World: Waiting for the Thrust

Waiting for the Thrust Khe Sanh, the imperiled northern position where some 6,000 U.S. Marines are surrounded by 40,000 NVA regulars, waited wearily through another week for what General Westmoreland still believes will be the largest battle of the war. Though the big enemy push failed to materialize on several predicted dates, the massed Communists were indeed closing in. “I see no reason to believe that they’ll stop now,” said Khe Sanh’s commander, Colonel David E. Lownds, 47. With new NVA bunkers spotted only 300 yards from Marine lines, corpsmen with stethoscopes knelt on Khe Sanh’s red clay to see if the enemy had tunneled underneath, as occurred around Dienbienphu. So far, they have heard nothing suspicious.

Trying to discourage an all-out attack, U.S. warplanes pummeled the foggy hills around Khe Sanh in the most concentrated bombing campaign of the war. More than 7,500 fighter-bomber sorties and 100 B-52 strikes have unloaded at least 120 million pounds of bombs around the besieged bases in the past three weeks—more explosive force than the two A-bombs dropped on Japan. They triggered more than 2,000 secondary explosions, signifying direct hits on ammunition or fuel dumps. But North Vietnamese artillery, mortars and rockets still peppered Khe Sanh at a rate of at least 100 rounds daily, killing an average this month of two Marines a day and wounding many others.

Mortar Bait. For the surrounded Marines at Khe Sanh, life is dreary days of digging deeper in their trenches and bunkers, ducking incoming fire, and cleaning and recleaning the M-16 rifles they expect to use against the NVA’s 304th and 325-C Divisions. “Mortar bait!” they scream as big transports lumber onto the metal runway. Then they dart into bunkers, knowing that the planes usually attract “incoming.” The Marines just sit and wait to be attacked, primarily because seeking out the enemy could cost more lives and casualty-consciousness has been drummed into every commander. The fact that they do not patrol means that Khe Sanh’s original purpose—to interdict enemy infiltration—has been abandoned. As the tension builds, Marines manning the misty perimeter, their eyes wet with straining, sometimes begin to imagine phantom attackers coming through the gathering dusk.

Whether the NVA masses will ever at tack Khe Sanh became a matter of growing doubt and deepening divisions. Some ranking officers wondered if the enemy buildup there was only a diversion for the urban offensive further south or for a bypass thrust at Quang Tri or Danang. There was also a dawning realization that, for all President Johnson’s warning against another Dienbienphu, Khe Sanh could be overrun by overwhelming human-wave attacks. A top U.S. general in Saigon reckoned that the base could be taken by 25,000 men in concerted assaults, “but a hell of a lot of them would stay on the wire.”

At week’s end General Giap was still pondering that price—and perhaps plotting new surprises. To preclude one such possibility, intelligence officers spread the warning among U.S. bases that North Vietnamese MIG-21s may strike Khe Sanh or other places in I Corps and that Hanoi might even try to send its handful of Russian IL-28 jet bombers as far south as Saigon. For several months, Giap is known to have been considering the use of warplanes in the south. Despite the huge array of U.S. radar, missiles and interceptors stationed to defeat any such attempt, the experts feel that suicide missions or low-flying intruders might just succeed in dropping their bombs.