Goodnight Saigon Page 9

  Reung thanked the young soldiers graciously for their help. He paused for a moment while he watched them trot happily through the main doors, where other South Vietnamese soldiers wearing green helmets with white stripes painted around them walked to and fro. He boldly waved to the men, and they waved back. His heart pounded. Sweat seemed to run at high tide.

  Even one checkpoint could have easily discovered the contraband explosives, weapons, and ammunition that he carried. Yet he had encountered none on his journey. Obviously, the South Vietnamese Army had focused its concerns of North Vietnamese Army activities farther north, beyond Pleiku, where the diversionary strikes had already taken place. The main force of the ARVN’s II Corps now busied themselves with token firefights that held the attention of their infantry resources, but vanished like smoke once they engaged the enemy.

  For Le Van Reung, it seemed almost too easy. Something had to go wrong. It always did. For the past two days, hundreds of his Viet Cong comrades had casually infiltrated Ban Me Thuot without incident or detection and now quietly hid, awaiting their moment to commence the attack. Nothing ever before had gone so smoothly. It made him sweat even more to think of it.

  EVERY DIRECTION BUT one that Nguyen Manh Tuan focused his binoculars showed dust trails billowing skyward in the distance. South Vietnamese mobile artillery pieces, tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, and jeeps zigzagged on motorized patrols throughout the highlands surrounding Pleiku, trying to corner the enemy that had now struck several times to the north and east.

  Every convoy that had departed Pleiku or Kontum on Highway 7, through Cheo Reo, or on Highway 19, over the high pass into An Khe, had turned back because of sudden and fierce enemy opposition. The NVA had, so far, successfully closed the primary routes that led to the sea, essentially blockading the main force of the ARVN II Army Corps.

  For two days, NVA attacks had become increasingly frequent: mortars, some light artillery, but mostly direct fire with machine guns and rifles in ambushes. Clearly harassment.

  Tuan quickly recognized the classic patterns, almost a cliché of North Vietnamese harassment tactics that he had examined in detail while attending the United States Army Command and General Staff College. There he had studied alongside American majors and lieutenants colonel, learning operational planning and execution from a regimental and divisional level. Graduating at a respectable station in the class had put the tall, slim soldier on a track that usually led to high leadership, perhaps even a general’s stars on his collar.

  In the mid-1960s Tuan had first attended the United States Army Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, beside Army and Marine Corps lieutenants. Two years later he returned to Fort Sill and completed the advanced artillery officers’ school.

  He had made many friends while at the sprawling army post on the northern outskirts of Lawton, Oklahoma. As he stood in his command bunker, atop a hill east of Pleiku, and gazed at the dust trails on all but the southern horizon, Tuan wondered about those old chums with whom he had spent so many hours sipping beers in the officers’ club or dining with their families. He enjoyed living in America and particularly liked the people he had come to know there.

  The seasoned South Vietnamese Army lieutenant colonel looked at his tactical map with its clear plastic overlays on which he had marked operational positions showing friendly units in black grease marker and enemy contact points with their suspected strengths scrawled in red. Above these, a second plastic overlay plotted his on-call targets with their grid coordinates. While the list of them grew, he had received few actual fire missions. The NVA always seemed to retreat after only a few volleys.

  For so much enemy activity with such little consequence occurring in the Pleiku and Kontum region, it appeared to Tuan very strange and suspicious. The NVA’s tactics seemed almost too obvious to him. It followed classic philosophy designed by the Vietnamese Communists’ greatest military strategist, General Vo Nguyen Giap, plotted first against the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and then against the Americans in the Tet Offensive of 1968.

  Late in 1967, General Giap commenced a siege of the Americans’ far western support base at Khe Sanh. He massed four full infantry divisions supported by two artillery and armor regiments at the heretofore largely unknown complex at the opposite end of Highway 9, the farthest compound away from most American or South Vietnamese principal enclaves. He purposefully made the presence of the more than forty thousand North Vietnamese troops highly visible to South Vietnamese and American intelligence gatherers.

  The congregation of NVA forces immediately drew the attention of General William Westmoreland. He had, a few months earlier, begun development of the primitive Khe Sanh outpost into a materiel support base for his proposed operations in Laos. The supreme commander of American forces in Vietnam had deployed a battalion of Marines and a crew of United States Navy Seabees to develop and defend the base. They quickly turned to, bulldozing the ground and installing steel matting for a primitive airstrip and laying in stockpiles of ammunition and supplies for the proposed Laos operations.

  Responding to the North Vietnamese action, Westmoreland ordered more than six thousand additional United States Marines to the distant and tactically unimportant base. In concert with the defense of Khe Sanh, Westmoreland also ordered commencement of massive air bombardment of the entire region that encircled the remote enclave, appropriately naming the aerial onslaught, Operation Niagara.

  As the battle raged, President Lyndon Johnson vowed that America would not lose Khe Sanh. The President said this despite the fact that he had already scrapped Westmoreland’s plans for border-crossing operations into Laos. His decision had thus rendered the Khe Sanh support base tactically useless.

  Illustrating such intense enemy activity in this far northwestern corner of South Vietnam, Vo Nguyen Giap had succeeded in convincing General Westmoreland that the Khe Sanh siege supported a greater North Vietnamese effort to overwhelm South Vietnam’s northern provinces. The American general envisioned a modern version of Dien Bien Phu about to occur. Therefore, he even resorted to asking President Johnson for permission to authorize a feasibility study to examine the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons to defend Khe Sanh.

  Meanwhile, the onslaught at the distant outpost served the North Vietnamese general in drawing a significant amount of American attention away from the major enclaves in the seaside provinces north of Da Nang. As the Lunar New Year, Tet 1968 approached, Giap redeployed the majority of his forces from Khe Sanh and secretly sent them eastward, moving them in small bands. Then, during the end of January, he very effectively commenced a blitzkrieg of attacks on the coastal cities as part of the greater Tet Offensive, which sent mostly Viet Cong guerilla forces striking American army units in the southern regions while General Giap pitted his battle-hardened NVA regulars against United States Marines in the north.

  The 1968 campaign mobilized Communist forces throughout South Vietnam, successfully hitting ARVN and American forces with complete strategic surprise. While the NVA general had enjoyed great success, surprising the Americans, he had badly underestimated their forces’ capabilities. In the end, the Vietnamese Communists garnered a media coup with world headlines that proclaimed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong victories, but in most practical military terms suffered significant losses at all corners. Tactically, Tet 1968 may have begun as a successful offensive, but quickly turned into an abysmal failure for the Communists. For all their expense of lives, equipment, and weaponry, they had gained nothing but a scrapbook of press clippings.

  To regain political face, Giap returned many of his forces to Khe Sanh and commenced draining more American resources at the strategically unimportant support base. The battle of prestige, however, soon became too costly for either opponent. Eventually, after more than two months of heavy fighting and severe losses of lives on both sides, the Communists and the Americans started pulling out. Determined to leave the enemy nothing, United States Marines destroyed every bunker an
d structure and even pulled up the steel runway matting that served as their airfield, symbolically turning out the lights at Khe Sanh.

  Nonetheless, the diversionary tactics that Giap used to set up the initial strikes of his forces in the 1968 Tet Offensive proved masterful. For a brief time, General Giap had even controlled the ancient Vietnamese capital city of Hue. Indeed, during his early years as a Viet Minh rebel, drawing focus away from the intended target with an attention-gaining movement or assault was Vo Nguyen Giap’s tactical signature. The legendary general seemed to always lead his main punch with a diversion.

  Although the aging general, and prime adherent of the late Chairman Ho Chi Minh, had for most purposes retired, his legacy remained very much alive. It lived in the tactics and strategies applied by the Vietnamese Communists’ reigning military leaders, who had learned their lessons at General Giap’s knee. Just as a boxer will jab, jab, jab, draw a punch from his opponent, feint it, and then counter with a devastating overhand right, a cross, or an uppercut, so did Giap’s brand of maneuvers.

  For the South Vietnamese lieutenant colonel who stood solemnly in the headquarters bunker of his artillery command on a hilltop east of Pleiku, glassing the countryside through binoculars, the hit-and-run strikes of the past several days seemed hauntingly like jabs from the NVA’s left fist. So much movement going on with so little consequence. The thought of it made his hair prickle as he watched the dust clouds on the northern and eastern horizons.

  Nguyen Manh Tuan kept turning his gaze southward, though, along the eerily quiet Highway 14, which led to Ban Me Thuot. A single question repeated in his mind. Why so quiet there?

  Chapter 5

  THE LOTUS BLOOMS

  BAN ME THUOT, RVN—SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 1975

  “COMRADE TRAN, PLEASE come in,” General Van Tien Dung said to General Tran Van Tra as he stepped from the shadowy, green-tinged light of a dense forest located several kilometers northeast of the Cambodian border village of Tuy Duc and entered a heavily camouflaged tent that served as forward-operations headquarters for the commander in chief of the North Vietnamese Army.

  Tran, a stockily built, round-faced man with receding gray-streaked hair, removed his cap as he took two short steps inside the command post, bowed respectfully to General Dung, and then nodded to the NVA deputy chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hoang Minh Thoa.

  “I hope you are not too perplexed with our bit of clandestine maneuvering from Hanoi,” General Dung said.

  “Not at all, sir. In fact, I found myself quite amused at chasing your shadow,” General Tran responded. “I did fully expect to see you at headquarters, but when I received my briefings by members of the general staff, rather than you or General Hoang, I quickly made the correct assumption that you had secretly moved ahead and deployed to forward command. Therefore, I did not bother asking about your presence but simply took my leave and proceeded here.”

  General Dung laughed. “I am sorry if I slighted you with what may have appeared a lack of graciousness, but I wanted my departure and my presence here kept secret. Your procession to headquarters to hold meetings with me served our purposes very well. The spies followed your every step in Hanoi.”

  Tran Van Tra smiled at his comrade and retorted, “Yes, they watched each move I made, and thus, we took advantage, making sure that they believe I deployed my headquarters to Duc Co.”

  “Wonderful,” General Dung said and motioned for General Tran to take a seat to his left, where he would hear the morning’s situation briefing by representative commanding officers from the campaign’s tactical organizations.

  “This dry weather presents quite a problem, does it not?” General Tran said, taking note of the thick carpet of dusty yellow leaves covering the forest floor. “Not only does one hear every move a person makes, from the crackling with each step, but does not such an abundance of dry tinder confront us with a potent fire hazard?”

  General Dung laughed. “Are these leading questions you ask, my old friend? Obviously, you have heard stories of the fire patrols and the problems that occur when our long stretches of archaic field-telephone wires short-circuit and spark among the leaves, setting the underbrush ablaze.”

  “Yes, I have,” General Tran said, now laughing too. “I have many eyes and ears that keep me informed. This is one of the stories that they tell with great amusement. I understand that the men return from patrolling the communications lines often looking like coal miners, caked with soot from the fires that they must battle, caused by your telephone wires hidden on the forest floor.”

  “The daily fires present a frustrating problem, yet we still manage to maintain our secrecy here, which I consider of vital importance,” Dung said. “The enemy might see a plume of smoke rising from the forest, and it is much less alarming to him than if he intercepts a message signal broadcast into the air. Smoke might mean a Montagnard cutting wood, but radio traffic clearly indicates the presence of a headquarters. So we will continue to put out our little fires.”

  General Dung nodded to a young soldier standing near the doorway. He made a sweeping motion with his right hand, pushing open the mosquito net flap. Two officers then entered the command post and took positions at each side of a large map mounted on a wooden easel with several transparent plastic overlays rolled over the back of the display.

  “The gentleman to your right is Comrade Nguyen Thien Luong,” Lieutenant General Hoang Minh Thoa announced, providing the two commanders in chief the benefit of introduction to their morning briefing officers. “General Tran, Comrade Nguyen is one of your subordinate commanders and has charge of the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s forces attached to the 320th Division.

  “Opposite Comrade Nguyen is Comrade Truong Quang Thi, commander of one of the 320th Division’s infantry battalions. Their units have enjoyed a great success in accomplishing the mission of diverting and holding enemy attention to the north, in the regions of Kontum and Pleiku, while we finalize our preparations here.

  “Gentlemen, if you please.”

  “Thank you for your most gracious introduction, Comrade General Hoang,” Truong Quang Thi said, working hard to control his nervousness. He knew that his colleague, Nguyen Thien Luong, could never possibly master the moment, so it was up to him to take charge of the briefing, and hopefully Nguyen would support him by answering some of the questions that addressed Viet Cong activities in support of the 968th Corps’s operations.

  “The situation this morning continues to hold in our favor,” Truong began. “The shadow headquarters at Duc Co, emitting inconsequential message traffic, continues to attract the ARVN II Corps command’s attention, and the vast majority of their sixty-thousand-man force still maintains their defenses well to our north. Judging from their troop concentrations and activities, we believe that they remain convinced that our main forces and headquarters operate in the western reaches of Pleiku and Kontum provinces.

  “Today, we have in place all elements of the 10th and the 316th divisions, along with their mass of heavy artillery and tanks. Tomorrow, our batteries of long-range guns will lay in their firing positions while the tanks and self-propelled artillery, the mortar and automatic weapons units, and the infantry will proceed eastward to the final coordination line and await departure, sometime after midnight or during the very early hours of March 10.

  “Intelligence sources in Pleiku indicate that the enemy has full awareness of the 320th Division but assumes that they remain in their common area of operation, west of Pleiku. They also indicate that the enemy suspects the presence of the Tenth Division as well and, as we had hoped, place them at Kontum. Currently, our intelligence sources tell us that the enemy has no inkling that the 316th Division is here.”

  The three generals immediately began clapping, after which the other officers seated behind them clapped and cheered as well.

  “Excellent news,” General Dung said. “Do you see why I want to use the old sparking wires, setting the woods ablaze?”

&nb
sp; Tran Van Tra nodded, fully agreeing with General Dung’s logical thinking.

  “Gentlemen, if I may continue,” Truong spoke.

  “By all means,” General Dung said.

  “For several days, guerrilla units from the people’s forces have successfully infiltrated the enemy’s lines and stand ready, well supplied with explosives and handheld weapons,” Truong said and glanced at Nguyen, who stood locked in place, glass eyed and silent. “They now await the signal to launch their attack from within the city.

  “In regard of noteworthy enemy activity, this morning, reconnaissance scouts have reported that a regiment from the ARVN Twenty-third Division has departed Pleiku, traveling south on Highway 14. Intelligence assessments indicate that the unit has the mission of establishing a flexible support position at the hamlet of Buon Ho. There, they remain available to reinforce units at Pleiku but enjoy less than an hour’s convoying time to Ban Me Thuot, should the garrison there call for help.”

  General Dung stirred in his seat and then looked at General Tran.

  “Do you have any thoughts on this?” Dung said.

  “The enemy has obviously discovered information that leads him to suspect our true intentions here, yet he still remains unsure of them, thus the compromising position so typical of our indecisive adversary, Pham Van Phu,” General Tran responded. “Clearly, we must cut the route to Ban Me Thuot without delay. Allowing this regiment to reinforce the city’s garrison measurably reduces our superiority in strength. This additional force, if they successfully link up, could make Ban Me Thuot a mire for us.”

  “I fully agree,” General Dung said. “Furthermore, once this regiment establishes its bivouac, it will certainly send out reconnaissance scouts. They could easily discover the massive size of our presence here, thus alerting the entire ARVN II Corps, and deny our forces the element of strategic surprise that we now enjoy.