Vietnam Climax
Siege of Khe Sanh

Approach to Battle

by John Prados

On May 9, 1967, a scout team from alpha company 3rd reconnaissance Battalion, went to reconnoiter a place at the northwest tip of South Vietnam, fifteen kilometers from Khe Sanh, near where the Demilitarized Zone intersected with the Laotian border. The recon Marines were supposed to assess damage from a B-52 ARC LIGHT bombardment mission just run in this area. Technical factors delayed helicopter insertion of the recon team from the planned dawn timeframe to one late in the day.

As happened many times in Vietnam with bomb damage assessment missions, People's Army resistance, suppressed in the first moments, even hours, after an ARC LIGHT, revived rapidly. Carl Friery and his six teammates moved off their Landing Zone (LZ) to find an extensive bunker complex only a few hundred yards away. Deserted at that moment, the base attracted North Vietnamese troops like hornets after dark, and the Marine patrol fought for its life. Three attempts had to be made to extract the recon men from their "hot" LZ, and the mission ended with four of the Marines dead, including team leader Sergeant James N. Tycz, and all the survivors wounded. That patrol of the ironically named Team "Breaker" typified Khe Sanh during the months after the hill fights.

"Indian Country"

Once Khe Sanh had really been a platform, a launching site for missions of all kinds into so-called "Indian Country," the land of the People's Army. There had been an Air Force team, TIGER HOUND, that used Khe Sanh to fly spotter planes over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Studies and Observation Group, Vietnam's euphemistically titled special operations command, had had a forward operating base at Khe Sanh -- almost since its inception, and created a second during 1967 for the specific purpose of installing the McNamara Line.

The SOG commandos also deployed one of their crack large units, Project Delta, which went to Khe Sanh for patrols similar to that of Team Breaker. The Marines themselves mounted numerous missions with both their 3rd Force Reconnaissance Battalion, attached directly to the Marine high command, and the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, organic to the 3rd Marine Division. All of this was apart from the patrolling the Army did with the tribal Bru "strikers" and ethnic Nung reaction force troops run by the Green Berets out of Lang Vei Special Forces Camp.

Far from the surrounding region being saturated by all the security patrols radiating from Khe Sanh, every day the Americans, tribesmen, and South Vietnamese troops who attempted these missions found their task harder. Infiltrating Indian Country became progressively more difficult until the problems seemed almost insurmountable. Although commando missions continued until the very eve of the siege, American commanders became intensely aware of the extent to which the People's Army presence permeated the area, every day more strongly.

In the meantime General Westmoreland had long been sensitive regarding the prospect of Hanoi's forces attacking around Khe Sanh, and the growth in the apparent presence of People's Army troops put him further on edge. As early as 1966 Westy had disputed with the commander of U.S. Marines in Vietnam, then General Lew Walt, over whether Khe Sanh had been given a sufficient garrison. Westmoreland drew Walt's attention to the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the 1954 climax of the Franco-Vietnamese war.

Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh had similarities in that both represented cases where friendly garrisons held plateau plus outlying hill positions overlooked by an adversary on even higher ground. Both bases were located far from friendly support forces and relied primarily on air supply and support. Walt's direct superior, Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak, appreciated Westy's arguments and wrote of a "Dien Bien Phu type" event.

The Coming of Tet

As the time of Tet 1968 approached, Westmoreland had MACVs own command historian assemble a study comparing Khe Sanh with Dien Bien Phu. A similar study would be compiled directly within the White House for President Johnson by the National Security Council staff under Walt W Rostow.

Indications continued to pile up that Khe Sanh had been isolated, and increasingly invested by Hanoi's forces. On May 3 and into the early morning of May 4, 1967, Camp Lang Vei underwent a pitched attack from the People's Army 18th Regiment. The problems with scout missions have already been outlined.

Then, on July 21, Marine rifle units clearing Route 9 for the passage of a truck convoy carrying heavy artillery guns to Khe Sanh were ambushed along the road. That effectively ended any overland connection between Khe Sanh and the coastal lowlands of Vietnam, confirming yet another similarity between the U.S. base and the French -position at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

With the solemn pacing and inevitability of a Greek tragedy, the threat Americans perceived at Khe Sanh grew through summer and fall. Westmoreland watched, using photo reconnaissance planes, scout patrols, road watch teams, and communications intelligence to plot Hanoi's progress. The forces that had been up against Khe Sanh were elements of the 325-C Division, the same unit which fought a fierce mid- summer battle in an effort to disrupt the McNamara Line at Con Thien on the Vietnamese coastal plain.

As weeks passed, 325-C units disappeared from other sectors, and by December 1967 the entire division was believed to be in the Khe Sanh area. During the night of October 29 an aircraft of the North Vietnamese air force illuminated Khe Sanh with flares and circled overhead, apparently to take aerial photos for Hanoi's use. Truck traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail rose to high levels -- by November it would be estimated at triple the rate of the year before.

At that point communications intelligence detected the 325-C Division moving Its formations from rear bases in Laos to the forward edge of the battle area around Khe Sanh. Beginning in November the radio spooks also discovered Hanoi's shift of its 304th and 320th Divisions from the vicinity of the North Vietnamese capital, and other points, to the Ho Chi Minh Trail headed south.

In December 1967 MACV, in collaboration with the Marine high command (III Marine Amphibious Force, or III MAF) set up an interagency intelligence group in Saigon to utilize every source for the monitoring of all aspects of the Khe Sanh situation.

Mask of Success

Hanoi's success a using Khe Sanh to mask its real intentions for the Tet offensive is evident in the MACV Intelligence reports, as well as General Westmoreland's command a cable traffic with Washington. Intelligence repeatedly kept Khe Sanh to the fore.

In one example, the People's Army 812th Regiment had for some time been an independent unit ranged along the Demilitarized Zone or in Quang Tri province. Once Hanoi sent its divisions south, however, MACV intelligence grouped the 812th with the slate of North Vietnamese units expected to participate in the Khe Sanh battle.

On Tet, the 812th Regiment would attack Quang Tri City instead. Similarly there would be misappreciations of the role of Hanoi's infantry divisions. And General Westmoreland, with each new piece of intelligence discovered that the Viet Cong planned to assault this town or that, kept telling Washington that these activities were to mask, divert attention from, or be preliminary to, the big attack at Khe Sanh.

With whole divisions closing in on the Khe Sanh combat base the Marine garrison of summer 1967 was soon seen as quite inadequate. A process of reinforcement of Khe Sanh began on December 13, when the 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines reinforced 1/26, the battalion which was then the garrison at Khe Sanh. More troops followed. The day after New Years a party of North Vietnamese officers would be caught making a field reconnaissance of Khe Sanh's defenses. They were wiped out. Troubled by this and other indications of impending battle, on January 16 the Marines sent the 2nd Battalion, 26th Marines into Khe Sanh, increasing the garrison and, for the first time in the war, putting all the men of the 26th Marines in one place at the same time. Regiment commander Colonel David E. Lownds became the boss of the Khe Sanh Combat Base.

According to the radio spooks of the National Security Agency, the closest People's Army unit to Khe Sanh on January 19 was a way station, a camp for passing combat formations, manned primarily by service units and security elements. On the other hand radio transmitters identified the headquarters of the 304th Division just inside the Vietnamese-Laotian border near the village of Lao Bao.

The 95-C Regiment of the 325C Division was placed about fourteen miles west-northwest of Khe Sanh as of January 15. It would be that force which actually opened the siege, with its attack during the night of January 21 on one of Khe Sanhs outlying strongpoints called Hill 861.

Last Men Out

Probably the last scout patrol to get out of Khe Sanh and reach home safely before the battle erupted would be Team 3-E-1 of the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, which went out on mission called "Nurse" on the morning of January 20. That afternoon they saw People's Army soldiers on the banks of a stream in the foothills that they were passing.

In the night the North Vietnamese, probably in company strength, stumbled into their harbor site and began an assault. Mission Nurse held out thanks to a steady artillery barrage put down around them plus the intervention of an AC-47 "Spooky' gunship, which orbited overhead until first light. Meanwhile the "Nurse" scouts began seeing rockets fly overhead toward Khe Sanh. It was a major barrage. They warned Colonel Lownds. The siege had begun.

Vietnam Climax Siege of Khe Sanh

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