TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

Departures
And wouldn’t you know: the darlin’ girl didn’t even
screech.
By the end of the coming week Kevin was leading a rifle
platoon along the DMZ. His classmate, J.D. Carter was sent
farther west, to Khe Sanh. One was just married and the
other a father of four days. For them and so many others
the fuse between leaving CONUS and staring at a platoon of
strangers awaiting some signal that you hadn’t slept through
TBS was very, very short.
***
The liberation Front were in 1967 busy fellows. VC, or
Charlie, was how all enemy were referred to. They existed
everywhere but in varying densities. They hurt a lot of
Marines, but they were in Giap’s grand strategy, a diversion.
Proof? By the end of Tet they were spent, yet the fighting
wasn’t.
For Hanoi it was always about the NVA. If you look
past black pajamas to mustard colored uniforms, a pattern
emerges reflective of a single intellect: Nguyen Van Giap.
Break­in artists check the locks at the front of a house
before breaking windows. Giap did that on the DMZ at two
spots, the Hills out around Khe Sanh and across the river at
Con Tien. If anyone is home, you might want to slam the
back door before pushing your way through the front one. If
all that fails, then turn everything inside out. Tet. Giap was
a pincher. North to south he pinched all year:DMZ down,
Que Son, up.
He couldn’t resist testing Marine resolve first up in
the Hills.
***
The Hills.
(Khe Sanh I ) These battles across adjacent hill­tops were
significant because no matter where you were or what you
were doing in I­Corps, you’d be effected by them, sooner or
later.
The color­by­numbers painting of I Corps was
entirely of Giap’s creation. Audacious in its complications,
yes; but he had never heard of Occam’s Razor.
Nevertheless, wherever a lieutenant of Company C might
have been assigned, he was going to be confronted by some
piece of that picture. It was complicated; thankfully
though, it included flaws of inter­dependency and wishful
assumptions. Still, there was nothing of happenstance in
what unfolded in I­Corps in ‘67, beginning up in the Hills.
Giap was shaping the battlefield.
Khe Sanh did physically resemble Dien Bien Phu. In
losing there, the French got some things right, more of them
wrong. What they got right was a replication of German
army’s use of hedgehogs, interlocking rings of mutual
support. They worked so well that the French colonials
troops there were still fighting long after they were
A‐12