American casualties at Khe Sanh were high, and the intense shelling hindered effective aerial resupply of the combat base. Only massive bombing-some 110,000 tons dropped during the siege-kept a full assault at bay. On February 7, the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, just seven kilometers southwest of Khe Sanh, was overrun, heightening the alarm over the fate of the Marine base. Little did I know that my platoon would soon be at the spearhead of the overland expedition to end the siege. I had only arrived in Vietnam in January, and when my parents sent me newspaper clippings about the Marines at Khe Sanh, I thought that if there were a place on earth that was close to being hell-it had to be Khe Sanh. The eyes of the nation and the eyes of the entire world, the eyes of all of history itself, are on that little brave band of defenders who hold the pass at Khe Sanh….” As LBJ personally sent off Marine reinforcements to I Corps from El Toro Marine Air Station, Calif., on February 17, he told them: “This is a decisive time in Vietnam. The dire Khe Sanh situation, with the trapped Marines reduced to living underground, was dramatized in news reports as likely to be a “very rough business with heartbreaking American casualties.” It was being framed as a major test of strength between North Vietnam and the United States, loaded with heavy political and psychological overtones. Obsessed over the fate of the firebase, LBJ had a table-top mockup of the Khe Sanh base set up inside the White House and told his advisers, “I don’t want any damn ‘Dinbinfoo.’” President Johnson and his advisers feared the Khe Sanh siege would be the prelude to a full-scale assault comparable to General Vo Nguyen Giap’s crushing 1954 Viet Minh victory over the French at a similar base at Dien Bien Phu. Built atop a plateau, the base covered an area approximately one mile long and one-half mile wide and had a 3,900-foot aluminum mat runway that could accommodate fixed-wing aircraft up to the size of C-130 transports.īy January 1968, the North Vietnamese had cut off Route 9 and built up their forces around the 6,000 Marines at Khe Sanh to 20,000 troops, unleashing a strike a week before starting their Tet Offensive that was waged across South Vietnam. To the south, Khe Sanh overlooked its namesake hamlet and Route 9, the only east-west road in the province of Quang Tri, linking Laos and the Vietnamese coastal regions. Some 15 miles south of the DMZ and barely seven miles from the eastern frontier of Laos, the Khe Sanh Combat Base was almost completely surrounded by towering ridges in the center of four valley corridors leading through the mountains to the north and northwest of the base. The Marines’ mission at Khe Sanh was to block the North Vietnamese infiltration across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and to establish a jumping-off point for a proposed but never authorized American advance into the panhandle of Laos to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Leading the 2nd Platoon, D Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, 3rd Brigade, 1st Air Cav, I was to be a part of the historic relief of the courageous Marines who held on for 77 days at Khe Sanh, and experience the effective use of the Air Cav’s awesome agility in breaking the grip of an entrenched enemy and of opening the road to the besieged combat base. In the early spring of 1968, that mobility would come into play during one of the war’s most prolonged encounters, one that struck fear in the heart of President Lyndon Johnson and gripped the attention of the nation. We had mobility and firepower that the other Army units simply did not have. It was a new concept for the Army, swift deployment of light infantry troops, their artillery fire support, supplies and equipment-primarily by helicopter. He knew the value of the horse and rifle to the cavalry soldier.įifty years after my Grandpa learned the lessons of mobility from atop his horse, I found myself an infantry lieutenant with the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), the “1st Air Cav,” in Vietnam. And if you got just a little bit of water left in your canteen, give it to your horse first.” Grandpa was a sergeant in the 1st Cavalry in 1917 and he was deployed along the Arizona border during Brigadier General John Pershing’s Mexican Punitive Expedition against the revolutionary Pancho Villa. “Joegy,” I recall my grandpa saying after he’d had a few beers, “Your two best friends are your rifle and your horse. 9, but when the forward companies made contact with the NVA, we were ordered to be picked up by chopper to leapfrog ahead and become point element.”
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