The Hill Fights

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While the seventy-seven-day siege of Khe Sanh in early 1968 remains one of the most highly publicized clashes of the Vietnam War, scant attention has been paid to the first battle of Khe Sanh, also known as “the Hill Fights.” Although this harrowing combat in the spring of 1967 provided a grisly preview of the carnage to come at Khe Sanh, few are aware of the significance of the battles, or even their existence. For more than thirty years, virtually the only people who knew about the Hill Fights were the Marines who fought them. Now, for the first time, the full story has been pieced together by acclaimed Vietnam War historian Edward F. Murphy, whose definitive analysis admirably fills this significant gap in Vietnam War literature. Based on first-hand interviews and documentary research, Murphy’s deeply informed narrative history is the only complete account of the battles, their origins, and their aftermath.

The Marines at the isolated Khe Sanh Combat Base were tasked with monitoring the strategically vital Ho Chi Minh trail as it wound through the jungles in nearby Laos. Dominated by high hills on all sides, the combat base had to be screened on foot by the Marine infantrymen while crack, battle-hardened NVA units roamed at will through the high grass and set up elaborate defenses on steep, sun-baked overlooks.

Murphy traces the bitter account of the U.S. Marines at Khe Sanh from the outset in 1966, revealing misguided decisions and strategies from above, and capturing the chain of hill battles in stark detail. But the Marines themselves supply the real grist of the story; it is their recollections that vividly re-create the atmosphere of desperation, bravery, and relentless horror that characterized their combat. Often outnumbered and outgunned by a hidden enemy—and with buddies lying dead or wounded beside them—these brave young Americans fought on.

The story of the Marines at Khe Sanh in early 1967 is a microcosm of the Corps’s entire Vietnam War and goes a long way toward explaining why their casualties in Vietnam exceeded, on a Marine-in-combat basis, even the tremendous losses the Leathernecks sustained during their ferocious Pacific island battles of World War II.

The Hill Fights is a damning indictment of those responsible for the lives of these heroic Marines. Ultimately, the high command failed them, their tactics failed them, and their rifles failed them. Only the Marines themselves did not fail. Under fire, trapped in a hell of sudden death meted out by unseen enemies, they fought impossible odds with awesome courage and uncommon valor.Edward F. Murphy is a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War. He is the author of a three-volume series on Medal of Honor recipients: Heroes of WWII, Korean War Heroes, and Vietnam Medal of Honor Heroes, as well two highly acclaimed Vietnam War histories: Dak To and Semper Fi—Vietnam. He lives in Mesa, Arizona.PART ONE
 
In the Beginning
 
Chapter One
 
On a hot, humid day in late September 1966, Lt. Gen. Lewis W. Walt wore a deep scowl across his broad face. The commander of the III Marine Amphibious Force (MAF), which incorporated all Marines in South Vietnam, Walt held strong opinions on how his troops should be used to win the war. When that did not happen, the barrel-chested, volatile head of III MAF got angry. Walt’s subordinates at III MAF’s headquarters in Da Nang had no doubt the old man was in a foul mood that day. They trembled as he barked into his telephone, snapped orders to his aides, and demanded instant answers to complex questions. Those who served under Walt knew all about his temper. They knew that it did not take much to set him off. Recently, the most frequent catalyst for Walt’s fury was his superior, U.S. Army general William C. Westmoreland, the head of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Westmoreland had his own plans for using the Marines to fight and win the war in South Vietnam. All too often these clashed with Walt’s.
 
The conflict between the Marines and their Army superior had been simmering for more than a year. Although trained since before World War II as a hard-hitting, beach-storming, amphibious force, the Marines took a different approach to the war in South Vietnam. Ever since they landed at Da Nang in March 1965, the Marines had supported pacification efforts as the best way to win this war. Walt fully concurred with the statement made by Marine Corps commandant Gen. Wallace M. Greene, Jr., shortly after the Marines’ initial landings. “The real targets in Vietnam are not the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese but the South Vietnamese people,” Greene had declared.
 
So strongly did Walt believe in this strategy that he approved a number of innovative programs to rid the native villages of their insurgent infrastructure and make the South Vietnamese people feel safe in their homes. But this emphasis on pacification programs did not mean that Walt possessed an unwillingness to engage the enemy in full combat. Indeed, quite the contrary was true. A Marine since graduating from Colorado State University in 1936, Walt was one of the Marine Corps’ most experienced combat leaders. He commanded a Marine raider company during the D-day landings at Guadalcanal in August 1942 and earned a Silver Star for his heroism. A year later, as a battalion commander, he earned a Navy Cross fighting in the dense jungles of New Britain. He picked up a second one in 1944 battling the Japanese on the fiercely defended coral island of Peleliu. He commanded a Marine regiment during the Korean War, where his aggressiveness and personal valor added more luster to his reputation. If anyone in the Marine Corps knew how to battle with an enemy, it was fifty-three-year-old Lewis William Walt. But he recognized that the civil war in South Vietnam would not be won by the Marines’ historic method of wresting terrain objectives from the enemy’s armies. In his view, if the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were to be vanquished, it would happen only if the people wanted it to happen. And the only way to get them to want that was to allow them to feel safe in their villages.
 
Walt’s strategy had the full backing and enthusiastic support of his immediate Marine Corps superior, Lt. Gen. Victor H. “Brute” Krulak. As head of the Fleet Marine Force– Pacific (FMF-Pac), Krulak provided administrative and logistical support to Walt’s Marines, but he had no authority over their operational deployment in South Vietnam; that was General Westmoreland’s business. Commissioned in 1934, Krulak served two years in pre–World War II China. It was there he began his study of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency. As commander of a Marine parachute battalion in World War II, he earned a Navy Cross in October 1942 during the raid on the island of Choiseul. He also saw combat in Korea during that war’s later years. Throughout his career he continued his studies of guerrilla warfare. By the 1960s General Krulak not only wielded a tremendous amount of influence as one of the Marine Corps’ top officers, he was also a recognized expert in counterinsurgency doctrine. In fact, he had served the Joint Chiefs of Staff as special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities from 1962 to1964.
 
Because 80 percent of South Vietnam’s population lived an agrarian existence and raised their own rice crops, both Krulak and Walt recognized that by protecting these peasants and their crops, the insurgents, as well as the infiltrating NVA, would be denied a major food source. The enemy would be forced to depend solely on supplies moved manually from the ports of North Vietnam down the five-hundred-kilometer-long network of paths and roads known collectively as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Obviously, they could not last long under these circumstances.
 
General Westmoreland, however, had different plans for fighting this war. Although he acknowledged the benefits of pacification, as a West Point graduate (class of 1936), an artillery battery commander in World War II, and a parachute regiment commander in the Korean War, Westmoreland had focused his entire career on conducting conventional warfare. Indeed, he yearned for a major land battle where his superior firepower would decisively defeat the NVA and send them packing back to Hanoi. And the only way to achieve the traditional victory he had trained his whole life for was to send his troops where the enemy was: South Vietnam’s rugged, mountainous interior border regions. But with his limited manpower resources, Westmoreland knew he could not protect the people and battle the enemy’s main-force units. He had to make a choice. His 1966 battle plan revealed that choice.
 
According to his master plan for conducting the war, American troops, better trained and with greater firepower than the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), would conduct major “search-and-destroy” operations in the rural, unpopulated areas. Here the combat units could “find, fix, and destroy” the enemy and his base areas. The ARVN would follow up with “clearing operations” designed to ferret out any surviving guerrilla forces. Then the local militia units, or Popular Forces, would move in to provide a permanent defense for area villages. As far as Westmoreland was concerned, the Marines’ preferred strategy for winning the war had been seriously downgraded.
 
But neither General Krulak nor General Walt was easily persuaded. In fact, so strongly did Krulak support the pacification approach that he wrote a seventeen-page appraisal of the situation in South Vietnam and set out to get it reviewed at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
 
Krulak’s appraisal concluded with four recommendations:
 
Emphasize the security of the indigent population from guerrilla oppression; fight the enemy’s main forces only when the odds are overwhelmingly in our favor.
 
Destroy North Vietnam’s rail lines, power plants, and fuel storage centers, and mine the entrance to her seaports.
 
Put all applicable U.S. resources into the pacification process.
 
Force the South Vietnamese government to institute land reform programs.
 
Krulak secured audiences with everyone up to and including Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and President Lyndon B. Johnson, but his effort failed. His second point, specifically the mining of North Vietnam’s harbors, proved anathema to America’s foreign policy strategy. President Johnson and Secretary McNamara were completely convinced that this particular action would result in a major global war with the Soviet Union and/or China. Both men lived in fear of such a prospect. Thus, the war in South Vietnam would be fought Westmoreland’s way—essentially by sending combat troops to fight a war governed by politics rather than by sound military strategy.
 
Although assured by McNamara that his strategy would prevail, Westmoreland was politically astute enough to be concerned about accusations of interservice rivalry. Thus, he trod softly when dealing with General Walt. Rather than force the Marines to comply with his strategy for massive infantry campaigns in the hinterlands, Westmoreland preferred to issue orders for specific operations that would eventually pull them out of their coastal enclaves. Opportunities for such orders came sooner rather than later.
 
Evidence of an increased NVA presence in South Vietnam’s northern provinces emerged in early 1966. On 28 February, U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers from the isolated outpost at A Shau, located in a wide valley adjacent to the Laotian border ninety kilometers west of Da Nang, captured an NVA soldier. According to the soldier’s diary, the 95th Regiment of the NVA 325 Division planned an attack on the camp on the night of 11 March. As a result of this information, reinforcements in the form of indigenous troops were rushed to the camp. Unfortunately, they were of dubious quality and loyalty.
 
The enemy soldier’s information proved wrong by two days. His comrades launched their attack in the early morning hours of 9 March. A two-and-a-half-hour mortar barrage blasted the camp from end to end, causing more than fifty casualties among the four hundred defenders. The NVA then hit the camp’s southern perimeter with a two-company force. They were repulsed after heavy fighting.
 
The NVA commander had timed his attack well. Low, monsoonal clouds blanketed the valley, limiting retaliatory air strikes and keeping all but a few helicopters out of the A Shau Valley. The NVA continued their attack on the camp throughout 9 March and into the early morning of the tenth. At 0400 that morning the NVA launched their final assaults on the besieged camp. The defenders fought heroically but were badly outnumbered. At 1730 the camp’s U.S. Army commander reluctantly ordered it evacuated. A few daring Marine pilots brought their helicopters through the cloud cover and pulled out 69 of the camp’s surviving defenders. The remaining defenders fled into the surrounding jungle. In all, 250 of the camp’s 400 soldiers were killed or listed as missing. The fall of A Shau opened the way for the NVA to increase its infiltration of men and materiel into South Vietnam’s northern provinces.US

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