Three Journeys to Khe Sanh

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/opinion/three-journeys-to-khe-sanh.html

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DONG HA, Vietnam — “This is surely one of the most beautiful spots on earth,” my Marine companion rhapsodized early in 1967 as we walked in South Vietnam’s mysterious, brooding Annamite Mountains, swathed in carpets of deep green and black, tumbling precipitously from rebellious skies into deep valleys. Emperors once hunted for tigers in the untamed landscape. French “colons” later established coffee plantations here.

The Marine and a few buddies lived among the hill tribes in their wood houses on stilts as part of an innovative American program to win Vietnamese “hearts and minds.” It was an almost indolent lifestyle, and war seemed far away at that moment.

I had recently arrived in-country, a somewhat bewildered recent British immigrant to the United States who had been plucked by the vagaries of the military draft from a bucolic Midwest life reporting on Iowa’s hog markets for the U.P.I. news agency. I was now assigned to be a combat correspondent with the Third Marine Division, headquartered along the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam. Little did we suspect during my visit that the Marines were witnessing the last days of natural splendor in a place that would play a central role in the war: Khe Sanh.

Shortly afterward, that isolated northwest corner of South Vietnam was transformed into the sort of landscape that the author and journalist Bernard Fall called “hell in a very small place.” That was the title of his book describing the siege of Dien Bien Phu, 13 years earlier, when the Viet Minh army decisively defeated the French, ending their reign in Vietnam. The siege of Khe Sanh would become so eerily reminiscent of that earlier battle that a spooked President Lyndon Johnson publicly demanded a pledge from his military commanders that it would not end in a similar debacle.

The struggle at Khe Sanh crept up on the world almost stealthily. It began with the little remembered “hill fights” of 1967, small-unit actions between the Marines and North Vietnamese to seize and hold vital high points in northern South Vietnam — Hill 861, Hill 881 South, Hill 881 North — that loomed over a small Marine air strip at Khe Sanh, a tiny plateau far below.

The North Vietnamese were slowly closing in, but we didn’t realize it. As the fighting moved up and down the peaks, lush jungle landscape was ripped apart by airstrikes and artillery fire and reduced to craters and shattered tree stumps, with body parts protruding from the pulverized earth.

Marine patrols battled an often elusive enemy and the equally challenging jungle. Grunts wore condoms to protect themselves from leeches that could burrow inside genitals. Once, when I was sprawled on the jungle floor during one halt, a huge snake slithered across my hand, and to this day I am convinced I levitated several feet in shock.

We’d be submerged for days by monsoon rains, wading through rice paddies and shivering at night in sodden jungle fatigues until our feet began to rot and we felt as cold as being naked on winter’s day in Chicago. The cold wetness was often followed, within hours, by tropical heat so stifling that Marines fell like ninepins from dehydration despite gulping handfuls of salt tablets.

We lived in terror of a night ambush — every sound and movement was undoubtedly an enemy soldier. It took hours to “come down” from that experience even when there was no contact. Marines doused themselves with mosquito repellent so evil-smelling that experts said the North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers could identify us over long distances and avoid contact. Eventually a less toxic mosquito formula was introduced.

As the North Vietnamese stranglehold tightened around the Khe Sanh combat base itself, Marines burrowed into often shallow trenches, reminiscent of those of World War I, that offered only modest protection against incoming fire. Streams of visiting civilian journalists refused shelter in the public information trench and bribed Navy Seabees with liquor to share their impressively constructed bunker.

My commander was bitten by rats. Despite his violent protests, he was medevaced “to the rear” for rabies treatment, which meant taking two helicopter or fixed-wing trips on the “death run” from the Khe Sanh airfield as North Vietnamese gunners bracketed aircraft and the airstrip with nonstop shelling.

What became known as the siege of Khe Sanh — probably the most reported fight of the entire war — began in late January 1968 and stretched into a protracted artillery slugfest, a grim daily struggle for survival dominated by a virtual curtain of death rained down by high-flying bombers we rarely saw but constantly blessed in our prayers.

As the encirclement was finally lifted in April, I returned to Khe Sanh as a civilian correspondent for U.P.I., having recently finished my military service. In an awesome fleet of gunships (yes, war can look beautiful at times) and clean jungle fatigues, the Army’s First Air Cavalry Division hopscotched from hilltop to hilltop into Khe Sanh base and planted a sign declaring, “Under New Management.”

I accompanied a sullen unit of Marines who had not changed their fatigues, taken a proper shower or eaten a good meal for weeks or months, as they left by battered trucks or on foot, some muttering their admiration for the North Vietnamese Army rather than any gratitude to the Air Cav.

I had first become aware of this Army-Marine animosity during a stopover in Japan en route to war, when frustrated Marines confined aboard a troop ship had tossed overboard dozens of inebriated soldiers returning from shore leave. And now it had resurfaced in Khe Sanh, and I feared an all-American shootout.

The base was abandoned shortly after the siege itself was lifted, but controversy swirls around Khe Sanh even today. Why were the Marines there in the first place, and why were so many lives sacrificed, seemingly in vain?

Were the North Vietnamese determined to seize Khe Sanh, or was the siege a feint to camouflage the forthcoming nationwide Communist 1968 Tet offensive? Common sense suggests that it was a combination of both. Had the North Vietnamese overrun the base it would have been their biggest victory of the war, affecting the outcome even more decisively than the Tet offensive.

And though the North Vietnamese were not successful in that aim, the battle did distract Gen. William Westmoreland and the Americans from developments in other parts of South Vietnam. Under pressure from Saigon, the Marines had also abandoned their promising hearts and minds campaign in the northern operational area, known as I Corps.

I arrived at Khe Sanh and the surrounding Quang Tri Province as a Marine with a rifle, but returned a half-century later with a piece of chalk as a full-time volunteer English teacher in a Vietnamese high school.

Today, the region, which was subject to possibly the heaviest aerial bombing and defoliation campaign in history, is still dotted with unexploded ordnance despite years of mine clearance and more than 7,000 postwar casualties. Farmers, children and mine clearers themselves continue to be victims. Families suffer the lingering effects of Agent Orange and babies continue to be born deformed.

Some 100,000 tons of ordnance were dropped around Khe Sanh itself, turning the region into a wild moonscape of pulverized red soil. But the mountains are again cloaked in green. Bomb craters have been transformed into duck ponds. The ghostly armies of camouflaged North Vietnamese soldiers slipping down the nearby Ho Chi Minh Trail have been replaced by commercial traders traveling to and from neighboring Laos and Cambodia.

Coffee plantations and split-level homes steadily encroach on the former Marine base, A Vietnamese victory museum there bizarrely claims “80 ships were destroyed” during the climactic battle, even though the base is 70 miles from the sea or other navigable waterways.

The Vietnamese are remarkably generous in their forgiveness of a war that devastated their country and killed one million to three million people (estimates depend on the source), or as high as 10 percent of the population. American deaths were slightly more than 58,000. Despite this carnage, locals have overcome the trauma of the war more quickly than Americans, and I am warmly welcomed into homes and classrooms everywhere, including Khe Sanh.

One skinny kid who begged candy from passing Marines in 1967 is now a friend and a successful businessman. A farmer friend was a South Vietnamese soldier. His wife was a Vietcong antiaircraft gunner. Their daughter, Nhung, attempts to teach me Vietnamese, a language most Marines did not need because we were not allowed to fraternize with locals, only shoot at them.

I recently met Lan, who had been at Khe Sanh as a N.V.A. nurse at the same time I was. She survived by snuggling close to the Marine wire in a strip of land around the base that American bombers avoided to prevent friendly casualties. Thousands of her fellow soldiers were “simply blown apart — we could do nothing for them,” she recalled.

Until our meeting, Lan said she had never talked about Khe Sanh except with her husband, though a picture of a beautiful young woman in uniform sits proudly on the wall of her home. After forging that deepest bond, possible only amid the horror and memories of war, sometimes even with former enemies, we agreed to revisit Khe Sanh — this time together as friends.