VALLEY OF DECISION

Naval Institute Press

Chapter One

"The distance covered today is comparatively long," Tran Quyen recorded in his diary. "I feel pain in my legs." Quyen remained far from his destination, indeed was still deep inside North Vietnam. A soldier in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), properly the Vietnam People's Army, Quyen numbered among the replacement troops Hanoi sent south in January 1968. Between eight and thirteen thousand NVA soldiers entered South Vietnam, along with Quyen, that February. The way was hard. On January 21, as compatriots began the decisive battle to which he would be sent, Quyen noted, "The road is winding and so slippery that one has the impression of walking on grease." Vietnamese peasants asked him to pay for the firewood Quyen used to cook his lunch.

A staff assistant for operations and training, Quyen noticed the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh when he entered Nghe An province. Nam Dan district, Ho's ancestral home, gave the passing troops a warm welcome on January 30. The NVA typically moved its people in three-or five-man cells as part of so-called infiltration groups (doan), except when they moved as full combat units, and Quyen belonged to Doan 926. The group had to change its route when crossing Ha Tinh province. Quyen noted, "Generally speaking, none of the former groups could pass this area without being attacked and shedding blood." On February 16: "How intense the anti-aircraft activities were on the first night we spent here."

For days the group hiked uphill to cross the Annamite chain. Sometimes the slopes got as steep as eighty-five degrees; a forty-five-degree angle seemed nothing special, and "the route [was] cut through masses of stone." One segment proved so tough that, for three days, the doan returned to the same rest station at the end of its march. Only on February 23 did the unit finally enter Laos on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

As the doan progressed southward the American presence became palpable. Quyen found the people of Kham Noi village rejoicing at having downed an aircraft. But the planes were over all the routes - L-19 spotters, helicopters, fighter-bombers. "They are continuously flying overhead both day and night," Quyen wrote toward the end of February. "I long to smoke but the present circumstances do not allow me."

Doan 926 had been sent to replace NVA soldiers lost in the fighting at Khe Sanh. The aerial firepower committed against them would be formidable, in particular the awesome power of B-52 strategic bombers, greatly feared by the North Vietnamese. Before Doan 926 reached Khe Sanh, some three hundred of its men deserted rather than face the B-52s. Quyen did not. He was assigned to the North Vietnamese 304th Division. That act sealed his fate.

Trinh Khao Lieu was another 304th Division man, from the 9th regiment of that unit. He transited much the same route on the way south, successively through the provinces of Thanh Hoa, Nghe An, Ha Tinh, and Quang Binh and then through Laos on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Lieu was on hand from the beginning of the big fireworks at Khe Sanh, his unit having reached its position, three kilometers from American defenders, on January 23, 1968. He would fight on throughout the campaign.

The very essence of the American presence at Khe Sanh, the man wore boots caked full of mud, so red it blended with the stains of the blood shed by his comrades, mud that seemed to reach through the skin to the very soul, mud that weeks of showers seemingly could not remove. He stood, hungry but a little uncertain, in the officers' mess at the hospital of the Naval Support Activity, Da Nang. Amid the silver and white tablecloths and real glass goblets, amid the polished boots or patent leather shoes of the rear area crowd, it was those muddy boots that shone the brightest. It was as though he were from a different land, even a different world, a world of mud soaked red, from centuries of the blood of centurions.

As the man, a chaplain, walked through the civilized rubble that was Da Nang, he thought of his arrival in "the Nam," only six months before. It had been in this same town, after landing at the large Da Nang airstrip, that he had encountered Harper Bohr, future intelligence officer of Khe Sanh. There had been many others, far more men than planes could transport, and all was confusion at the field. Seizing an opportunity, they boarded a C-130 Hercules transport. It was near midnight as they flew out.

Moments later the stillness at Da Nang was rent by the shock of blasts and noise of explosions as, from two different directions, the air base suffered an estimated fifty hits from 120mm and 140mm rockets. When silence returned, three of the big C-130s were smoking ruins and a dozen Americans lay dead. By then the chaplain was already approaching Khe Sanh, for an encounter that would change him, and everyone else who experienced it. Like the North Vietnamese soldiers, he would be thrown into a maelstrom, a violent shadow war in a setting of dark, dank jungle, precipitous cliffs, and tortuously twisted gorges. The incident at Da Nang had been just a harbinger of what lay ahead.

The Dreamscape

Reality, in the Vietnam experience, is often the opposite of first images - peace and serenity contrasting with the absolute terror, horror, and fear of battle. Observing Khe Sanh from a distance left an impression of beauty: rolling hills with green velvetlike cover, an occasional stream visible among the thick vegetation, some majestic cliffs on the slopes of the higher hills. Near where the Americans eventually located their airfield and built a combat base, there was even a waterfall. "There were some powerful, almost spiritual ties to the place we were in," recalls Marine Lieutenant Ernest Spencer. "I thought I was in a magical kingdom."

The cool air was striking, so different from most of South Vietnam, and the silence could be unnerving. Often the only noise was the loud drone of the insects in the jungle, a sound that over time became soothing. There were wild boar and deer, elephants that could be used for transportation, a tiger that could be met in the jungle. Khe Sanh seemed beautiful and innocent, like the Americans who came there and saw that beauty.

Americans learned that evil is dressed in awesome beauty. Life fed on life, the luxuriant vegetation grew in inexorable competition, a fight of tree against tree, bushes clinging to slopes that were not rolling and gentle at all, but steep forty to sixty percent grades and often sheer cliffs. On maps the triple-canopy rain forest was shaded a simple green. On the ground the forest was a chaos of vegetation, the rolling hills a hell of elephant grass, taller than a man, with razor-sharp edges that cut into the skin of hands and arms and was loaded with bacteria that quickly festered into ugly and persistent sores. Movement was a strenuous exercise in controlled falling followed by pulling oneself up mud-slicked hillsides. The streams that looked like strips of tinsel from the air were raging, violent rapids full of cube-shaped boulders five or six feet across. Often there were no banks at all, only slippery rocks or muck that oozed over the tops of boots. The daily patrols devoured one's strength.

There are several significant hills in the area. To the north across the Rao Quan (rao means "stream") looms Dong Tri mountain, which Marines referred to as Hill 1015 for its height, in meters, above sea level. All the hills had numbers. About a kilometer to the west of Dong Tri lay Hill 950, the end of a mountain range Americans always suspected to be infested with North Vietnamese observers gazing down upon every move in the valley below. From Hill 950 one could look directly into the valley, to the Special Forces camp that marked the beginning of the American presence and that would become the combat base, near Ta Cong village.

Eventually the Americans came to use Hill 950 themselves, for an observation post and a radio relay station. The frequency-modulated radios U.S. troops carried, principally the PRC-25, had relatively short range and broadcast in line of sight. Humping up the hills and valleys all around the Khe Sanh quickly cut off direct communications. The relay station atop Hill 950 solved that problem.

Most of the inhabitants of the area were mountain tribespeople, "montagnards," after the French term for mountaineer. The major montagnard tribe in this area was the Bru. It was the Bru, along with American reconnaissance patrols, who had the most encounters with the fauna of the area. One Sunday morning in 1958 five Bru women were working their rice paddy, pulling out the weeds, when a tiger came out of nowhere, reared up at one of the women, and slashed her neck. The others screamed loudly and tried to save the woman, pulling at her legs as the tiger pulled at her head. Finally the tiger departed, leaving the Bru woman grievously hurt. That year twelve other people fell victim to the tiger, which terrorized the villagers. Megarde, a Vietnamese military hunter, managed to kill the tiger in 1959. On another occasion concerned plantation owners organized a tiger hunt and the planters killed forty-seven of the animals.

Marines had their encounters too. During one reconnaissance patrol the team reached its extraction point, a landing zone (LZ) along a riverbed in a valley with sharply sloped walls. The Marines had to stand on boulders awaiting the helicopters. Three men, "Junior" Reather, Kevin Macaulay, and Lionel Guerra stood together in silence until they suddenly heard a tremendous roar.

"It must be a water buffalo," Guerra said. Everyone laughed. No water buffalo ever made a sound like that.

Moments later the bushes rustled and out stepped an enormous Bengal tiger, about eight and a half feet long, not more than six or eight feet away. Luckily the Marines were downwind and the tiger did not immediately sense them. It strode to the stream and began to drink.

Reather quietly opened his pack, extracted a Kodak Instamatic camera, and snapped a picture of the tiger. At the sound of the shutter it turned and faced them, beautiful and terrible, its markings a brilliant orange. The tiger looked at the Marines and crouched to jump. Guerra then took a deep breath and hollered "AAAH-OOGH!" like a submarine diving alarm. Startled, the tiger growled, turned away, and walked off.

On another patrol Marines had settled in for the night in the middle of a thicket of thorn bushes. Such inaccessible "harbor" sites were chosen in the expectation that anyone following would make plenty of noise and alert the Marines. Imagine the surprise around midnight when booming noises awakened them. Kevin Macaulay awoke to look straight up into the eyes of an elephant. Its trunk hung down between Macaulay's left leg and the right leg of teammate Terry Young, who had just joined the squad.

Young, a black Marine who had joked earlier in the evening that he needed no camouflage paint, was now exclaiming "O! My God! O! My God!" in a sort of chant. At the strange sounds the elephant turned to look. Macaulay recalled its breath as being like an open cesspool. Then the elephant made a complete turn, trumpeted, and took off running. Fifteen minutes later Young was still chanting. From their harbor site the reconnaissance patrol could hear the elephant for miles.

Then there was "Doc" Bugema's story. Bugema was a Navy corpsman assigned to the Marine recon company. He stood about six foot two, had broad shoulders and very narrow hips, and seemed the perfect embodiment of the devil after a few days in the bush, with the stubble growing like a goatee on his chin.

On one patrol it was Bugema who carried the team's M-60 machine gun. After crossing a small stream the others suddenly heard the M-60 open up. Everyone dove to the ground, assuming they were under attack, except Doc Bugema, who stood blasting away at the ground in front of him.

The patrol leader turned around and asked incredulously, "Doc, what the hell are you doing?"

"Come back and look!" Bugema exclaimed.

It was a fifteen- or twenty-foot-long snake, at least a half foot in diameter, with a huge mouth. Despite forty or fifty rounds pumped into it, the snake slithered away into the jungle. Inevitably, after that Doc Bugema was known as "Snake Charmer."

Another night, another patrol, the stillness was broken by a slapping sound, followed by "O my God! O my God! They're on us! They're on us!"

But it was not the NVA at all. Instead a little spider monkey had dropped out of a tree onto the patrol leader, Jim "Thunder Legs" Hutton, and was slapping him in the face. While Thunder Legs went crazy, the rest of the men laughed their heads off.

"It's not funny, it could have been NVA," sneered Hutton.

"Nah," replied a teammate, "the NVA are a little bit bigger than that."

What everyone at Khe Sanh remembers most are the rats. These were not ordinary rats - nothing seemed ordinary in this magical and mysterious land. These rats were immense, and they were everywhere. It was not unusual to hear them at night inside bunkers, rattling cans, chewing on anything with food particles on it, even the paper labels on jars. One gunnery sergeant (typically called a "gunny") on one of the hilltop outposts became so incensed at a rat that kept visiting his bunker that one night he pulled out his .45-caliber pistol and shot the thing as it scurried above a poncho the gunny had hung across the ceiling. He killed the rat, but the hole in the poncho became a drain for rainwater - and in the monsoon season, that was plenty!

The rats were bad enough, but worse was that many of them carried fleas infected with plague virus. The official word was always to drown rats after killing them to get the fleas. So, after killing the rat in a trap, the men drowned it and then burned it. Everyone had advice on a favored method or bait - many said the peanut butter from the C-rations was irresistible to the rats. The animals couldn't be poisoned; local Bru children who helped fill sandbags and cleaned out the garbage dumps collected the rats, broke their legs, and put them in their pockets to take home. Later they would be eaten. To horrified Marines the Bru children simply said, "Numba one chop chop!"

Setting the Stage

Why anyone would want to fight a battle for Khe Sanh is virtually inexplicable. True, Khe Sanh village stood astride Route 9, the northernmost transverse road in South Vietnam, a road that gave access to Laos and the legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail. But the road was not a highway to anywhere, for it had not been maintained, and security along its length, at least once it ascended from the coastal plains, was virtually nil.

Continues...

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Excerpted from VALLEY OF DECISION by John Prados Ray W. Stubbe Copyright © 1991 by John Prados and Ray W. Stubbe. Excerpted by permission.
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