Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 27)

After Tet

After Tet, time passed. It has a habit of doing that. We followed the news of the Marines and ARVN fighting to retake the City of Hue, the loss of life in attacking the Citadel, the discovery of mass graves and possible massacres of civilians by the VC. And we continued to watch the Siege of Khe Sanh on our Day Room television and wonder what the enemy was up to.

Did they really want to turn Khe Sanh into a second Dien Bien Phu? Didn’t they know they could not do that against a super-power like the United States. And yet, they tweaked us, dropped rockets and mortars on the base, defied the power arrayed against them. Starting with the battle at Dak To and moving through the hill fights, the VC, sometimes the PAVN, had been fighting almost constantly. Khe Sanh was the most protracted fight of them all.

It began prior to the Tet Offensive, on January 21, 1968, and lasted far past the offensive, finally, ending on April 8, 1978. That’s 3½ months of rockets and mortars falling on the camp. The Air Force had launched Operation Niagara, which dropped tons and tons of bombs around Khe Sanh, but enemy forces continued to attack. The severity of the American response was unmatched for ferocity.

According to Wikipedia, quoting authoritative sources:

By the end of the battle of Khe Sanh, U.S. Air Force assets had flown 9,691 tactical sorties and dropped 14,223 tons of bombs on targets within the Khe Sanh area. Marine Corps aviators had flown 7,098 missions and released 17,015 tons. Naval aircrews, many of whom were redirected from Operation Rolling Thunder, strikes against North Vietnam, flew 5,337 sorties and dropped 7,941 tons of ordnance in the area.

That’s a total of more than 22,000 tons of bombs, not including artillery fire directed at NVA and VC forces.

Those of us at the 330th? We just watched it on TV (like other Americans back home in the States). We knew that LBJ would not tolerate the enemy over-running the base, that he had ordered the military in Vietnam to ensure that it did not fall into enemy hands. Finally, though, Khe Sanh just ended. Relief columns fought their way into the base and the enemy faded back into the hills and jungles…across the border into Laos, across the DMZ, wherever they faded to.

During the siege, in a lesser known operation, the NVA, using 12 tanks, totally devastated a Green Beret camp near Khe Sanh, the small base (manned by Bru Montagnards, some Civilian Irregular Defense Group folks, and 24 Green Berets)was called Lang Vei. Marine Colonel Loundes and his staff refused to implement their existing plan to relieve Lang Vei because they feared it was a PAVN trap. Loundes was supported in that decision by General Westmoreland and Marine General Cushman.

Lieutenant Colonel Ladd, commander of the 5th Special Forces Group, infuriated that his men were being left to die at Lang Vei, proposed that Green Berets go to Lang Vei in Marine Helicopters to relieve their men. Cushman continued to resist until Westmoreland ordered him to provide the choppers. The relief effort was a success and managed to rescue 11 of the 24 Green Berets. The rest had been killed.

The Marines at Khe Sanh managed to further distinguish themselves by not allowing the Gook “Bru” to enter Khe Sanh. They had to find their own way back to Laos. All of this information is Wikipedia information, but it is all footnoted. I’m sure there are other, more reasonable explanations for the Marine behavior.

Us? We were mostly bored. We had been proved correct in our assessment of what was going to happen at Tet. And our lives changed slightly. A few of us stopped going into town because the regulations changed: Instead of civilian clothes, we had to wear jungle fatigues…and: we had to carry our M-16s with us. In other words, we had to join the Army!!!! Aside from that, our school was dismantled. We had one last meeting with our students and signed documents attesting to their having graduated as “advanced intermediate speakers of English.” We hoped those letters would help them get jobs and keep them out of the ARVN.

We continued to translate documents, did our day-to-day work. Nothing exciting happened for a few months and that was not earth-shattering: well, the commander of the 330th did receive a letter from the Inspector General’s Office stating that reports had reached pretty high levels that there was a morale problem in the company and that he should report back on the situation. Furthermore, the IG suggested that that report should probably start with an interview with Specialist Allen Hallmark. That is really Allen’s story, so I’ll stick to my own take on what followed in a subsequent blog.