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They say he would saunter into the room wearing his pajamas at those hours when the horizon held merely the hint of light. He would hover over the sandbox he had made them build and bring here, sometimes just staring at it, other times walking around it, stopping to focus on certain parts as he read the dispatches, as if those words would make the thing live.
He must have been incredibly frustrated, maybe even to the point of madness, for even though he had at his fingertips more power than any human being would ever hold before or since, he could not command this place the way the gods move people like chess pieces in Ray Harryhousen’s Jason and the Argonauts. Instead his obsession resembled the sculpture of Devil�s Tower that Richard Dreyfuss builds in his living room in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like Dreyfuss, the more he stared at his model, the more it became a question mark that bored its way deep into his brain leaving him sleepless, frustrated, even angry.
Unlike Dreyfuss, he knew the name of this place. He could point to it on a map and discourse at length on its significance or sum it up with an expletive-filled sentence. That place was named Khe Sanh. The man in the pajamas was Lyndon Johnson. It was he who had them bring the table top model into the White House basement until it became a fetish not unlike the sculpture that haunted Richard Dreyfuss.
There is something spooky about the President of the United States haunted by a sand pile in his basement. Like some shaman, he must have felt the model would control the battle raging in his mind while soldiers hunkered in their bunkers listening for the next incoming round. Instead that which haunted him would end up costing him his presidency.
George W. Bush has little use for models and even less for shamans. Let’s just say his brain is not wired that way. He does not prowl the White House hallways in his pajamas in those hours just before th sun rises as did Lyndon Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, reading the incoming reports that might bring some relief from the sleeplessness. According to his own accounts, George W. Bush sleeps very well.
Yet the model Lyndon Johnson obsessed over should have Bush prowling the hallways, for it-and the battle it was built to monitor–should weigh on his mind as heavily as it did on Johnson’s. Khe Sanh is many things, some of them still being argued about by historians and the tacticians at West Point and Leavenworth. Parts of it even resemble earlier battles–the Somme, Gettysburg. But parts of it also portend the future, for Khe Sanh, as much as any other battle, may have the most to teach us about Iraq. It is a lesson we would do well to heed.
When invoking Khe Sanh it is important to remember that it was one of the great moments in heroism, courage and grit on the part of ordinary soldiers and pilots�the ones who actually did the fighting. Today those who served there are rightly regarded by other veterans with the deference accorded those who fought at Iwo or Normandy. Most of all, there is a saying among veterans–the real heroes are those who did not come back.
For those who have forgotten this battle that should never be forgotten, Khe Sanh began as a small firebase near the Demilitarized Zone on the border of North Vietnam. A little over a year before the siege, one soldier described the base as a:
quiet, uneventful place viewed by ADA personnel as a welcome respite from the grueling barrages at Con Thien and Gio Linh, and the daily routine of mine sweeps and convoy escorts.
In 1967, General William Westmoreland and Defense Secretary McNamara decided to upgrade Khe Sanh adding more troops, firepower and other enhancements so that by January of 1968, Khe Sanh had grown to 6,000 troops with another 40,000 in supporting positions in the area.
Khe Sanh also received a new mission as the western anchor for what became known as the “McNamara Line,” a scheme designed to track and contain enemy forces. Ever the technocrat, McNamara, fell under the spell of various researchers who sought a technological solution to the war, the most infamous part of this effort was a series of electronic sensors known as Igloo White–a Maginot Line built of transistors.
As the build-up proceeded, the North Vietnamese began probing Khe Sanh with a series of attacks in 1967. Although not officially part of the siege, in hindsight they can be seen as precursors to the main attack, designed to see if we would defend the outpost and also gather information about the strength of the base.
In early 1968, intelligence began receiving information that the North Vietnamese appeared to be increasing troops in the area for an assault on Khe Sanh. At this point American commanders and the White House faced a key decision. They could evacuate the base or they could try to hold it against what promised could be a formidable assault. In the book The Tet Offensive, edited by Marc Jason Gilbert and William Head, Peter Brush, who served at Khe Sanh, states:
For the U.S. military command, the Marines at Khe Sanh were bait; chum liberally spread around the Khe Sanh tactical area to entice large military forces of North Vietnam from the depths of their sanctuaries to the exposed shallows of America’s high technology killing machine.
For all his adoption of technology such as Igloo White, William Westmoreland may be remembered as the classic example of the general who fights the last war rather than one he faces. Westmoreland had always sought a big battle against the enemy like those of Korea and World War II, believing that our superior training, firepower–and most important–air power would give us an overwhelming edge.
Westmoreland and Lyndon Johnson also were fighting a ghost. The name of that ghost was Dien Bien Phu, the climactic battle that had driven the French from what was then known as Indochina. Like Khe Sanh, Dien Bien Phu lay in a valley which enabled the Vietnamese to encircle and besiege it, finally forcing the French to surrender and leave what became Vietnam.
Westmoreland decided to hold Khe Sanh at all costs even though the Marines who would have to hold the base opposed the decision. The assistant commander of the 3rd Marine Division summed up the feelings of the Marines regarding the importance of the base by saying,
When you’re at Khe Sanh, you’re not really anywhere. You could lose it, and you really haven’t lost a damn thing.
Westmoreland had the final word. In Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, he is quoted as stating:
We are not, repeat not, going to be defeated at Khe Sanh. I will not tolerate any talking or even thinking to the contrary.
When the siege began, the Vietnam commander called it a “vain attempt to restage Dien Bien Phu.”
Lyndon Johnson also was haunted by Dien Bien Phu, for in 1954 as the senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee he had opposed any American intervention to rescue the besieged French. So that may be one reason why when it came to Khe Sanh he used the colorful accents of his Texas drawl:
I don’t want any damn Din Bin Phoo.
The press quickly adopted the analogy and soon in a classic cycle the two fed on each other creating a kind of vortex at the center of which were the troops of Khe Sanh, who had no say in the debate. Shortly after the siege began on what is generally established as it official starting date of January 21, 1968, Walter Cronkite used the Dien Bien Phu analogy, saying, “The parallels are there for all to see.”
The approximately six thousand troops at Khe Sanh were eventually surrounded by more than triple that number of North Vietnamese troops. In perhaps one of the last great artillery battles, the North Vietnamese began mercilessly pounding the garrison, sending anywhere from a thousand to two thousand rounds a day at the troops who had dug into the red clay soil that was to give the Khe Sanh veterans the name for their newsletter. A thousand rounds a day is 42 rounds an hour–an incoming shell almost every minute.
But, of course, the shells did not come in so neatly spaced, instead they came in waves that pinned the troops into the bunkers they had dug and then fortified sometimes as much as three feet thick with anything they could find including old ammunition cases and other supplies. There they could only lie and wait and hope none of the shells was a direct hit. On the first day of the siege the North Vietnamese created probably their biggest artillery damage on the site when a shell landed on the ammunition dump, resulting in the destruction of 16,000 artillery shells and a large supply of C.S. tear gas which spread over the entire base.
To counter this, Westmoreland supplemented the artillery in place at Khe Sanh with airpower, including B-52s. Westmoreland publicly entertained the idea of using nuclear weapons at Khe Sanh, an idea that was vetoed by more saner officials higher up the chain of command. Still, the bombing response to the siege, which bore the colorful and, in some ways, apt nickname of Operation Niagra poured more conventional bombs on the area around Khe Sanh than had been dropped on all of Japan during World War II. Brush estimates the B-52s:
Delivered the equivalent of a 1.3 kiloton nuclear device every day of the siege. Putting PAVN force estimates at around 30,000, the U.S. expended over five tons of artillery and aerial munitions for every NVA soldier at Khe Sanh.
At first the besieged troops were supplied by C-130s and helicopters that landed on the upgraded airstrip that Westmoreland had ordered built on the site. Of course, the approach of any aircraft would trigger an enemy barrage, so supplies and replacement troops quickly developed a routine where the aircraft would skim low over the field or taxi quickly while everything was thrown out the back. This lasted until a C-130 was hit and exploded, an event seared into the memory of those who served at Khe Sanh and preserved in pictures of the fireball the engulfed the 48 people in the aircraft.
After this came a time of experimenting with various resupply techniques, the most dangerous of which resembled the old mail pouch snag used by early trains as incoming aircraft would attempt to hook drag lines on a stationary device designed to jerk supplies from the aircraft. Today when we talk about the bravery at Khe Sanh it is important that we include not only the ground troops but those in the air who kept them alive. Even with these supplies, the men at Khe Sanh lived on reduced rations, going as long as a month without a hot meal and routinely subsisting on two rations a day. More crucially–and unknown to the North Vietnamese–their water supply was even more tenuous.
In reading accounts of soldiers who served at Khe Sanh and knowing one personally, what surfaces again and again is the perilousness of life “above ground” and the rats. The symbolism is inescapable, men who lived like rats found themselves plagued by huge rats who found the bunkers an inviting place. Soldiers had a choice of fighting off the rats that scampered underground or going above ground. At one point, Bruce Geiger remembers,
The B-52 strikes left large numbers of NVA dead around the base perimeter, the rats began feeding on the decaying corpses. A major panic took place when the doctors at Charlie Med identified rats infected with bubonic plague and began giving booster shots to large numbers of Marines.
Accounts of Khe Sanh have about them the flavor of the trench warfare of the First World War. In fact, the North Vietnamese began digging their own trenches outside the perimeter, trying to get them as close as they could before American aircraft could bomb them. One trench almost succeeded in reaching under the airfield, no doubt to fill it with explosives and destroy the supply route. They also mounted periodic “human wave” attacks, going “over the top” of their own trenches in an attempt to overrun one section of the lines defending the base. The Americans also sent troops to probe for the enemy in the equivalent of the World War One No Man’s Land.
As the largest battle of the Vietnam War and the main battle during the infamous Tet offensive, the debate over the significance of Khe Sanh still continues. In short it boils down to whether Khe Sanh was a “feint” designed to lure Americans away from the cities or a genuine attempt by the North Vietnamese to win a major battle on the order of Dien Bien Phu. Brush makes a good case that it was neither:
The diversionary model alone nor the notion that Khe Sanh was only meant to be another Dien Bien Phu adequately explain the events that transpired there. It is necessary to ignore much evidence to make either of those explanations fit the facts.
The Americans finally ended the siege at Khe Sanh in early April. Accounts of total casualties vary. Ray Stubbe, a Navy Chaplain attached to the Marine forces at Khe Sanh and the founder of the Khe Sanh veterans organization, put the total U.S. military personnel killed in the fighting around Khe Sanh at 476. One of those who died was the father of Maryscott O’Connor of the blog My Left Wing. The total casualty estimates for the North Vietnamese vary widely. The official “body count” was 1,602, Westmoreland would claim 10-15,000 North Vietnamese were lost.
In June 1968 Westmoreland approved the abandonment and demolition of Khe Sanh. The Pentagon placed a news blackout on this action until Baltimore Sun Correspondent John Carroll broke the embargo only to receive an indefinite suspension of his Saigon accreditation. A 1968 Time story stated:
The news could hardly have been more startling. For months, the American people had been told that the base was indispensable to U.S. strategy and prestige. When its 6,200-man garrison came under siege and heavy artillery bombardment from the North Vietnamese in mid-January, some observers saw an ominous similarity to Dienbienphu . . . And yet, scarcely half a year later, the U.S. Marines were out of the base.
Even as the siege was being lifted, President Johnson became another casualty, announcing on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. The mock-up of the table that had been the subject of those late night walks had to have figured in that decision. One Khe Sanh vet would later say that one of his four memories of the siege was, “Westmoreland’s lack of vision and planning (worst ever war-time general)!” Another vet noted:
For our professional cadre of NCOs and officers, the long running fiasco of our experience in that time and place became a template for how not to fight a war.
When Westmoreland ordered Khe Sanh abandoned he also directed that it be obliterated. A Time reporter described the scene:
Amid occasional incoming shellbursts, bulldozers clattered across the base last week, filling the red clay scars that trenches had cut into the once verdant plateau, burying the hulks of crippled aircraft, Jeeps and trucks. Dust-caked Marines stacked up the aluminum matting that had formed Khe Sanh’s 4,000-ft. runway, during the siege, its only link to the outside. Demolition men destroyed bunker after bunker, the single bit of protection against the rain of North Vietnamese steel that had lashed the base for almost half a year
By the time they were done, it was as if Khe Sanh never existed. Westmoreland’s reasoning, as always coming from some unknown back corner of his brain, was that by destroying all signs of the base it would deny the North Vietnamese a propaganda victory which would allow them to show their own troops standing on the site of the former base. It, of course made as little sense as Westmoreland’s entire war strategy.
The North Vietnamese built a monument on the site whose text proclaims that for the North Vietnamese Khe Sanh was another “Dien Bien Phu.” Since they now control the site they get to rewrite history. But the monument isn’t much as monuments go, so Khe Sanh itself may be the final victor. The red clay soil is slowly recovering even the monument, as the bricks at the base crack and the text fades and is pock-marked as if the rats were at work chewing on it.
BACKGROUND: For more info on Khe Sanh link to the Khe Sanh veterans site and also check out Valley of Decision by Ray Stubbe and John Prados and Marc Jason Gilbert and William Head’s The Tet Offensive
Ralph Bauer also blogs at My Left Wing, All Things Democrat, and Progressive Historians.
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