1965, over 2.5 million tons of bombs had been dropped on the North, and over 300,000 sorties flown, with nearly half a ton of explosives being dropped each minute for three-and-a-half years, with no notable effect. Indeed, during that time infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh trail had soared and the NVA strength south of the DMZ had increased by an estimated 75 per cent. Rolling Thunder may have stiffened morale in the South, but it also hardened the attitude to the war in the North.