A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (125 page)

A further complaint of Weyand’s was that Westmoreland’s intelligence officers were not paying enough attention to the threat posed by the genuine local guerrillas in the district companies, village platoons,
and hamlet squads. He did a study on his own and discovered when he added up all of those in III Corps that they constituted the equivalent in rifle strength of roughly another forty battalions.

Weyand had been opposed to Westmoreland’s campaign plan since the previous fall. “It’s a great plan but it won’t work,” he told the MACV colonel who came out from Pentagon East to brief him on the latest version around the time Vann was going on leave. His particular worry by Vann’s return, which he described to Vann right away, was that while he was under orders to move out to the Cambodian border, the enemy was apparently moving into the interior of South Vietnam. The intelligence indicated firmly that the three divisions, and the three separate Main Force Viet Cong regiments in III Corps, were shifting out of their bases near or across the frontier and infiltrating down into the populated provinces closer to Saigon. Weyand was fearful that as soon as he stripped the interior provinces of American troops, the Communist regulars would team up with the local force battalions and the true local guerrillas and lay waste the cadre teams working in the hamlets, the newly trained RF and PF units, and the other pacification projects in which he and Vann had invested so much effort.

He was thinking of going to Saigon to see Westmoreland. Vann urged him to do so. Weyand started with Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s deputy, as that seemed the most prudent approach. Abrams listened, said that Weyand had a good argument, and took him into Westmoreland’s office. Weyand laid out his intelligence once more for the commanding general and summed up at the map. “I can see these guys moving inward. They’re not staying in their base areas,” he said. His hand was up along the Cambodian border. “We’re going to be in the base areas and they’re going to be down here somewhere.” He pointed to the Saigon-Bien Hoa area. “I don’t know what they’ve got in mind, but there’s an attack coming.” Weyand wanted to postpone the opening of the whole 1968 campaign plan in III Corps.

Westmoreland tended to be ad hoc in the latitude he gave local commanders. Weyand had amassed a lot of evidence, and he was asking Westmoreland to postpone, not to cancel. Westmoreland agreed. He thought he had a bigger worry of his own at the moment. The Vietnamese Communists seemed to be attempting to achieve a second Dien Bien Phu at Khe Sanh.

Hanoi was moving two infantry divisions, each bristling with a regiment of artillery, roughly 20,000 men in all, into the ridges around the airstrip
in the Khe Sanh Valley and the hill positions above it that the Marines had clung to after the ghastly struggle for them in April and May of 1967. The 325C Division, two of whose regiments had fought the Marines for the hills, was coming back. The other division, the 304th, an original regular formation of the Viet Minh, had Dien Bien Phu emblazoned on one of its battle streamers. The opinion of the Marine generals as to the wisdom of possessing Khe Sanh had not changed since Lowell English, the assistant commander of the 3rd Marine Division in 1966, had observed: “When you’re at Khe Sanh, you’re not really anywhere.” Robert Cushman, Jr., who had succeeded Walt, and his subordinate commanders had kept their peace and done Westmoreland’s bidding. Krulak, still in Hawaii as Commanding General Fleet Marine Force Pacific, and less able than ever to influence events, was vitriolic, hiding his scorn only from newsmen. (Lyndon Johnson had just denied him the commandancy of the Marine Corps. The rancor he had aroused against himself by his opposition to Westmoreland’s strategy had been one of the contributing factors.) In December, as the scud clouds and fog and
crachin
rain of the northeast monsoon shrouded Khe Sanh and the enemy activity around it quickened, Cushman had reinforced the caretaker battalion and a regimental headquarters garrisoning the base with a second Marine battalion.

The anticipated confrontation was both nerve-racking and welcome to Westmoreland. It held out promise of fulfillment on a grand scale of the scheme he had presented to Krulak during their argument at Chu Lai in the fall of 1966 when Westmoreland had first decided to cast Marines as bait at Khe Sanh. He had also never ceased to be convinced, and had said publicly a number of times that at some point in the war Hanoi would try to stage a second Dien Bien Phu. Hanoi’s ambition was Westmoreland’s opportunity; he would achieve a Dien Bien Phu in reverse. He would bury Hanoi’s divisions under a cascade of bombs and shells. Five days before Weyand came to see him in January he issued instructions for the initial phase, the silent phase, of his plan, code-named Niagara after the famous honeymooners’ waterfall on the Canadian-American border where John Vann and Mary Jane had gone on their wedding trip. No intelligence means—ground reconnaissance teams, aerial photography, airborne infrared and side-looking radar, communications and signal intercept, electronic sensors sown from aircraft along likely approach routes—was to be spared to pinpoint the NVA troops and their heavy weapons enveloping Khe Sanh.

Westmoreland did not intend to rely solely on planes and artillery for this climactic battle. As January lengthened and the forays from the
base encountered more and more resistance from the NVA closing in and Cushman strengthened the garrison with a third Marine battalion, Westmoreland ordered the entire Air Cav division to shift from the Central Coast to northern I Corps. With the Air Cav he could reinforce rapidly and massively at Khe Sanh should the need arise. He instructed his staff to organize a new higher headquarters for I Corps. It was to be called the MACV Forward Command Post and would outrank Cushman’s III MAF. Creighton Abrams was to be put in charge of it. Westmoreland wanted to tighten his control over the Marines and the additional Army forces, besides the Air Cav, that he planned to send north as soon as he could. He had a further worry. He feared that the Vietnamese Communists would couple an assault on Khe Sanh with a conventional-style invasion across the DMZ to try to seize most of the two northernmost provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien in order to set up an NLF regime in a “liberated zone.” By the end of January he had concentrated in I Corps, if one counted the Marines, 40 percent of all the infantry and armor battalions he had in South Vietnam.

An NVA lieutenant showed up outside the barbed wire around the Khe Sanh airstrip perimeter early on the afternoon of January 20, carrying an AK-47 in one hand and a white flag in the other. He said that he commanded an antiaircraft machine gun company and wanted to defect because he had been passed over for promotion. He was cooperative with the Marine interrogators, describing an elaborate plan for the seizure of the base. It was to commence that night with the capture of two key hill outposts that were to be used as mortar and recoilless cannon positions to support further diversionary attacks on the airfield perimeter. The main assault, by a full regiment of the 304th Division, was to come during Tet, when the U.S. and Saigon side had scheduled a thirty-six-hour cease-fire and the Communists had proclaimed seven days of no shooting for the entire holiday period.

The events of the night of January 20 and the next day seemed to corroborate the lieutenant’s information. Not long after midnight the better part of an NVA battalion struck one of the hill outposts and was repulsed after penetrating a section of the defenses. No attack materialized against the second hill the lieutenant had named, but the assault force could have been broken up by a preemptive artillery barrage. Then, at 5:30 in the morning, the NVA artillerymen announced their arrival. All manner of artillery pieces, rockets, and mortars opened fire on the airstrip and the principal Marine positions in the valley. Hundreds of 122mm rockets streaked into the air from the slopes of Hill 881 North, the one hill mass bought so dearly in the spring that the Marines had
judged too far forward to defend. The biggest ammunition dump at the base was set off by some of the first NVA shells. The repeated explosions shook the Marines’ bunkers with mini-earthquakes, threatening to collapse them, and scattered burning mortar and artillery shells all over the place, many of which in turn blew up on impact and created further havoc. Another NVA shell hit a cache of sensitive material—tear gas. Clouds of the stuff drifted through the airstrip, dosing Marines who had laid aside their gas masks.

Westmoreland turned loose Niagara. Every three hours around the clock, six B-52S from the Strategic Air Command bases in Guam and Thailand obliterated a “box” with 162 tons of bombs. In between, a fighter-bomber struck on the average of nearly every five minutes. Flights of Marine, Navy, and Air Force jets were stacked up as high as 36,000 feet over Khe Sanh awaiting their turn. Forty-six Marine howitzers in sandbagged revetments around the airstrip and the Army 175mm cannon at Camp Carroll and the Rockpile contributed no small flow to the cascade. The Marine artillery was to fire almost 159,000 rounds. Westmoreland airlifted in more Marine infantry and a battalion of ARVN Rangers to show the flag for the Saigon side until he had 6,680 men in the fortifications at the airstrip and the outposts on the hills. The Marines demonstrated their confidence in their Vietnamese ally by placing the Rangers in front of a line of Marines who would be shooting Rangers and NVA if the Rangers did not hold. And as always, nothing silenced the NVA artillery and rockets and mortars, and nothing stopped NVA machine gunners from shooting up transport planes landing in the valley and helicopters trying to resupply the hill outposts and evacuate wounded Marines. The weather is so bad at Khe Sanh at the height of the rainy season that on a good day one is fortunate to get 500 feet of ceiling for a few hours. Despite the massive intelligence-collection effort, most of the time the planes were bombing grid coordinates where someone merely suspected the enemy to be and the artillery was firing blind in the same way.

Where the commanding general places his standard, the newsmen focus and the nation follows. The images in the newspaper and magazine photographs and on the television evening news programs were the begrimed and haggard faces of Marines in peril. The staunchness of the Marines in these miserable circumstances (another 205 were to die in this second battle in the far northwest corner of South Vietnam) could not relieve the sadness of Khe Sanh nor dispel the public’s anxiety for an American garrison besieged in such a forlorn place.

The anxiety was shared by a man who was supposedly better informed
than ordinary Americans. Lyndon Johnson had a sand-table model of Khe Sanh built and placed in the Situation Room in the White House basement so that Walt Rostow could describe the course of the battle to him. He made Earle Wheeler give him a memorandum from the Joint Chiefs explaining how Khe Sanh could be defended successfully.

Fred Weyand and John Vann were too concerned with the threat in III Corps to be preoccupied with Khe Sanh. The closer the calendar got to the Tet holiday at the end of January, the more Weyand got the feeling that “something was coming that was going to be pretty goddam bad and it wasn’t going to be up on the Laotian border somewhere, it was going to be right in our backyard.” The Viet Cong attacked all over the corps in the first three weeks of the month. They overran Bau Trai when the province chief denuded the place of ARVN troops one day during an operation, and on the night of January 19 they raided the Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) Center for defectors in Bien Hoa.

Vann wrote to York that the Communists seemed to be “making a maximum effort to try and go into the Tet cease-fire with an appearance of military strength.” The guerrillas then contradicted Vann’s theory. Their attacks dwindled. Yet the intelligence picture grew steadily more ominous. The trackers in the sky of Vann’s advisory year at 7th Division—the technicians of the 3rd Radio Research Unit who had eavesdropped on the Viet Cong radio operators from their single-engine Otter aircraft—had become the large and sophisticated communications-intercept establishment the U.S. Army fielded. The radio direction-finding analysis told Weyand and Vann that the three Communist divisions were arraying themselves in an arc to the north and northwest of Saigon and Bien Hoa. Two regiments of the 5th Viet Cong Division were about seven miles away, “pointing in like a dagger,” as Vann put it, toward Bien Hoa. Gleanings from the intercepts of the radio traffic and agent reports indicated a big assault on Bien Hoa Air Base, which was, along with Tan Son Nhut, one of the two major air complexes necessary for the support of both III and IV Corps.

Attacks on Weyand’s headquarters and on a nearby prisoner-of-war camp to liberate the Communist POWs there were also apparently being planned. Weyand sent for Rome Plows, bulldozers with pointed and sharpened blades that had been brought to Vietnam to employ as forest killers in the guerrilla base zones, and stripped away all of the vegetation around his headquarters. The POW camp was in the middle of a former rubber plantation across the Bien Hoa Highway about half a mile away.
He had the plows slice down and remove all of the rubber trees too. To be able to react at night with speed and mass, Weyand put his armored cavalry squadrons on full alert.

The thirty-six-hour cease-fire declared by the United States and the Saigon side began at 6:00
P.M.
on January 29, Tet Eve, except in the two northernmost provinces, where Westmoreland had it canceled out of fear for Khe Sanh. George Jacobson, who continued to serve as mission coordinator, gave a party that evening on the lawn of the house where he was currently living. It was behind the new U.S. Embassy a few blocks down wide Thong Nhat Boulevard from the garish Independence Palace that Diem had begun and in which Thieu now resided. Vann went to the party and took Lee with him. The new seat of American power was a rectangular six-story fortress that had been completed in September. The embassy building was encased on all four sides by a concrete shield against bomb blast and rocket and shell fire and was set well back from the street behind the lower protective wall of a guarded compound. The house to which Jake had managed to get himself assigned was a pre-World War II French one that had been incorporated into the back of the compound.