TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

Company C
anyone who hadn’t come from a farm in the middle of
Kansas that Khe Sanh looked a whole lot like Dien Bien
Phu. Nguyen Van Giap, who earlier humiliated France at
Dien Bien Phu, saw the Marine enclave at Khe Sanh as
opportunity’s pretty sister.
Hindsight will always fill in the blanks if you give it
time. The U.S. Army had its own recent past, one replete
with big, sweeping arrows drawn on maps of French,
Belgium, or German plains. Marines? – give us those oldtime
small wars, because as the year began that’s what they
had, all up and down the Street Without Joy. Was it to be
large­scale search and destroy or pacification? There was no
tactical agreement between U.S. commanders as the year
began. Giap fixed that.
A big, looping punch, however, can leave leave your
chin sticking out. What seems obvious should be made to
look otherwise. Misdirection was a strength of our
adversary, Giap, and it followed to his planning. Luckily,
false assumptions and over­complications dogged him,
too.
As Company C arrived in­country, Giap’s opening
gambit began up in the hills surrounding Khe Sanh. The
chess match was on, Saigon supposed. It took some months
to figure out the game was actually Chinese checkers.
Lieutenants are a crafty lot, and absent any view of the
grand sweep of things, even Joe Bagadonutz and Cowboy
Bob of the Basic School supposed that if regiments were
being exposed as pawns, it was probably going to get loud,
so a good idea to sleep with your helmet and flack jacket
on.
A listing of major battles fought across the
provinces of I­Corps, beginning in early spring of ‘67,
would be incomplete without these.
April ‘67 The Hills ( or Khe Sanh I)
May
Con Thien
Spring­summer Leatherneck Square battles
Spring ­fall Que Son battles
Spring­fall Quang Nam (triangle)
summer ­ fall Khe Sanh
Jan ‘68
Tet NVA offensive (and the battles
for:)
These are but the major battles. They identify
sustained regional campaigns, bitter fights. But they were
often cast in a fuzzy light, puzzling even to those stuck in the
middle of them. Further, imprecision of language doesn’t
help. Take this often expressed explanation for example:
There was a “conventional” war and an “unconventional”
one at play in Vietnam. No, there weren’t two wars, there
was one war fought by separate means, conventional and
unconventional. Nor were there campaigns in the way that
we know what the Islands Campaign in the Pacific was.
Language of that day was clear and distinct; movement was
ship to shore. Vietnam benefited from no such clarity: the
fighting was inside out. It was difficult to see how all the
pieces fit together. Vision, unsurprisingly, is never 20/20 in
the jungle.
***
Bumping into reality in parts of I­Corps was as difficult as
bumping into a beautiful woman in a bowling ally in
Baltimore. The reasons for this weren’t explained in The
A‐8