TBS 2-67 Cruisebook_Updated_7Jan23

Khe Sanh
The Siege of Khe Sanh
Back they came, the small men in natty hats,
mustard­colored shirts, and Michelin tires for shoes. Was
anybody surprised? Nobody that had ever actually seen
Khe Sanh. The French had baited the Viet Minh to go out
and attack them out at the Seat Of the Border County
Prefecture (Dien Bien Phu). The Viet Minh obliged and,
famously, won. Even after the NVA were rebuffed in early
spring, they hadn’t tossed away their memory scrapbooks.
The lure of glory redux was simply irresistible.
Everybody that didn’t matter, knew. The
Montangards, they knew. The missionaries, they knew. The
Marine provisional rifle company left up there, they knew.
SOG damn sure knew, since Lang Vai was one of their
launch sites (into West Vietnam). And Marine Recon
knew. Problem was, the generals didn’t want to know.
“Nothing in it for the NVA,” one of them assured WestPac.
Yeah, sure. Lew Walt didn’t want to know, because it didn’t
fit his preferred strategy of pacification. His error was in
thinking that every part of his military TAOR must
necessarily resemble the whole. Pacification could be
entirely correct in the main, just not in all its parts.
The NVA learned, at great cost, that they were never
going to roll over Con Tien. They could make it bleed as
long as it suited them, but the sort of crushing artillery blow
they landed on the French at Dien Bien Phu fell just short of
their grasp. The Commander of the 12 th Marines had an
aversion, it seems, for the sort of indigestion that poor Col.
Piroth served to himself at Dien Bien Phu, when he placed
his artillery down in the valley and left the high ground to
his enemy. Conversely, Marines (and army) spread their
batteries across a wide swath, from Cau Viet at the ocean to
Camp Carroll half­way out to Khe Sanh. What they could
effectively do that the French couldn’t was to provide
interlocking fire support across Leatherneck Square,
particularly at the point of decision, Con Tien.
After a long summer of woefully pounding his head
against the top of Leatherneck Square, Khe Sanh reemerged
in General Giap’s imagination as something more like Dien
Bien Phu. He’d give it another go.
His return build­up didn’t go unnoticed. Recon
picked it out; the Montagnards sure knew, which means
they told the army. That didn’t mean the “army” told the
Marines. That’s because the army outside Khe Sanh at Lang
Vai wasn’t owned by MAC(V). It was a forward launch site
of Special Operations Group (SOG), and while it was polite
to Westy, it wasn’t part of McNamara’s band; rather, it
worked for Walt Rostow in the basement of the White
House. Second, when they “launched” from Lang Vai it
wasn’t into the hills surrounding Khe Sanh, it was into
“West” Vietnam. Where they went and what they saw
wasn’t shared locally. How closed was that window of
intelligence to Marines? Commonly, division commanders
were SOG briefed, but it is certainly the case that when SOG
intelligence was briefed at I­Corps, the assistant corps
commander had to leave the room. That secret.
Even when it became clear that Giap was reinvesting
Khe Sanh, slowly and methodically, our own generals
resolutely disagreed as to his purpose. Walt thought it was a
feint intended to distract from Leatherneck Square and
pacification programs to the south. Westy thought Khe
Sanh passed the “duck” test and was highly agitated that he
not give Giap any sort of victory, real or self­proclaimed.
Both, however, ceased giving a tinker’s damn about
McNamara’s wall. Bruno Hockmuth flew in with the cavalry.
A‐34