Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (56 page)

At Hué the Vietcong and North Vietnamese infiltrated in small independent units, at night, and often out of uniform. They fired automatic weapons, mortars, and grenade launchers from house windows, behind walls, and in crowds, forcing the marines to fight a counterattack reminiscent of Stalingrad, in which the enemy had to be expelled block by block, destroying hundreds of residences in the process. Often the Americans’ choice was either to be picked off at random by well-ensconced snipers or to blast apart entire—and often historic—buildings by using howitzers and aerial bombardment:

They were unshaven, grimy, and covered with dust from the shattered brick and stone buildings. Sweat and bloodstains covered their fatigues. Elbows and knees stuck out of holes in their uniforms, the same ones they had worn for two weeks. . . . The Marines, who were trained to be a mobile, amphibious reaction force, had become moles. They had become a static, immobile collection of rats, hunkered down in a junk pile of crumbled houses, surrounded by shell-pocked courtyard walls, burned-out automobiles, and downed trees and power lines. Death was waiting to tap them on the shoulder at any time, and many would never know where it came from. (G. Smith,
The Siege of Hue,
158)

Yet in less than a month the enemy was expelled from Hué. The final tally of the dead was dramatically lopsided. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies—the Elite Black Panther company (Hac Bao) was given the privilege of storming the imperial palace and slaughtering the last enemy holdouts—had killed 5,113 of the enemy. Only 147 Americans were lost in action, with 857 wounded—fatality figures that in their own right would have signaled a landmark victory in both world wars. Yet reporters who freely roamed Hué ignored the respective sacrifices and were uninterested in the larger tactical situation. Instead, they mostly interviewed American soldiers in the midst of the dirty street fighting. Often they sent back mini-interviews like the following with a marine taking a minute’s break from firing:

What’s the hardest part of it?

Not knowing where they are—that’s the worst thing. Riding around, running in sewers, the gutter, anywhere. Could be anywhere. Just hope you can stay alive, day to day. Everybody just wants to go back home and go to school. That’s about it.

Have you lost any friends?

Quite a few. We lost one the other day. The whole thing stinks, really. (S. Karnow,
Vietnam,
533)

For the first time in the history of Western warfare—in fact, of any conflict anywhere at any time—soldiers in the heat of battle could be seen instantly by millions of their parents, siblings, and friends in the safety of their living rooms. Images of the wounded and dead were flashed home in gruesome detail—and in color—by reporters of any nation, who were mostly free to go, see, and send back what they wished, with the likelihood it would be heard, read, or seen by the American voting public within hours, if not minutes. When such technological breakthroughs in instant video communications, often in abbreviated snippets and without context, were married to the traditional Western emphasis on unlimited freedom, the result was soon a level of civilian vehemence against the war rarely seen in the past, even among the voices of dissent against the Athenian expedition to Sicily, the European conquest of the Americas, or the British conduct during the Zulu and Boer Wars.

While Americans saw pictures of atrocious killing on television and interviews with disgusted marines, who found their South Vietnamese allies as reluctant to charge fixed positions alongside them as their North Vietnamese enemies were deadly, almost no reports were issued about the North Vietnamese massacres of the innocent. Much less was there any appreciation of the astounding ability of surprised and outnumbered U.S. marines to expel 10,000 from a fortified urban center in just over three weeks at the cost of fewer than 150 dead. Hué, brutal as it turned out to be, was yet another impressive American military victory, perhaps a feat of arms rivaling any bravery shown in either World War I or II. And the Americans were not done.

Khesanh

When the North Vietnamese and Vietcong broke the thirty-six-hour Tet truce on January 31, they systematically attacked the main cities of Saigon, Quangtri, Hué, Da Nang, Nha Trang, Quinhon, Kontum, Banmethuot, My Tho, Can Tho, and Ben Tre with more than 80,000 troops. Altogether thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals were invaded at a time when 50 percent of the South Vietnamese army was on leave for the holidays. Yet in most places, except for Saigon and Hué, enemy infiltrators were expelled within a week. That counterattack was an amazing feat in and of itself, because the Americans were caught off guard—intelligence warnings of the size and date of the invasion were issued weeks prior, but largely ignored by the squabbling MACV high command.

Even though relatively small numbers of troops had infiltrated key installations in the hearts of major cities like Saigon and Hué, the North Vietnamese initially achieved a psychological dividend far out of proportion to the actual damage inflicted on the Americans and their allies. They were learning quickly that they need not win the offensive, but only overrun for a few days purportedly secure areas in order to cause a firestorm of recrimination and unrest in America. Moreover, at first the American command was confused over enemy intent. General Westmoreland himself felt that the Tet offensives were diversionary tactics to draw American forces away from the siege at Khesanh. Yet the opposite was more likely true: the early siege at Khesanh was designed to divert attention from the urban attacks to come in the following week.

At a little after 5:00 in the morning on January 21, ten days before the formal start of the Tet Offensive, thousands of North Vietnamese troops unleashed an artillery barrage as part of a general assault on an American base at Khesanh. The latter was a forward-area garrison near the DMZ that was intended to cut the supply of troops and matériel from North Vietnam. During the last week of January, news of the beleaguered base ran around the world. Many newspapers dubbed the siege another Dien Bien Phu, where a French garrison in 1954 was nearly annihilated before surrendering its 16,000 survivors.

Yet at Khesanh daily air strikes, hourly resupply, relatively safe evacuation of Lao and Vietnamese refugees, and constant communications kept the besieged 6,000 troops in relatively good shape. Was there much strategic value in hanging on to the surrounded Khesanh? It was hard to ascertain any. The Americans chose to hold the isolated outpost as bait, apparently as a deliberate plan to draw whole North Vietnamese divisions into an open firefight, or they were worried that withdrawal would signal a critical weakness in an American election year, when antiwar protests were on the rise. Whatever the rationale for the decision to stay, far from being another Dien Bien Phu, Khesanh was yet another devastating American demonstration of firepower. While the French had been cut off, outnumbered, without much air support, and isolated in North Vietnam near the Chinese border, the Americans were supplied daily, reinforced, south of the DMZ, in constant and easy communications, and able to drop tons of ordnance on the enemy. Nonetheless, the surrounded marines were also in a sea of seasoned North Vietnamese troops and themselves somewhat unsure of their exact mission. What was the eventual American plan for Khesanh? Was it, as professed by Westmoreland, a key to the defense of the DMZ and possible future operations in Laos, or simply a killing zone to incur enemy body counts and thus to be abandoned once the siege was lifted?

Veteran North Vietnamese troops had surprised and overrun the Lao and Vietnamese garrison at Lang Vei nearby, along with their American advisers, thus giving them full control of land routes into Khesanh. Soon the base was being shelled almost hourly—on some days as many as a thousand incoming artillery, rocket, and mortar rounds—in an effort to wear down the marines and destroy the airstrip. The North Vietnamese were equipped with some of the latest Soviet and Chinese weaponry, such as the 122mm heavy mortar, surface-to-surface missiles, flame-throwers,

tanks, and 130mm heavy artillery, most of it adapted from basic designs dating back to World War II and based on original German, French, and American models. Thousands of Chinese and Soviet advisers worked stealthily but feverishly in the North to unload the artillery batteries and train the Vietnamese in their use.

Despite the new lethal armament, the American counterresponse was frightening and constituted one of the most deadly artillery and air assaults in the history of infantry battle. During the nearly three-month-long siege—from January 20 to mid-April 1968—110,022 tons of bombs were dropped and 142,081 rounds of artillery fired. Some estimated that the true American total was in excess of 200,000 cannon shells. Such astonishing firepower demanded constant rearmament; and eventually more than 14,000 tons of supplies were flown into Khesanh, all under continuous fire. Thousands of North Vietnamese were incinerated in the jungle surrounding the camp. Most estimates put the enemy dead and severely wounded around 10,000—half the 20,000 believed to be involved in the original siege.

Khesanh was to become an abject communist slaughter. If back home Americans in and out of government protested that there were needless marine deaths in defending a frontier outpost, North Vietnamese were publicly silent about their own logic of sacrificing thousands of their young men in a failed effort to storm a tiny airstrip. An American air force pilot remarked of the obliteration:

In mid-February, the area looked like the rest of Vietnam, mountainous and heavily jungled with very little visibility through the jungle canopy. Five weeks later, the jungle had become literally a desert—vast stretches of scarred, bare earth with hardly a tree standing, a landscape of splinters and bomb craters. (T. Hoopes,
The Limits of Intervention,
213)

Fewer than 200 Americans were killed, with 1,600 wounded, 845 of which were evacuated. No doubt the real figures were somewhat higher when one considers the fighting in and around Khesanh at Lang Vei, the overland rescue effort in April (Operation Pegasus), and the loss of transport and combat pilots. Still, for every one American killed at Khesanh, fifty North Vietnamese lost their lives—lopsided figures approaching the horrendous slaughter ratios between Spaniards and Aztecs in Mexico or British and Zulus in southern Africa.

Instead of amazement at the carnage, the American media throughout the siege forecast a terrible defeat. After the beginning of the Tet offensives, and the near simultaneous capture of the intelligence ship
Pueblo
in Korean waters,
Life
magazine warned its readers against global American reversals culminating in “the looming bloodbath at Khe Sanh.” After a month into the siege, when the level of American counterfire was well established, on March 22 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in the
Washington Post,
“Whatever we do, we must not re-enact Dien Bien Phu.” He went on to warn Americans, “Let us not sacrifice our brave men to the folly of generals and the obstinance of Presidents.” Oliver E. Chub, Jr., echoed the general hysteria in the
New Republic:
Khesanh, he said, recalling Bismarck’s remark about the relative value of German soldiers versus intervention in the Balkans, “was not worth the life of a single Marine.” He concluded that the siege “could easily end in a military disaster unprecedented in the Vietnam war” (B. Nalty,
Air Power and the Fight for Khe
Sanh,
39–40). Meanwhile, within three weeks of the beginning of the siege, wings of B-52s—in a preview of the Gulf War bombing tactics years later—had worked out a grid system around the besieged base, in which three bombers blanketed a one-by-two-kilometer box every ninety minutes, around the clock, with explosives and napalm. The air force methodically began to destroy nearly every living thing within one kilometer of the marine ramparts.

The siege ended on April 6, and with it a close to the last of the fighting that had lingered after the culmination of the Tet Offensive. But then in late June, convinced that the resistance had been an overwhelming American success, the MACV ordered the base dismantled. On July 5 Khesanh was razed! The Americans destroyed in hours what the North Vietnamese communists could not in months. All the bridges on nearby Route 9, which weeks earlier had been so laboriously repaired to enable land convoys to reach the trapped marines, were systematically blown up. In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive and subsequent bombing halts, the Americans had apparently determined to abandon their previous idea of walling off the DMZ and stationing troops in forward defense areas near the North Vietnamese border. The marines who had braved constant fire for nearly three months were furious and in near revolt at the news; they felt that possession of the base, not the number of enemy killed, had signified that their lost friends had at least died for something tangible.