Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War (5 page)

The Great Spring Offensive ground on through most of the summer before it sputtered out. The end of the offensive also brought a change in tactics, which meant an end to our days of patrolling Highway 19. Most of the 23rd Division was pulled off the line and given extensive R & R, so I got to spend some time on a lovely beach with some equally lovely nurses. After that there were plenty of rumors that something big was about to happen. When our battalion was pulled back to Ad Nang in early November, everybody was sure that we were getting ready to invade North Vietnam, go right up through the DMZ; we certainly had enough men in country by then to pull it off. Of course Captain Elston didn’t know anything, but as the weeks went by it was apparent that something huge was being planned up near Quang Tri, trucks were going up Highway One in a constant stream and Gen. Westmoreland or somebody from his staff was always in the area. Another rumor had it that Nixon or even LBJ had flown into Da Nang for a top secret conference.

During the week before Christmas, infantry units began to move up to Quang Tri, which confirmed our suspicions that something was about to happen, because up until then that area had been Marine country, but it wasn’t North Vietnam they were heading for. On December 29th we crossed the border into Laos in a big way, heavy armor and everything, with the intention of shutting down the famous Ho Chi Minh trail. It made sense to me, cut the head off and the snake will die. As far as we were concerned the handwriting was on the wall and this wasn’t going to be anything like exchanging fire with snipers on Highway 19, we were going to get down and dirty with Charlie on his own turf. Two weeks into the new year our orders came through to deploy to new positions in Laos. Of course everybody was scared, but at least we felt that we getting down to the business of getting this war over with so we could all go home. If only things had been that easy.

They trucked us up Highway One past Hue and into Quang Tri province where we caught Highway Nine and headed toward the Laotian border. Finally we reached the staging area where we were briefed by Lt. Stevens on our mission-”deploy behind enemy lines, seize our objective and hold it until relieved.” Just that damn simple. The first units into Laos had run into a buzz saw; taking pretty heavy casualties and we had no reason to believe that our reception would be any more pleasant. Just after dawn we climbed aboard a big Chinook and headed west into Indian country. Just after takeoff we passed a group of Hueys heading east, loaded with wounded, which didn’t do anything for our morale. Apprehension had been growing ever since we had left Da Nang, because even though I had been in Nam for over a year, this was my, and just about everybody else in the battalion’s, first time out in the bush, instead of patrolling Highway 19 between time in a base camp. Glancing out of that Chinook, all I could see below were miles of impassable jungle covered mountains and ridges and I was almost overwhelmed by a terrible childlike fear being stranded in an unfamiliar hostile place. I could feel my self control failing as my body began to shake. I prayed every day I was in that war, but I don’t believe I prayed any harder than on that helicopter on our way into Laos. Looking back on it, I realize now that what I feared the most was losing it and braking down in front of my buddies and those new kids.

We put down in a river valley somewhere way over in Laos, to this day I don’t believe I could locate it on a map, but Sgt. Stone said we were closer to Thailand than South Vietnam. There was nothing but jungle in every direction, high ridges to the east from whence we came, which only made us feel all the more isolated. Our job was to keep the North Vietnamese out of that valley since supposedly it was part of Ho Chi Minh’s trail. Bravo Company took up a position at the southern end of the valley with Alpha and Charlie Companies digging in to the North and East of us; together we would protect a fire base on high ground to the West that could lay down artillery across the entire area. The only sign of the enemy we could find was a burned out Zil truck on one of the many jungle trails that ran through the region, but we knew he wasn’t far away.

We thought that for once we had caught the Communists with their pants down and kicked them in the ass, but good. After putting up a fight in the first days of the operation, they had just faded away into the jungle. We took advantage of their absence to dig in and establish a perimeter, then properly reconnaissance the area; a bunch of us draftees stumbling through the forest trying to make contact with some of the best jungle fighters in the world. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so damn serious. It was a big change being out there in the bush, we had been used to the comforts of a base camp, such as they were. So we had to make do and improvise in ways I would never have imagined possible. For example: we were in a much higher elevation than we had been used to and it got damp and chilly up in that river valley at night, so some guys took to sleeping in unused body bags. They claimed it was quite warm and dry, but I never bothered to find out, that was just asking for bad luck. One thing we all learned to do was to make unauthorized use of C-4; in very small amounts it was perfect to ignite a cooking fire in a pouring rain. One PFC in Charlie Company lost a foot when he learned the hard way that you never stomp on C-4 to put it out-compression causes it to explode.

Of course the North Vietnamese were not going to just let us walk into their backyard and take over. At first there were sightings of NVA patrols that quickly melted away into the bush, then sniper attacks, which escalated into mortar assaults that were over before we could respond. During the night they would mine the trails we patrolled by day. You couldn’t see them, but you knew they were out there, hidden behind nature’s own camouflage, watching and planning for the right moment to strike at us.

As usual we underestimated the NVA’s capacity to get up after being knocked on their butts and as usual our so-called intelligence services weren’t worth a damn when it counted. The sons of bitches were able to mass tens of thousands of Chucks right under our noses in the Laotian jungles and kick our asses again. At first they started chewing up individual units one at a time; for days we could hear the incessant barrage of AK-47 and M-14 fire from off in the distance. Then we’d call in air strikes and there would be great plumes of smoke to mark the clash. We were taking a hell of a lot of casualties because the NVA lived up to their reputation as jungle fighters, they had changed tactics and were able to pin our units down and keep them from being reinforced long enough to totally decimate our ranks. We dug in and prepared for the worst.

Mr. Charlie came into our valley in full force in the early hours of Valentine’s Day, they infiltrated from both ends of the basin and opened up with an intense mortar salvo and as soon as we were hugging the ground, the human wave assaults started. They were throwing hundreds of their best men to the meat grinder, but they were going to take a hell of a lot us with them. Almost immediately it was apparent that our perimeter was too large to defend, so we had to withdraw under fire to a more defensible position around our bunkers where the M-60’s could be set up so they could lay down a killing fire in all directions. I spent eight hours straight behind the same pile of sandbags firing continuously, we had Pfc.’s whose only job was to slap fresh magazines into M-14s and hand them over to us. There was a real threat that our ammo would run out, since the only way to supply us was by helicopter and that was impossible as long as we were under fire, and it looked like Charlie could keep it up indefinitely. Finally, late in the afternoon, somebody who never took responsibility, ordered in air strikes and the F-4’s came in and napalmed the northern end of the basin, which was a direct hit on Alpha Company, and incinerated GI’s and Chucks together. That broke off the action, although the enemy kept shelling and sniping at us all night.

I had been crouched down behind those sandbags for so long that I couldn’t walk, my legs had cramped up so bad it took me an hour to get straightened out, but I was lucky, Bravo Company had over 35 men wounded, all of whom had to lie stretched out in one of the bunkers all night because they couldn’t get a helicopter in until the next day. There was only one medic to take care of them all and there wasn’t enough morphine, I think two of them screamed themselves to death before daylight. We also had 27 body bags to load up, a lot of them guys who had gone through basic at the same time I did, not much left of some of them. You really don’t understand the discipline the military gives you until you see your buddies shredded and blown apart all around you and still keep on doing your job. That’s what it’s all about, that’s what we sweated and trained and took shit for. Sgt. Stone was hit by a round right above the knee, but he just tied his leg off with a tourniquet, propped himself up behind the trench and helped reload the M-14s until he had to take over a position on the line when the rifleman defending it was killed. “Guess this is my ticket home, wish the rest of you sons of bitches were coming with me.” was the last thing he told us before he was loaded onto a Huey. Our battalion had suffered more than 60% casualties in less than two days and we sure wished we were going with the Sergeant, but it wasn’t to be. We were to hold our position until we were relived, Lt. Stevens told us after all the dead and wounded was evacuated. “Until that time arrives, there is only one way out of this valley.” The LT sure found out how true that was two days later when an artillery round exploded right next to him and he was blown 35 feet through the air and went head first through a tree trunk. But he was right about us holding that position, the Army began sending in replacements and we were almost back up to full battalion strength within days.

Gen. Earl Halton:
There are a lot of myths and downright falsehoods, mostly spread by people with agendas who don’t know what they are talking about, concerning the course of the war during the last months of ‘66 and early ‘67 and I hope what I say can help set the record straight.

First of all, the incursion into Laos and Cambodia was not a desperation move by an Administration with a failed war policy. These actions had been actively discussed for over a year, in fact Gen. Westmoreland had proposed carrying the war into these so-called neutral nations from the beginning. The Administration had resisted this move at first because President Kennedy had signed agreements with the Soviets to respect the sovereignty of Laos and we did not want to take any action that would drive Prince Sihannouk into the arms of the Red Chinese, as though that hadn’t already happened. As the war progressed, it became obvious that the backbone of the Communist invasion of the South was the Ho Chi Minh trail. They had built a system, using Laotian and Cambodian territory as their highway that could move, despite heavy bombing, 200 tons of supplies a day and over a thousand men a week into the South. Any attempt to interdict this pipeline short of sending in ground troops failed hopelessly. It was ridiculous for the United States to honor agreements that our enemies and their allies ignored while they killed American boys on a foreign battlefield. Yet this insane position had more than one proponent in the State Department and National Security Council. Apparently the Communists could widen the war at will while we tied our own hands.

This viewpoint began to change after the North Vietnamese spring offensive; Gen. Westmoreland formally requested permission to send a large force into both countries to attack enemy sanctuaries, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff backed him up. Secretary Nixon, on the other hand, was at first reluctant to take this major step and escalate the war, because as he told me, “We must keep the big picture in mind. What we do in South Vietnam is one thing, it is clearly the victim of aggression by one of Moscow and Peking’s satellites, and we are perfectly justified in coming to its aide; but the South’s neighbors are another matter. The Communist Giants may well view our escalation as a green light to move against West Berlin or attack South Korea. We are spread pretty thin as it is and if another shooting war broke out; we could be forced to go to the nuclear option much too soon.”

What the Secretary didn’t discuss, but what was clearly on everyone’s mind, was the domestic political cost of widening the war. Our enemies here at home were making great political hay by claiming that America was sending thousands of young men to die fighting an unwinnable war. The rising draft calls and corresponding casualty rates only added fuel to their fire. No matter how much we hated to admit it, the North Vietnamese’s domestic allies were a force that we had to contend with. It was a poorly kept secret in Washington that President Johnson was becoming highly impatient with both the progress of the war and the deteriorating situation at home.

The most important events were happening behind the scenes; in September 1966, intelligence information came into our possession that significantly changed the course of the war. I am talking about the “Peking Papers” that had been passed to a CIA officer in Paris. This event has been investigated and researched in other books, and there is nothing new that I can add here except to corroborate the impact it had on the military planners in Washington.

I was shown the documents in question by Secretary Nixon in his office. They were detailed reports, in Chinese, on their military assistance to the North Vietnamese. One page was a map of the country that showed the North Vietnamese airfields, supply bases, and anti-aircraft positions. The CIA had concluded that the documents were genuine and had come from a staff officer who reported directly to Lin Biao, the Chinese Defense Minister. “Of course this doesn’t mean that there is a mole in the Chinese Defense Ministry,” the Secretary explained. “This is a deliberate leak of sensitive material on the part of the Chinese. I might add that none of the information contained in those papers is anything we do not already know. What they are really doing here is sending us a signal that they do not desire a North Vietnamese victory.”

It was really quite Machiavellian, Secretary Nixon explained. The Chinese and Vietnamese were ancient enemies, united now by the thin bonds of Communist solidarity. In reality, the North was closely allied to, and received the bulk of its supplies from the Soviet Union. Thus a victory by the North over the South would mean the establishment of a large Soviet ally on China’s southern border, not to mention a deep water port for the Soviet Navy at Cam Ranh Bay. So in an extraordinary way the war had made very strange bedfellows of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao and Chou En Lai. It was all part of the internal politics of the Sino-Soviet split, something few in Washington had picked up on except for the Secretary.