Khesanh

Some months and many disasters ago, when both Vietnam and the United States were more peaceful than they are now, the first American troops arrived on the green plateau that was to become the Khesanh Marine combat base. In those days there was little doing in the northwest corner of South Vietnam, so these Special Forces troops spent their spare hours fishing the cascading mountain streams, or hunting tigers and boars.

All this changed, of course. First, the Special Forces were displaced by the Marines. Then, last year, there was a series of vicious battles on the jungle-clad slopes near the base. Finally came this year’s big victory — or defeat, depending on whom you ask — at the base itself.

As a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, I visited Khesanh several times between the first of this year and June 24. On that day I wrote that the base was being abandoned, and subsequently I had my military press accreditation suspended for breaking the embargo on the story. One could say I asked for it; in fact, that is exactly what the military command did say. I will save a defense for another occasion. What is important is the nature of the battle of Khesanh — how we got into it and how, once we were there, we found ourselves entangled in a double web of military and public relations considerations.

Military-press relations were different in World War II, when the press was very much part of the team. The reporting of that war focused on how the combat was going and what the individual soldier was enduring.

In the Vietnam War the press has addressed itself to issues like the feasibility of our aims. Vietnam has no Ernie Pyle, and none seems likely to emerge. The military has come to realize that while fighting well against the Viet Cong is important, looking good to the press, and through the press, to the world, is equally critical.

By the time the shells were pouring down on Khesanh, the military had learned its lesson. This time the psychological war, waged through the press, would not be neglected. Khesanh would be a victory — on the battlefield as well as on the front pages and television screens of the world.

Coming as it did in concert with the climactic Tet offensive against South Vietnam’s previously unmolested — and largely unguarded — cities, the battle of Khesanh marked the end of the American military’s delight at finding the enemy willing to stand and fight in the remotest corners of the country. While the cities were ravaged, the resources tied up in the Khesanh venture were considerable; a sixthousand man garrison, supported by thousands more — plus aerial bombardment heavier than the United States‘s total bombing effort in Europe during 1942 and 1943. And throughout the 77 days of repeated ground probes and heavy shelling at the base, there was always the fear that the North Vietnamese in the hills, estimated variously from ten thousand to forty thousand, would mass and swarm over Khesanh, inflicting a military blow and perhaps a crippling psychological defeat on the United States.

My first visit to Khesanh was on January 23, the fourth day of what came to be called the “siege.” I was as green a war correspondent as had ever wandered into Vietnam, and my imagination was working double time as the four-engine C-130 transport whined along the runway at Danang and lumbered into the gray monsoon clouds. There were several other correspondents along, all of whom had been under fire before, and I resolved to do as they did. If they ducked, I would duck. If they ran for a bunker, I would run for a bunker. If they flattened themselves in a ditch, I would flatten myself in a ditch.

As it turned out, there was no cause for panic. January 23 was a relatively quiet day at Khesanh. We came tumbling out of the plane onto the metal tarmac with flak vests zipped up tight and helmets low over our eyes, but it was immediately apparent that the shelling was in a lull.

Sore

The Khesanh of January, 1968, was no longer a place for fishing or tiger-hunting. The green plateau had become a red-brown sore on the face of the earth, and everything — the sandbagged bunkers, the jeeps, the stubble-bearded Marines — was tinted the reddish color of the dirt. Around us were the lush, sinister hills. Above were the oppressive layers of dark clouds that gradually lifted late each morning and then, in the evening, settled down inexorably around the plateau like a giant candlesnuffer.

We walked along the dirt road that was Khesanh’s main street, skirting the craters. As we approached the command post, everything that was not sheltered by sandbags seemed to be slanting back toward the tarmac. The forest of antennas, the makeshift utility poles, and the battered wooden “hooches” (shacks) all leaned in the same direction. This, we were to learn, was because an enemy round had detonated the main ammunition dump a few days before.

In the dim yellow light inside the sandbagged command-post bunker, a plain-spoken man told us about the situation at Khcsanh. In contrast to the Marines outside, this man managed to keep unstained by the dirt and the billowing clouds of dust, and his neatness all came to focus in his marvelous mustache, impeccably waxed to two sharp points. He was Colonel David Lownds, the Khesanh commander. “Our reconnaissance team and patrols have made contact in every direction,” Lownds said. “I have no doubt that we will be attacked.”

I A twenty-three-year-old corporal took a break from sandbagging to tell me: “The hills are full of gooks. They’ll probably start a barrage of artillery and then run right through the base.”

It was in January that public concern about Khesanh began to build. The military command knew it had problems. Some high-ranking officers had opposed holding Khesanh at all. Militarily, the base was simply not worth it, they believed. But there were problems in pulling out. One was the fact that many of the guns would have to be destroyed if the Marines fought their way out on the ground. The guns had been flown in, and the prime movers — the machines that tow the guns and carry the ammunition and crews — had been left behind.

Another problem, the decisive one, was that a withdrawal under pressure would have all the earmarks of a defeat. By the last ten days of January the world was watching Khesanh, and the first grim parallels with Dienbienphu had been drawn. So to withdraw at this time would be to take a terrific drubbing before a huge audience.

“Western anchor”

What was needed, then, was a good, solid, militarily sound explanation of why we were holding Khesanh. The American public could be counted upon to take a dim view of it all if the military were to announce frankly: “Your sons are at Khesanh to win a psychological victory, or at least to prevent a psychological defeat.”

The military explanation that finally emerged was twofold. It goes as follows: Khesanh is critical to American military interests in Vietnam because it sits “astride” major infiltration routes from North Vietnam and Laos. Moreover, it is the “western anchor” of the defensive line of bases along the demilitarized zone.

In reality, Khesanh sat astride nothing but Khesanh. To the North Vietnamese Army, which can do without valleys or roads in making its way into the south, Khesanh was merely a speck of flotsam — an irritating speck, to be sure — in a sea of infiltration routes.

The “western anchor” concept was equally fallacious, based as it was on a simplistic Maginot scheme for keeping the North Vietnamese out of South Vietnam. One might think that if our western anchor were lost, the enemy would be able to turn our flank. Of course the flank was being turned every day, Khesanh or no, by means of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the mountains of nearby Laos.

It has been put forth in defense of the decision to hold Khesanh that, as it turned out, the cost was not inordinately high, as battles go: fewer than a hundred Marines killed on the base, with roughly another hundred deaths in the surrounding hills, and 1600 Marines wounded, in addition to South Vietnamese and Special Forces casualties. The cost of a withdrawal under fire might have been as great. But to figure the real cost of Khesanh, one must take into account the forces held in reserve, ready to move into the base. Add to this the cost of mounting the most intensive aerial bombardment in the history of warfare (commanders in some parts of the country practically wrote off their chances of getting any air support during the Khesanh bombing). The logistic effort, too, was costly in terms of man-hours, casualties, and aircraft lost.

Thin spread

While all these resources were being poured into a remote outpost in the farthest corner of South Vietnam, the enemy turned up at the gate of the Presidential Palace, in the front yard of the United States Embassy, and in Vietnam’s old imperial throne room in Hué.

One had only to go to Hué during the Tet offensive to see how thinly spread our resources were at that time. I flew into this most graceful of Vietnamese cities (it still is, despite devastation) aboard a Marine medevac helicopter on February 6, landing in the front yard of a battered Hué University. The Marines on the south bank of the Perfume River had problems, far worse problems than anyone realized at the time. On February 6 the Marines had an enclave of perhaps a half-dozen city blocks along the riverfront, and progress was agonizingly slow. At the heart of the enclave was the bullet-scarred building that served as the American military advisers’ compound. Hué was so noisy that night that hardly anyone who slept at the compound noticed when the North Vietnamese, only a few blocks away, detonated a huge charge that dropped the two center spans of the highway bridge into the murky green river.

The battle for Hué lasted weeks longer than anyone expected. Every day in Saigon the correspondents would file into the air-conditioned auditorium for the afternoon briefing — the “five o’clock follies,” as it is known — expecting to hear of the North Vietnamese collapse in Hué. It was a long wait. Never during the fight did the Marines have the forces they felt they needed to move effectively. And never was the combined American-South Vietnamese force that fought at Hué adequate to prevent the North Vietnamese from feeding troops and supplies into the city. Just short of a month after taking Hué, the North Vietnamese withdrew, having impressed all observers with their strength and tenacity, and leaving behind a shattered city with most of its progovernment leadership captured or resting in mass graves.

The withdrawal from Hué signaled the end of the Tet offensive, but there was still Khesanh. By this time it was evident that the bombing was taking a high toll. This massive bombardment is where we won our victory, according to those who consider Khesanh a victory. Our success was in terms of enemy forces tied down and enemy soldiers killed. General Westmoreland stated later: “With only one percent of my forces,

I tied down two enemy divisions and seriously defeated them. It was a major victory.”

Certainly we were successful in keeping the North Victname.se from massing and overrunning the base as, it appears, was their intention. But tied down? This claim ignores the obvious fact that only one party to the Khesanh battle retained his options: General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese commander. His forces could leave any time they felt their losses were outweighing their gains. We, on the other hand, were committed for the duration.

In terms of enemy forces destroyed. no doubt terrible losses were inflicted on the North Vietnamese at Khesanh. By American standards, such losses would simply be unacceptable; the North Vietnamese are far more willing to sacrifice men, and there has been no strong sign that they are having trouble replacing the thousands who fall in battle.

Giap‘s withdrawal finally came late in March, when the monsoon clouds were growing thin and the Army’s First Air Cavalry was about to mount Operation Pegasus to relieve the base. Reporters on the scene started picking up signs of the withdrawal a week or two before Pegasus started, as did one or two Pentagon reporters with sources outside the official briefing circle. The briefers, for their part, denied any knowledge of the enemy’s withdrawal. For this reason some members of the Saigon press corps strongly suspected the image-conscious command of attempting to conceal the withdrawal so that it would appear that Operation Pegasus rather than any decision by Giap had cleared the Khesanh area of North Vietnamese forces.

“You must nearly die”

To those expecting a big battle, Pegasus was an anticlimax. The Air Cavalry sliced through to Khesanh like a knife through butter. At the end of the operation, George Wilson, the Washington Post‘s military writer, and I wandered through the rolling country near the base, inspecting the battered North Vietnamese bunkers and the shallow trenches that snaked their way toward Khesanh’s perimeter.

The force of the bombing defied comprehension: where the 2000pounders had hit soft dirt the craters were big enough to contain a small house. The ground was littered with torn North Vietnamese and shattered supplies. On one hillside we found what we believed to be the remains of the last Marine patrol to go any distance outside the perimeter wire. Marines are fond of writing slogans on their helmets, and on one scorched and battered helmet was an ironic touch of Marine bravado: “To really live you must nearly die.”

That afternoon we hopped a lift to Danang to interview Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman, Jr., the commander of the Marines in Vietnam. We asked him whether Khesanh was going to be abandoned in the near future, and he replied that it would be kept for the time being. But he added that the base might be closed later — if enemy activity dropped off in the area.

“Mobile posture”

Two months later the withdrawal started, but not for the reason General Cushman proposed. An official statement cited an increase in the enemy’s forces in I Corps, which consists of the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, from six divisions to eight since January. “This,” the statement noted, “gives him the capability of mounting several sizable attacks concurrently.” Such attacks, of course, were precisely what had happened at the end of January in the Tet offensive. At any rate, the statement went on to say that the United States forces were adopting a “mobile posture,�� which would mean continued operations around Khesanh without a need for a large fixed base.

Before this statement came out,

I made my visit into Khesanh aboard a slow, throbbing, deafeningly noisy Marine helicopter. (The Marines seem to revel in old equipment; “We do with men what the Army claims it does with all its gadgets,” a Marine sergeant boasted at the Danang press center bar.) The word had been out in Saigon, and again in Danang, Phubai, and Dongha, that Khesanh was being abandoned, but I had no idea how far along the withdrawal had gotten until we approached the base itself.

Portions of the base that had been crowded with sandbagged bunkers and antennae were now broad fields of raw, red earth. Marines were tearing down bunkers, and bulldozers were filling the remaining holes with rubble and dirt. Big tandem-rotor helicopters were shuttling in and out, carrying slings full of cargo east to Landing Zone Stud and returning empty. The unloading tarmac of the metal runway was being peeled up and stacked in strips, ready to be hauled out.

In talking to the Marines on the ground, I learned that the North Vietnamese Army had seen everything I had. Patrols had encountered enemy troops on the hills overlooking the base, and there had been sniper fire within only a few hundred yards of the perimeter. It was clear that the news of the withdrawal was being held up for political, not military, reasons. The North Vietnamese Army knew about the withdrawal; the American public did not.

Breaking the embargo

Writing the story would mean trouble from the command, for stories about troop movements and future plans are embargoed until released by the Saigon headquarters. For the command, releasing the story at this time would have meant headache after headache. Correspondents would flock to the base to file eyewitness accounts of the last days of Khesanh. Instead of disposing of the issue in a single day after the completion of the move, the command would have to answer questions every day for nearly two weeks. Television watchers and newspaper readers would want answers. What would happen when our forces no longer sat astride those infiltration routes? What would become of the defensive line of bases along the demilitarized zone if the western anchor was hauled in? Above all, why was Khesanh worth all that effort a few months ago and not now?

As things worked out, the command ultimately faced the questioners with its lame answers, and I lost my press card. At first the suspension was indefinite, then it was set at six months. At that point the whole issue was hashed over publicly, and after some protests, the command agreed to reduce the suspension to sixty days, leaving neither of us entirely satisfied. My own hassle was one of the less significant unresolved questions about the military’s role in political and propaganda aspects of the war which remain as the Khesanh episode passes into history, and the trenches and crumbled bunkers become overgrown with the lush foliage of Southeast Asia. — John S. Carroll