Arrow of Death

Forced to rationalize defeat after defeat in South Viet Nam, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army have been desperately searching for a major military or psychological victory. They have lately been emboldened in the search by highly exaggerated reports from their commanders in the South, who often multiply the number of U.S. dead by ten or 15 in order to please their bosses up North. The Communists have massed troops in unusually large numbers in and around the Demilitarized Zone, have directly threatened the provincial capital of Quang Tri and even the ancient Vietnamese capital of Hue 32 miles to the south. In an area where their strength is great, they gambled on a set battle with the U.S. Marines. Last week they came off second best in one of the war's bloodiest series of battles.

In a valley near Khe Sanh in the extreme northwest tip of South Viet Nam, only eight miles from the Laotian border and twelve miles south of the DMZ, North Vietnamese commanders thought that they had found a tactical situation that somewhat resembled Dienbienphu, where they inflicted the decisive defeat on the French in 1954. Before the Com munists discovered that they, and not the U.S. Marines, were to share the fate of the French, several fierce battles were fought up and down hills so worthless that they had only numbers (representing elevation in meters above sea level), not names. In a Korea-like seesaw of hand-to-hand combat, two battalions of Marines took 1,000 casualties: nearly 200 dead and 800 wounded. The cost to Hanoi was 1,200 dead and countless wounded among the North's freshest, best-trained troops.

The Strategy. The terrain looked promising to the North Vietnamese. Near Khe Sanh, a shaft of the Ho Chi Minh trail comes out of Laos, headed by three hills that form an arrow. Hill 861 is the tip, aimed east into the heart of troubled Quang Tri province, around which some 35,000 Communist troops are drawn. Hill 881 North and Hill 881 South form the arrow's flukes. An area of choice coffee plantations and twelve-foot-high elephant grass, the Khe Sanh Valley was defended by a company of U.S. Marines guarding its airstrip and three companies of South Vietnamese in the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei (see map). The North Vietnamese, hidden from air observation by monsoon clouds and rain, had stealthily and expertly moved in through Laos and fortified the three hills into a vast redoubt for at least two regiments of the 325th NVA Division.

The twelve-day-long battle began when a five-man U.S. forward-observer team went up Hill 861 for a look; only one man came back alive. Two Marine platoons that followed were stopped at the base of the hill by heavy fire. With that, Marine Commander Lieut. General Lewis Walt pulled out all the stops, ordered two battalions into action. The Army's big 105-mm. and 155-mm. guns swung round to zero in on the enemy hilltops. Marine jets began flying sortie after sortie with 1,000-lb. and 2,000-lb. bombs and napalm, eventually dropped more than 1,000 tons on the North Vietnamese. From the outset the Marine strategy was to take the hills at any cost, denying the enemy the killing high ground that would control the entire Khe Sanh area.

Hill 861. The first hill the Marines charged was 861. They reached the top but could not hold it under heavy fire from the entrenched Communists, who refused to break and run as they have so often done in Viet Nam once U.S. troops closed with them. The Marines withdrew and let the air and artillery knock off the top of the hill, blasting away foliage and great chunks of earth and rock. After that, the Marine tactic became, as Lieut. Colonel Gary Wilder explained, "to use just enough Marines to fix a target, then pull back and use our ordnance." The lethal rain of ordnance that they called in worked on Hill 861; two days later the Marines took it without difficulty. The enemy dead were larger and better fed than usual, and their uniforms were new khaki or tiger suits. Some even wore steel helmets, and many had been using high-powered sniper rifles with scopes.

One battalion of Marines then moved toward Hill 881 South, the other toward 881 North. Both hills had been mercilessly shelled, bombed and burned off, and Wilder's 3rd Battalion moved up the steep slopes of 881 South, fired on only by stray snipers. By early afternoon, one company was moving up a draw to the summit itself when the

North Vietnamese struck. Protected from the bombing in their log-roofed bunkers, the Communists had let the Marines advance into their very midst. Popping out of spider holes and bunkers everywhere, they opened up a murderous crossfire. Those Marines caught out in the open were cut to pieces by small-arms fire, grenades and mortars. One Marine's canteen, found later on the battlefield, had six bullet holes in it. Pinned down, the Americans heard the North Vietnamese calling out in English: "Put on your helmets, Marines; we are coming after you!"

It was several hours before the Marines could shoot their way back down the hill, able to carry with them their wounded but not their dead. Fifty Marines had been killed, another 150 wounded. All the next day the jets streaked in, backed up by B-52s whose bomb clusters turned hills into volcanoes as they raked along the Laotian border and the DMZ to seal off the area. Next day, Hill 881 South was a blasted moonscape of stumps and craters; the Vietnamese finally withdrew, and the Marines at last claimed the summit and their dead.

A Cold Rain. The northern peak of 881 proved nearly as difficult for Lieut. Colonel Earl ("Pappy") DeLong's 2nd Battalion. Halfway up the slope, the Marines ran into heavy fire from bunkers, and bedded down. A cold rain blew up during the night, and just before dawn the North Vietnamese came charging down from the summit, penetrating a company perimeter. Jerking on their boots, the Marines repulsed the attackers. But 28 Marines were killed and 61 wounded. Once again, the Marines waited and watched while air and artillery slashed at the Red bunkers dug in above them, reducing the hilltop to a bare burnt knob. A captured prisoner warned that the Communists planned to hit DeLong's line again that night. Instead they hit the Lang Vei Special Forces camp, cutting through its defenses and blowing it up with satchel charges; they killed 39 of its defenders, including two Americans. The Marines listened helplessly to the attack, unable to leave their own positions to aid.

It turned out to be the last North Vietnamese thrust near Khe Sanh. When the Marines stormed up 881 North, twelve days after the battle for the valley had been joined, the Communists had withdrawn into Laos. The Marines counted 575 enemy bodies on the three hills and estimated that air and artillery had taken at least another 600 Communist lives--a "tremendous" toll, said General William Westmoreland, who visited the battlefield. "I don't think the battle is necessarily over," he added. "I anticipate further fighting in the area."

General Walt helicoptered into Khe Sanh several times in the course of the fighting and came under fire himself--to the extent that he was once forced to dive into a foxhole. The series of battles constituted, he said, the seventh time since the February Tet truce that his Marines had stopped an enemy offensive aborning. From the Laos-supplied arrow of Khe Sanh, the Communists would have had a straight shot east across Quang Tri province. By vigorously denying them that shot, the Marines may well have frustrated an even larger invasion directly southward across the DMZ.

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