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Recollections of Vietnam: Walking Dead of Khe Sanh

By Don Gordon

My battalion of the Ninth Marines, nicknamed "the Walking Dead," was airlifted into the mountain valley near the evacuated hamlet of Khe Sanh during the Tet offensive of 1968. The U.S. inability to stop the fighting during Tet finally extinguished once and for all the illusion of "light at the end of the tunnel." After Khe Sanh, Hue and the Tet of 1968 people in the U.S. came to realize we were not winning the Vietnam War.

Khe Sanh was featured on the cover of Time Magazine under the bold headline "Khe Sanh--America's dien Bien Phu?" (the French colonial war in Vietnam ended in 1954 with their defeat at Dien Bien Phu). I took the magazine with me when I was airlifted into the base and showed it around. Everyone was interested and thrilled to be in the news. It had seemed plausible that Khe Sanh was of strategic value in our efforts, but the Time article made it clear, even from their conservative slant, that what was at stake was a symbolic turf-holding exercise for big kids. We should have evacuated the base as was discussed, saving lives and retaking it after the offensive, because Khe Sanh was under siege; defending the base drained U.S. airpower leaving other areas unprotected. The base was only defensive and as the end base on McNamara's line across the DMZ to stop infiltration from the north. Under the circumstances, its mission was out of the question.

I think we all felt somewhat expendable being stuck up there. We were told if we were overrun to hide in our bunkers and throw C-ration heat cubes that burn hot into the trench line so the gun ships would know where we were while they blasted the base from above. The North Vietnamese Army outnumbered us 10 to 1. The Walking Dead lost 100 men killed in 87 days of fighting at Khe Sanh and countless wounded. Many of the grunts were hit tow and three times. But they stayed up there because there simply were not replacements and the unit was badly understrength at two-thirds or maybe three quarters personnel level.

I knew about the spirits of Khe Sanh in my regular job in the rear. The days before I left Dong Ha for the bush were filled with a quiet between those of us left in the rear, broken only by the morbid fascination about the fighting going on and distant explosions. We sent thirty bags of belongings home one week and into our hearts crept the silent spirits of the battle; the frustrations of a strategic mistake: our valley locations; and the anguish of the dead.

We were completely encircled. To the north were mountains and North Vietnam; to the south were mountains; the valley narrowed to the east, and toward the west and Laos, the land rose in elevation. My unit was out here on top of a hill holding this strategic point of defense.

I was enlisted and so in the custom of American military in this era I do not know much of the inside military information, and never have taken the time to read the official versions available now in increasing numbers. What I know are the things of the field, the dirt of all wars, the new roar of B-52 strikes, and their glows or arc-light, like some science fiction movie, signaling the extreme destruction going on. The NVA developed a strategy to protect themselves by spreading out over a wide area. We watched our own cargo planes flying through waves of .50 caliber machinegun fire day after day dropping our supplies. All land routes out were cut off. Lost of incoming rockets, mortars and artillery fired from 10 and more miles away became part of the daily experience. We always listened for incoming.

My picture and a friend's were on the cover of the Los Angeles Times opening a package of provisions sent from home. The woman photographer ultimately was killed by incoming somewhere else a few days later. War correspondents--I cannot remember their names. At the airport, what was left of it, a cargo plane and several helicopters lay in wreckage. Everything was uniformly dust covered, not from the blowing winds but from months of pounding by artillery, rockets and mortars, at the peak rates of 1,000 rounds and more daily.

Our jets were no force for the situation because of fighting going on everywhere at once. Lots of villages fell, little outposts were overrun, and the jets were in short supply against the number of requests. Khe Sanh was a high priority for them. On the ground at night the hills and mountain sides around the base were lighted with small fires from bombs, but not well enough to see anything: some of them no doubt were campfires of the NVA soldiers all around us. For a time one night we watched an NVA truck driving up a mountain several miles away. The big guns and jets were out of our reach so we could not report it; they were too busy to be bothered.

Ready to leave at the airstrip we were crouching in a little bunker talking about incoming and life back in the world, as rounds came in on the helicopter port area because an NVA spotter saw us beginning to gather. "Does it hurt," I think the reporter asked. I said, "Don't worry, if they miss a direct hit we are safe in here. If we suffer a direct hit you probably will not know the difference."

For living Americans the losses of life in Southeast Asia have made a difference. Many Americans, veterans and non-veterans alike, have been affected and could not sit by and let another imperialist, colonial war like Vietnam and battles like Khe Sanh repeat themselves. In this regard Khe Sanh was a victory for the U.S. struggle to build a revolutionary working class movement. It was also a victory for the liberation forces of Vietnam. Even though they never took the base during the 1968 Tet, they tied up U.S. airpower defending Khe Sanh, an outpost at the end of McNamara's line. The U.S. military leaders took the bait by refusing to evacuate and concentrating on the defense of Khe Sanh; as a result, countless smaller units were left defenseless and were overrun, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon was bombed, and a stronghold of the NVA was established in Hue for 25 days, completely exposing the U.S. inability to control the situation in Vietnam.

Don Gordon
Milwaukee

The episode printed here is only one example of the kinds of experiences that vets had in Vietnam. Vietnam Veterans Against the War hopes to print a book of such recollections, whether from Vietnam, from basic training, from being stationed in Korea or anywhere else in the world--actual happenings as remembered by the vets who saw them or lived them. Given the flood of publications and movies about the Indochina War, we see the need to have materials which goes beyond the idea that the war was a "terrible mistake." We invite veterans to think back over their collections of "war stories," write them down, and send them in. The exact nature of the final book will depend on the contributions we get, but we believe it can be a powerful statement of some of the experiences which helped us to realize why we should "Fight the Rich, Not Their Wars."