Propaganda in Vietnam: The Battle of Khe Sanh
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Hello, everybody. Stakui here. I was literally still grabbing the mic. Hello, everyone. Stakui here. And I'm Gabby. And welcome back to the History of Everything podcast. Oh, dear God. Off the get-go, if it sounds weird or strange or if I sound off at any given moment, I apologize, my friends. It is currently, what, 11.42 p.m. on a Saturday. We landed back home from recording a new podcast in Philly.

all week. And we landed back home last night at midnight. And we got home, we woke up, we started recording literally everything we possibly had to and could because we leave tomorrow at 11am for Switzerland for the German Christmas markets Trova trips. So fun stuff. Speaking of Trova trips,

Our Mongolia trip only has two early bird spots left. So guys, get those, save yourself a hundred bucks and let's go to Mongolia and have a ton of fun because we're going to be, we're kayaking on some river. Did you see that? We're doing camel rides. There are quite a few hikes, I will say, but it's Mongolia and it's beautiful. And we get to stay in a yurt, I think at least three nights. And make dumplings. But we get it like a nomad experience the entire time. Not to mention it's freaking Mongolia. I think a

According to TikTok, going there cures your depression. But don't quote me on that. TikTok is not a reliable source. You say that to when we were literally when we got big on TikTok. Well, okay. TikTok is not a reliable source for psychology, health, or medical advice. Well,

Honestly, no. If you actually hear some of the drama ones, it can be. Fact check everything. That's just kind of like common sense, I fear. Absolutely. Now, my friends, what it is that we are going to be doing here today, the story that we're going to be diving into, this is actually something that is related to the ongoing series that we've been doing here on Patreon. So if you saw a while back, we did the first episode of our Vietnam episode. We've gone in year by year and told the story of the Vietnam War because this is something that is...

Gabby, how would you describe the Vietnam War? Depressing. Depressing. Brutal. Miserable. Now I understood why flower children existed in the 60s. They were just

Yeah, it's not exactly a pleasant thing, which means that it's probably not one of those things that would be as advertiser friendly for here. So we specifically put it on Patreon for all of the, well, nasty details that that can possibly entail. But in this case, my friends, what we're going to be diving into is one specific battle. The Battle of Khe Sanh of 1968, something that would go down in history as the longest, deadliest and honestly the most controversial battle in the entire Vietnam War.

In the midst of such an unconventional war, statistics were tracked to measure progress. In reality, though, the only metric that seemed to matter when it came to announcing success or failure was the kill counts gathered after the battle. This is one of those things where it's like, remember how many times talked about in Vietnam War? It's like, yeah, they're killing the enemy at a rate of like five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten to one for every one loss of an American life. They're taking out 10 Viet Cong.

Yeah, that doesn't matter when the losses are continuously replaced and it seems to be nothing but an endless grind. And this, perhaps, is the perfect kind of demonstration. The word kill counts when talking about real human lives is deeply upsetting, though. Understandably. But that is the reality of war and that is the unfortunate thing that would be going on here at this time. The idea of attritional warfare, of making your enemy capitulate through sheer force of destruction, that is something that is as old as time. And in this case, it didn't really work.

Both sides have published official histories of the battle, and while these histories agree that the fighting took place at Khe Sanh, they basically disagree on just about every single other aspect about it. And that's kind of the messy thing when you go in and talk about these kinds of things. See, for context, my friends, in late 1967, the North Vietnamese Army began a carefully prepared operation against the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh.

Close to the Laotian border, Khe Sanh was the closest American base to the demilitarized zone on the border of North and South Vietnam. Even as early as 1962, the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, or MACV, had established an Army Special Forces camp at the site. Now, the goal was to keep North Vietnamese Army, or NVA, troops from slipping into the country from Laos just after crossing the DMZ and into South Vietnam.

Going back in time, in the winter of 1964, Khe Sanh had become the location of a launch site for the highly classified studies and observation groups. The site was first established near the village and later moved to a nearby French fort from back in the Dien Bien Phu days, which if you remember when we did that first episode, that is specifically what it's talking about, where the French were the first ones to then have to deal with things in Vietnam after everything kind of went to crap.

From there, reconnaissance teams were launched into Laos to explore and gather intelligence on the PAVN, which is that's the North Vietnamese troops, logistical system known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, also known as the Truong Son strategic supply route to the North Vietnamese soldiers. By 1966, the Marines had built a base just across from the army camp. And from there, they would coordinate combat activities around named operations. By early 1967, the Marines had posted an entire regiment there.

This would coincide with the position taken by General Westmoreland that the Khe Sanh area was a crucial part of a larger strategy. Because he was waiting to get approval to officially invade Laos to attack the enemy on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Westmoreland sent the order that it was absolutely essential to hold the base by any means. This base was to serve as the western anchor of Marine Corps forces, which had tactical responsibility for the five northernmost provinces of South Vietnam, known as I-Corps.

Throughout the second half of 1967, the NVA carried out a series of military actions in the border regions of South Vietnam. And this is messy because when we say that the NVA was committing different operations, literally anything and everything when you're talking about a guerrilla war could be an operation. And all of these attacks were conducted by large regimental size NVA and VC units.

But unlike their usual hit and run approach, these were long, protracted and bloody encounters. They would later become known as the border battles. The purported objective of the NVA forces was to distract American and South Vietnamese forces away from the cities towards the borders in preparation for the upcoming Tet Offensive.

which was set to be Le Duan's masterstroke plan, which would come to fruition in which the people of the South would rise up and help the VC and NVA to overthrow the Saigon government South, which admittedly talking about this thing was, oh, dear God, so horribly corrupt and awful. Like it's one of those things we talked about in previous episodes on the patron one, just how incredibly corrupt the South Vietnamese government was.

You know how in the past, Gabby, we've talked about different communist governments and how incredibly corrupt and broken they could be in their structure? Yeah. It's wrong to use the word capitalist in here because that doesn't even begin to describe this. The dictatorship of the South that used a veneer of democracy in order to kind of present itself as something that was Western supporting or allied was one of the most disgusting examples of sheer incompetence and corruption that you could possibly see. That was just...

supported by the Americans in an effort to, well, not let it be communist. It is incredibly broken. I honestly think that would be a fun episode in and of itself. I did a whole episode before on YouTube talking about how corrupt the modern day government of Vietnam is, or at least how it has really big problems with corruption that it has been trying to fight. Yeah. But it used to be way worse, arguably. Didn't you just do the Vietnam corruption episode? That was...

God, when was that? No, that was like in spring. I'm pretty sure at this point. I'm pretty sure that was like five months ago or so, six months ago, something like that. You should post it with this one. So everyone has context. Yeah, actually, no, I think I already did. I think that that's one of the episodes that I have out. If you go back in the episodes in here and you're looking for the bonus episodes, look up the Vietnam one. I'm sure that I already have it posted in here and it is incredibly broken. Anyway, when talking about this.

One of these operations included the famous Battle of Dakto, where the heaviest action on the border battles would take place. The Pavan 1st Division would clash with America and its allies in some of the most brutal close quarters combat of the war. U.S. intelligence would estimate between 1,200 and 1,600 Pavan troops being killed, and 362 members of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, the 173rd Airborne Division, and an ARVN airborne element being killed in action.

But three of the four battalions of the 4th Infantry and the entire 173rd were rendered combat ineffective during the battle. It didn't matter that, you know, the majority of them had survived. They were so tired, broken, exhausted, wounded that you wouldn't actually be able to utilize them to an effective degree afterwards. American intelligence was confused by this approach and tried to make sense out of why the NVA was suddenly trying to hold its ground.

Little did they know, though, the attacks had achieved their two most important objectives. One, to distract the attention of the American command and focus it on the border region. And simultaneously, they drew Allied forces away from the coastal lowlands and cities, leaving them even more vulnerable in anticipation of the Tet Offensive. That, my friends, is when the hill fights then began.

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In Vietnam, the hills were named after their height in meters. Now, trying to name each one with a memorable name would be nearly impossible, as there were so many of these hills in the region, it's just not going to happen. On the 24th of April, 1967, a patrol from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, became engaged with a Pavan force of an unknown size north of Hill 861.

That action prematurely would trigger a Pavan offensive that was aimed at taking Quezon. The Pavan forces were in the process of gaining elevated terrain before it launched the main attack.

To prevent NVA observation of the main base at the airfield and their possible use as firebases, the hills of the surrounding Quezon Valley had to be continuously occupied and defended by separate Marine elements. The 2nd and 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment, under the command of Colonel John P. Lanigan, would reinforce the KSCB, the Quezon Command Base, and were given the task of pushing the PABN off the

off of Hills 861, 881 North, and 881 South. After an intense battle, Havan forces were finally driven out of the area around Quezon after suffering around 940 casualties. The Marines would suffer, in their part, 155 killed in action and 425 wounded. Then, it would seem that the NVA forces backed off for a while to replant and regroup. For a few months, nothing much happened.

But then, December, early January, numerous sightings of NVA troops and activities were made in the Quezon area. But the sector was still relatively quiet. So here then, a decision had to be made by the American High Command to commit more of the limited manpower in I-Corps to the defense of Quezon or to just abandon the base. Westmoreland would not yield, even though many of the officers that were present at Quezon disagreed with him vehemently.

Brigadier General Lowell English, who was assistant commander, 3rd Marine Division, complained that the defense of the isolated outpost was ludicrous, saying, and I quote, when you're at Quezon, you're not really anywhere. You could lose it and you really haven't lost a damn thing. In other words, he just didn't want to give up a single bit of land, judging it to be too important. But this was the exact kind of battle, as it turns out, that Westmoreland had been hoping for.

A giant set piece battle, large numbers of troops on both sides where the NBA would choose to stand and fight instead of just quickly escaping after striking. You know, that's kind of the problem with guerrilla warfare is that when they're raiding you and attacking you and then melting into the woods, you can't surround them and then force thousands to surrender at a time. So what's a set piece battle? A set piece battle is it is something where.

Everyone's on the field. It kind of everyone's on the field. It's kind of difficult to just explain overall, but it's one of those things that if you compare a set piece battle to a guerrilla battle or something that is more fluid in nature, this means that everything is out in the open tactically, that you can go and anticipate the potential moves of an enemy surround and maybe counter them to surround them, to put them into position where they're not able to just immediately melt away.

Okay. That's like the best way I could phrase it, which I know that for anyone who's listening right now, that's not going to be the exact thing. But the short of it is that if you compare us to a guerrilla battle, they're not going to be able to hide and surprise and melt away at nearly the same rate. This would be something that could be decisive if they win and perform it right.

they could take out way more troops than they ever have been able to in previous engagements. And that is something incredibly valuable.

It was even more irresistible for Westmoreland because this battle was going to take place in a remote, unpopulated area where American firepower could be expended without worrying about civilian casualties, which, as you can imagine, has already been a major problem in Vietnam in the previous years. The amount of cases that would come out of accidental airstrikes, intentional airstrikes on regions that were supposed to house militants, but these were mixed in civilians.

This was a nightmare in Vietnam that was a continuous problem. By having this be away from the villages in a more isolated location, significantly more firepower could be brought to bear without worrying about the potential negative outcomes of it. That was the true value here. This was going to be the grand victory that he'd been seeking ever since the Battle of Ia Drong Valley.

So in early December of 1967, reports began to indicate that two divisions of NVA troops, this being the 304th and the 325th, were moving into position around Khe Sanh. As a result of this intelligence, KSCB was reinforced on the 22nd of January 1968 by the 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment. According to official NVA historical record, the North Vietnamese had moved in far more troops than American intelligence reports had confirmed.

In place, or within supporting distance at least, were the 304th, 320th, 324th, and 325th Infantry Divisions. The independent 270th Infantry Regiment, five artillery regiments, this being the 16th, 45th, 84th, 204th, and 675th. Three air defense artillery regiments, the 208th, 214th, and 228th.

Four tank companies, one engineer regiment, plus one independent engineer battalion, one signal battalion, and a number of smaller local force units. This was much bigger than anyone had anticipated, even West Berlin, in his desire to get a major battle going.

So by January of 1968, between 20,000 and 30,000 communist troops had converged on the area around the Quezon base. The army, marines, and their allies had just over 6,000 men stationed there. There were low-lying mountains surrounding the base, as this was the heart of the infamous Central Highlands, close to the Ayatollah Valley, where the first battles had taken place against the NVA.

On January 20th, 1968, North Vietnamese troops would attack U.S. patrol early that morning and a main assault would follow. At 0330 hours, soldiers of the NVA 6th Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 325th Infantry Division would attack the Marines on Hill 861. Among the dead Marines was 18-year-old Private First Class Curtis Bugger.

About two hours later, an NVA artillery barrage would rain hell on the main ammunition dump at Khe Sanh combat base, killing Lance Corporal Jerry Sternberg and other Marines. Many of their artillery and mortar rounds stored in the dump were thrown into the air and from there would detonate on impact within the base. Soon after, another shell would hit a cache of tear gas, which saturated the entire area.

At about 0640 hours, the NVA 7th Battalion, 66th Regiment, 304th Division, would attack the Huanghua District headquarters in Khe Sanh Village. This fighting was heavy and vicious, involving local Montenard militia troops, as well as their U.S. Army MACV advisors and Marines attached to a combined actions company platoon.

That afternoon, as a rescue force was dispatched to the village, Army Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Simo and other soldiers would die when their helicopter was shot down. The fighting and shelling on the 21st of January would result in 14 Marines killed and 43 wounded.

Hours after the attack, though, the base was far from peaceful as a fire ignited a large amount of explosives, rocking the base with a series of explosions that felt essentially like an internal artillery barrage. So it didn't matter that the attacks were over. Everything inside the base was still blowing up. The Marines, Army and Arvin dug in and hoped that the approaching Tet truce, which was scheduled for the 29th to 31st January, would provide some respite.

The Vietnamese holiday of Tet had been a time for temporary ceasefires in years prior, and everyone expected that tradition to continue. On the afternoon of the 29th of January, however, the 3rd Marine Division notified Khe San that the truce had been cancelled. The Tet Offensive was about to begin. This was like if those soldiers in World War I who had the Christmas Day truce and soccer match had climbed up over their trenches and then one side whipped out their weapons and mowed the other side down.

When the Tet Offensive kicked off, it kicked off throughout South Vietnam. It was as if a thousand infernos had been set ablaze and the entire country had Ted Garden hoses to fight the fire with. Everything was going to be on fire.

But for those of you who are curious about the full story of the Tet Offensive, that is not what we were covering on here. You are going to have to go and check out Patreon where we've been putting everything. And that is one of the episodes that is coming up in there at the time that we are even recording this. Our editor, James, has written. I mean, they're pretty good episodes. I'm not on them, but I listen to all of them. Exactly. Exactly.

So just as a little advertisement myself, you can access the series and a ton of other extra content if you want for as little as a dollar a month. So definitely go and check that out. But OK, I plugged myself enough here at this point. Back to the story.

It is here at this point that I must ask you to remember that for the rest of the story, everything that had to be done to save Khe San from utter destruction had to be done while dealing with all of the other issues, the problems, disasters that came from, during, and after the massive series of nationwide attacks that comprised the Tet Offensive.

This is not an isolated thing. This is all happening in tandem with everything else, and that is why it is notoriously difficult to do anything at all or well. After January 21st, attacks began to happen daily. And for the next 77 days, the soldiers, Marines, and allies stationed at ACSB would be living in basically a giant world of shit that was constantly trying to kill them.

An oppressive, coordinated, and ruthless assault that seemed to continue ceaselessly. Daily attacks on the wire occurred, and this was after they'd set a third perimeter of razor-sharp concertina wire around the base.

Once you get caught in that kind of stuff, it feels impossible to get free of it. And you just get cut more. This stuff is nasty. And they were having to set layer after layer after layer of it to try and hold people back. Is this like barbed wire or is it worse? Worse. So think of it like barbed wire. And so barbs have like the little bits that stick out, right? Look up concertina wire. Okay. This is... Imagine it's razor blades, basically. Like it's... Oh, it's like a little...

I don't know. It's like each side is a hammer shape, like a mallet shape, but it's pointed. That's not fun. Yep. So it's like a bunch of little razors and stuff that are on the wire that will rip you to shreds. It is some nasty stuff. And this is what they were having to try to use to try to hold people back. And it just wasn't really working. See, Khe Sanh was a very bad place for them already. But the airstrip there was the worst place in the world.

That's because the airstrip on the base was the exact predictable focus of the mortars and rockets that were hidden in the surrounding hills. The sure target of the big Russian and Chinese guns that were lodged into the side of the Korok Ridge, 11 kilometers away across the Laotian border.

If the wind was right, you could hear the NVA 50 calibers starting far up the valley whenever a plane made its approach to the strip, and the first incoming artillery would precede the landings by seconds. If you were waiting there to be taken out, there was nothing you could do but curl up in a trench and try to make yourself small. And if you were coming in on the plane, there was nothing you could do at all, nothing at all. You were just going to be blasted the moment that you made landfall.

All aircraft attempting to land at Khe San received heavy ground fire, including .50 caliber machine gun, mortar, and artillery rounds. The crew chiefs of incoming flights had their passengers lay their gear bags on the floor beneath themselves to shield their bodies from ground fire that might penetrate the underside of the chopper. It was impossible not to be nervous at the thought of .50 caliber rounds ripping through the thin underbelly of the chopper beneath you. Wait, so they shot into the chopper?

choppers? Yeah. So remember, helicopters and other things, they're flying relatively low. So it's not like a plane that you're trying to shoot out of the sky that's way up in the air. If you have several machine guns aimed up at the sky for a chopper, if they're only a couple hundred feet up above you, several machine guns trained on them could just go right through and you have a decent chance of actually hitting it. That's horrific.

So this is one of those things that if you ever seen in was it the movie was an apocalypse now or is it full metal jacket? I forget. I think it was apocalypse now where one of the things that is the famous scene of soldiers going and taking their helmets and then placing it underneath them for them to sit on it because the additional layer of protection that if they were shot up through there that the helmet would protect their balls from getting blasted off.

At least they had their priorities in the right place. Yeah, exactly. So that was something. Flights would circle down through a heavy cloud cover and those offloading would only have a few seconds with the tailgate on the ground to disembark with all their gear. As they began their descent, they would see trace around streaking past windows through the thick clouds. The crew chief would typically shout something to the effect of you have less than 10 seconds on the deck and you had better be off the ramp or know how to fly.

This being as they came in to hover briefly just off the ground. Incoming mortars and artillery rounds would explode all around the landing area. The pilots wouldn't even land the choppers. The crew chiefs would lower the tailgate to the ground as the chopper hovered, and the occupants were dumped out like a heap of garbage from the rear of the sanitation truck. Then they'd have to scatter like rats for the nearest trench line or bunker and wait in terror for what seemed like an endless barrage to be over.

The choppers would then disappear into the clouds, and those who just landed had to wait for incoming rounds to stop firing at them. It really was an entrance into hell. Bad weather in February and early March would often leave the combat base shrouded in fog for hours or even days at a time. With the fog providing cover from NVA snipers and artillery spotters, the Marines would seize the opportunity to drive their Quad 50 trucks, known commonly as Dusters, for water, ammunition, and sea rations.

Most other days they spent holed up in their bunkers since NVA snipers and artillery made movement above ground extremely treacherous. The artillery was perched up high on the hills all around them, very much like the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

The men's survival instincts and physical senses would reach a peak, having been sharpened for months under the routine bombardment. They were able to hear mortar, artillery, and rocket rounds leaving their tubes, and could often identify the type of weapon that was fired just from the sound that it made. A smart Marine would never ignore or second-guess their own instinct or those of others. They would hit the ground in an instant if they thought they'd heard a suspicious sound or had seen a muzzle flash.

Case on, your fatigues were always dirty from diving to the ground to avoid incoming direct fire. At any given moment, you could be shot, blown up like that.

That's... Wow. So what were the rates of PTSD from these things? Vietnam? Oh, dear God. I don't know off the top of my head, but this is where it's like PTSD. Obviously, that was a thing before when it came to World War I, World War II, Korean War, etc. But this is where people really started to pay attention to it. I don't know off the top of my head specifically what the rate was.

of PTSD was, but certain places had it way worse. Like you saw way more PTSD in places like the Marines and others that had to be involved in the worst of it at any given time. It was a nasty thing. And so one clear morning, a careless young Marine stand up and walk across an open stretch of ground between unconnected trenches. In an instant that he did this, he was struck in the side of his face by a sniper round.

Fortunately, the round went through his cheek and out of his mouth, which only knocked out a few of his teeth. But otherwise, it would leave him in a relatively good condition. You know, relatively good condition. At least he's alive, I guess. Here's the thing. It went through a cheek and it hit a tooth. Right. In comparison, if he had his mouth even slightly closed, that could have shattered his entire jaw.

Yeah, but could you imagine in through your cheek? Oh, man. So after some dental work and a few stitches, he was able to go back onto the line and be good as new. That is the life of a soldier, Gap. This incident would reinforce most of the men's resolve to just crawl or scurry on all fours when moving across open ground in clear weather.

They didn't even have the freedom of movement on their own base. Imagine that. It is your base, your defensive position, and you have to crawl everywhere because if you stand up and walk to another part of it, you will be shot. Maybe they should have defended it a little bit better. Like higher wall? From the location, from where they were. There's a lot of things that potentially could have been done. By trees?

And it's from the valleys as well, or from the hills. Okay. So they have a much higher position that is overlooking them and is able to then shoot them with sniper fire as well as mortars. That's just horrific. Exactly. See, NVA gunners had the airstrip zeroed in and a few fixed wing aircraft were able to land without being hit or destroyed.

But really, it's only a few of them. Not many could do this. With landing and takeoff just being way too dangerous, the Air Force attempted delivery procedures known as LAPES and GPES. Under LAPES, which are low altitude parachute extraction system, the aircraft made a low level approach and a parachute dragged the cargo across rollers and then out the rear doors. Basically, just airdropping and supplies.

Under GPES, which is ground parachute extraction system, the aircraft came in low to snag an arresting cable, which in turn would yank the cargo out of the rear. And both procedures were highly risky for the aircraft, ground personnel, and were finally discontinued when runaway cargo pallets ended up crashing through bunkers at the west end of the runway, killing several Marines.

Thereafter, most resupply was made by a parachute drop from C-123 or C-130 transports over the northwest perimeter of the combat base. Marine Corps Sergeant Ronald Echols was serving with Marine M. 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines, 3rd Marine Division on Hill 881 South when this happened, and he described the problems they had with getting resupplied. Quote,

For the first 30 days, they couldn't get us resupplied. Seven helicopters got shot down bringing supplies to us. We went nine days one time without anything to eat. Fortunately, with the thick fog, we were able to spread plastic down the hill and catch condensation. We needed to have about two 12-ounce cans of water to last until the next morning. But guys were still dehydrated. They weren't getting enough to drink. It was a hellish siege.

During the siege, Marines created an air delivery method called a supergaggle to provide supplies to areas cut off from land and supply routes after several aircraft were lost during resupply missions. The supergaggle method coordinated air and artillery strikes to occur simultaneously during resupply missions, providing a shield for aircraft delivering much-needed ammunition, food, water, and evacuating the wounded.

Quote, the air wing came up with the idea that they could come in and bring jets in and bomb, then come around the hill, put up a smoke screen, and then the helicopters would come in five at a time with the resupplies. They looked like geese coming through there. So that's why they called it the super gaggle, like literally a gaggle of geese. That's how they started getting us resupplied.

Eccles would later receive a battlefield commission and a bronze star for his actions during the Battle of Caisson, with his bronze medal citation including excerpts such as, quote,

but they were fighting an endless battle against an infestation of rats. As any Vietnam veteran would probably tell you if you asked them, these were not just ordinary rats as well. They often grew as big as large rabbits and were cunning and vicious. After weeks of setting traps to no avail, First Lieutenant Bruce Geiger would finally get fed up and decide one night to take a serious step to annihilate one particularly persistent pest.

As you would later recall, quote, I climbed into my upper rack and tucked a flashlight and a loaded .45 caliber pistol under my sleeping bag. After my section chief had gone to sleep, I lay awake for the telltale scratching sound of our nightly intruder. And I was not disappointed. I followed the sound of his movement to the baited traps on the floor across my bunk, and I silently lined up my pistol and flashlight in the direction of the sound and waited for the complacent invader to begin chowing down. Did he catch it?

At the moment of truth, I simultaneously switched on the flashlight beam and emptied an entire clip of .45 caliber rounds into the direction of the monster rat. My section chief bolted from the sleeping rack below, certain that we were under attack.

I quickly quieted him and assured him that all was okay, pointing confidently towards the array of triggered rap traps in front of us. The rat's carcass, however, was nowhere to be found, and the sergeant was not amused. They can't even win against the rats, bro. Like, imagine that. Like, bro, look at this. Check it out, chief. I did it. Points with a flashlight. There's nothing there.

That would actually be my that would be my 13th reason. Yeah, because they're going through it and they can't even get rid of the rats. No, they cannot. And that's the thing. They never really did get rid of them. When the B-52 strikes left large numbers of NVA dead around the base perimeter, the rats began to feed on the decaying corpses. Oh, they had basically an endless food supply just there, which in turn allowed for more breeding, which in turn allowed for more feeding. And you can see what would then happen.

A major panic took place when the doctors at Charlie Med identified rats that were infected with bubonic plague and began giving booster shots to large numbers of Marines. Most of the men braved the hazardous trek across the runway to get their booster injections because no one, no one wanted to die of bubonic plague. Shot? Sure. Yeah, that'll happen. No one wants to die of the plague. Also, here's the thing. So the guy told them to defend this by all means necessary. And they're doing it.

But they're not getting any break. No, no, they're not. Because that's the thing. This base was important. It was so important to the United States, or at least from what they judge, that President Johnson stated that he was, quote, determined that Khe Sanh would not be an American Dien Bien Phu, that he ordered the military to hold Khe Sanh at all costs. Well, they're paying the costs. Exactly. Things got truly unprecedented. And to be honest,

Ridiculous when Johnson gathered the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had them all sign a document that they guaranteed that Khe Sanh would not fall. How is that? How is that even like a reliable course of action? Let's just get these. Let's make them sign it. And then maybe they go out there themselves and hold it. Well, yeah. In this case, though, with the Joint Chiefs, that's all they could do would basically guarantee that any resource at all possible, anything would be done specifically to hold it, which is

of course, means that risky maneuvers would probably be taken. True. And even wilder side note here is that, okay, so like nine days before the Tet Offensive broke out, PAVN or NVA, which I guess, you know, the acronyms are kind of interchangeable, really. They opened the battle at Khe Sanh and attacked U.S. forces just south of the DMZ. Declassified documents show that Westmoreland considered using nuclear or chemical weapons in response.

Wow. This didn't happen, of course, or else way more would come out about it. But this was deemed to be so important and risky that he was willing to resort to war crimes or chemical. Yes, basically. Yeah. Literal war crimes. Yes. OK, so do they end up holding it? You can't tell me that yet. We're not going to tell everyone. We're going to tell the story. I just hope it's worth it for them in the end, because this is horrific.

Yeah. See, eventually that whole idea there was scrapped by Johnson and his advisers, and a secret memorandum reported by the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara sent to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson on the 19th of February 1968 was declassified in 2005.

It reveals that the nuclear option was ultimately discounted and eliminated because of not morality, but terrain considerations that were unique to South Vietnam, which would have reduced the effectiveness of tactical nuclear weapons. They just didn't think that it would be very effective. So that's why.

McNamara wrote, quote, because of terrain and other conditions peculiar to our operations in South Vietnam, it is inconceivable that the use of nuclear weapons would be recommended there either against Viet Cong or North Vietnamese forces. McNamara's thinking may have also been affected by his aide, David Morseau, whose brother, Michael Morseau, was serving at the base. And you don't want you don't want to accidentally nuke your brother. Yeah. Yeah.

So the U.S. reinforced Khe Sanh with artillery and air support, including massive air campaign Operation Niagara. Thus began what was later described as, quote, the most concentrated application of aerial firepower in the history of warfare.

On any given day, you could find more than 30 light observation or reconnaissance craft, 60 B-52s, and over 350 tactical fighter bombers in the sky over Khe Sanh, bombing the shit out of everything. So, the Vietnamese, did they have a lot of air power, or was it literally just the Viet Cong being...

Pretty good at their jobs, honestly. Okay, so we actually covered this in the previous episode of the patron one. Okay, I'm not on those. I know. I understand, but they did have a decent but not large amount of air power. They fought with their aircraft and their Migs, which were the Russian jets they were utilizing in the same way that they fought on land. Guerrilla war, basically. And

Dear God, for those of you who are curious, the way that the United States conducted the air war in Vietnam was so goddamn stupid. Oh, my God. The way that it was done. Wasn't your granddad literally a Vietnam pilot? Yeah, he was a bomber pilot. Yeah.

Wow. He would tell me stories about how he from one time where his co-pilot had been ripped to shreds by him by shrapnel. So he was flying the plane and his buddy was just there, dead, ripped apart. Yeah, I remember that story because it comes up quite a lot. That's...

Not great. Yeah. So basically, just a bit, just spoiler alert for anyone who's curious. Largely, the way that like bombing missions were run in Vietnam was that it was a period of gradual escalation. So they didn't just go all outright and say, all right, we're fighting here. We're going to bomb all these important military targets, knock everything out. And then from there, just completely crush the willpower of the Vietnamese and it's over. No. Instead, what they did is gradually escalate the targets they were targeting with larger amounts.

To force the North Vietnamese to the negotiation table rather than using overwhelming force from the get go. Makes sense. On top of that, the way that these bombing missions were ran was from the same spot and direction every freaking time. Now, I want you to think about this. You are about to come under attack from someone, you know, the time is.

You know the location and you know the direction that they are going to be coming from and going to. Okay. Where do you think that you are going to position all of your anti-aircraft weapons?

Where they're coming from? Literally that. Meaning that at any given time that the U.S. was heading into a position, they were entering a frickin' turkey shoot. Because the NVA knew where they were coming from because they never changed it. Oh. So they were just immediately would enter into a hell zone of getting shot at. Oh my gosh.

This allowed the NVA and their pilots, which they were dead. They had a very limited amount. And I cover this in the patient episode. They had a very limited number of aircraft. But because they knew where the enemy was coming from, they were able to stage ambushes. This whole war. No wonder it's so controversial. Like everything I learn about it. Well, A is against my will and B is terrible. Exactly. So it was a giant goddamn mess. It just really was.

So anyway, let's see, where was I? Marine Direct Air Support Center. Right, Dasik. The Marine Direct Air Support Center, or Dasik, located at KSCB, was responsible for the coordination of airstrike and artillery fire.

An airborne battlefield command and control center aboard a C-130 aircraft would direct incoming strike aircraft to forward air control or FAC spotter planes, which in turn would direct them to targets either located by themselves or radioed in by ground units. In terms of logistics and lethal asset deployment, it was a masterclass thing. It was actually quite strong gear.

As Ronald Eccles would say, quote, we had a couple of North Vietnamese soldiers surrender. We asked them why they surrendered and they just pointed up at the sky. You can imagine what these B-52s do. They called it an arc light and they would just drop hundreds of bombs out of one plane and there were three or four planes at one time. It was devastating.

In March, under cover of fog and darkness, enemy troops would dig a network of tunnels and zigzag trenches within a few meters of the perimeter wire on the east end of the runway. They went undetected until weather broke the following morning, this being when F-4 Phantoms resumed tactical operations and spotted them from the air.

The NVA had evidently hoped that they would tunnel under the wire and that the runway would be able to be just lined with mines and explosives that would destroy any inbound aircraft or the surface of the runway so that it wouldn't be able to be used. But they were spotted.

The F-4 Phantoms immediately launched heavy airstrikes with napalm and high explosive ordnance to destroy the trenches. In addition to the F-4s, they also had support from Puff the Magic Dragon, which I'm not exactly sure is actually the name of it. This was a specially outfitted Douglas AC-47 nicknamed Spooky.

This was a very special aircraft as this thing, Gabby, had three 7.62 millimeter mini guns on board. Wow. Not the mini guns on board.

Sorry, I don't know what that means. Basically, imagine this. I want you to imagine the heaviest caliber machine gun that you can. Yeah. Three of them that fire at such a high rate that anything that they aim in the direction of don't get holes made in them. They turn to mist. Do you need people shooting those or do they shoot

automatically by the pilot. Well, there's many guns that can be handled by people. And then there's ones that like the aircraft as they're going over something, they just they fire that are part of the plane itself as a weapon system. OK, so it can really depend on how they're utilized. So there were two in the back shooting out of special windows and one that was just sticking out of a side door hatch of the plane like it was a freaking chopper. Like this thing was insane.

All the guns were on the left side, so the pilot could orbit and decide when to pull the trigger, which would cause a nearly continuous stream of tracer fire to light up the entire sky. Wow. He could orbit the target for hours, providing suppressing fire over an elliptical area of around 52 yards in diameter, placing around every 2.4 yards during a three second burst.

The aircraft also carried Mark 24 Mod 3 parachute flares that it could drop to eliminate the battleground. Imagine thinking like this. You got an aircraft that is no one can see what I'm doing here with my hands right now. But because it's all on the side, right? You know how planes when they turn, they don't just like have to tilt zoom flat like you tilt your wings and you turn. So if all the guns are on one side and you are going in an area and circling it continuously. Oh,

Oh, wow. This means that you are creating a death tornado that you can fire down into. Okay, that's effective. Yes, it is. The aircraft would bring relief and would inspire confidence and victory for men in Vietnam, much like the beloved A-10 Thunderbolt, or more commonly known as the Warthog, which this is the thing that I always reference when I go, because that's beautiful. I thought you were just making a fart sound.

No, no. But admittedly, this thing would probably make anyone shit their pants if it was coming after them. It really would. So the thing is, though, when you heard the unmistakable bird sound of many guns, you knew that wherever you were, wherever the Viet Cong forces were, which were commonly referred to as Charlie, they were not happy.

However, poor visibility would often limit tactical airstrikes, which would largely leave air support to the B-52 Stratofortresses. Because when you couldn't really see the enemy, indirect bombing was pretty much all you could do. Intense fighting in artillery barrages would last into April. The air campaign did save the men on the base, though. What did it require?

Well, by the end of the battle, U.S. Air Force assets had flown 9,691 tactical sorties and dropped 14,223 tons of bombs on targets within the Khe Sanh area. Marine Corps aviators had flown 7,098 missions and released 17,015 tons.

Naval air crews, many of whom were redirected from Operation Rolling Thunderstrikes against North Vietnam, flew 5,337 sorties and dropped 7,941 tons of ordnance in the area. It's a lot. When I say that they bombed the shit out of this place, I mean they bombed the shit out of it.

As April approached, Westmoreland's plan for the overland relief of Quezon went into effect. His plan infuriated the Marines, who had not wanted to hold Quezon in the first place, and who had been roundly criticized for not defending it well. No word on how the Army guys felt, but one can imagine that it was pretty damn similar.

So Operation Pegasus, from April 1st to the 15th of 1968, called for elements of the 1st and 3rd Marine Regiments to attack up Route 9, or its case on, where the first air cab moved by helicopter to seize key terrain features along the line of advance. As the Marines advanced, engineers worked to repair the road, which had been heavily damaged by artillery in prior months.

Operation Scotland 2 began the day Pegasus ended and lasted until July 11, this being when Marines there were withdrawn from the area. Essentially a police action, the 3rd Marine Division would assume responsibility for the KSCB and began actively seeking out NVA forces in the Kaesong Plateau and the western portion of the Kwong Chai Province.

West Berlin insisted for several months that the entire Tet Offensive itself was nothing more than a diversion, including attacks on downtown Saigon and obsessively affirming that the true objective of the North Vietnamese was Khe Sanh. Now, West Berlin was so obsessed with the tactical situation that at one point he threatened to resign if his wishes were not obeyed. But he was wrong. And what did they decide to do after they finally rescued the trapped soldiers and Marines at Khe Sanh? They evacuated it.

and then fucking destroyed it. All that effort, everything that was done to hold it for nothing. In what was perhaps the biggest insult to the men who lost their lives holding it in through the siege, the evacuation of Khe Sanh began on the 19th of June, 1968 as Operation Charlie. Useful equipment was withdrawn or destroyed and personnel were evacuated. A limited attack was made by the NVA company on the 1st of July,

falling on a company from 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, who were holding a position 3 kilometers to the southeast of the base. Casualties were heavy among the attacks on NVA, who lost over 200 killed, while the defending Marines lost 2 men. The official closure of the base would come on the 5th of July after fighting, which had killed 5 more Marines. The withdrawal of the last Marines under the cover of darkness was then hampered by the shelling of a bridge along Route 9, which had to be repaired before the withdrawal could be completed.

There were still Marines on Hill 689, though, and they needed to be evacuated. Further fighting would follow, resulting in the loss of another 11 Marines and 89 Pavan soldiers before the Marines finally withdrew from the area on the 11th of July. When looking at the results of the battle, the question of kill counts has come under intense scrutiny by both sides of the years. On April 6th, a front page story in New York Times declared that the siege of Quezon had been lifted.

According to the official Marine Corps history of the battle, total fatalities of the operation for Scotland were 205 friendly killed in action. The Marines recorded an actual body count of 1,602 NVA killed, but estimated the total NVA dead at between 10,000 to 15,000. Time magazine in April 12th, 1968 would write an article titled Victory at Quezon.

and reported General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, after flying into Khe Sanh by helicopter, declaring, We took 220 killed at Khe Sanh, about 800 wounded and evacuated. The enemy, by my count, has suffered at least 15,000 dead in the area. So yeah, it was a victory, I guess.

As journalist Robert Pisser would point out in his 1982 book, The End of the Line, the siege of Khe Sanh, no other battle the entire war had produced a better body count or kill ratio claimed by the Americans at Khe Sanh. It was brutal.

basically a turkey shoot for them. Yes, they were constantly under attack. Yes, they were suffering continuously from the snipers, the mortars, the everything. The large rats. The large rats. But for every single Marine that was killed, they were taking out three, four, five, six men at a time. Westmoreland echoed this judgment in his memoirs and using exactly the same figures, concluded the North Vietnamese had suffered a most damaging and one-sided defeat.

Senior Marine Corps General Victor Krulak would agree, noting on May 13th that the Marines had defeated the North Vietnamese and had won the Battle of Khe Sanh. Over time, these killed-in-action figures have been accepted by historians. They produce a body count ratio in the range between 50 to 1 and 75 to 1.

By comparison, according to another army general, a 10 to 1 ratio was considered average and 25 to 1 was considered very good. Keep that in mind when talking about this. Normally, you do not see those kinds of casualties in pretty much any other type of conflict. But when it was American troops in Vietnam, yeah, they were out killing just about anything. And even with numbers being exaggerated, it still was far in their favor, or at least it should have been on paper.

In other words, the Americans performed way too well. Battle of Khe Sanh, according to the official numbers, in order to get a kill ratio like that, you would have to be like if we're talking Warhammer 40K. This is this is this is space marine, not just regular marine level. This is this is some insane stuff where like one or two guys are going up against an army of three to four hundred by themselves slaughtering them. It's just too good to be true. And that's kind of the problem.

Pisser points out that 205 is a completely false number. This was because the American military made it extremely complicated to be considered killed in action at Caisson. Only those killed in action during Operation Scotland, which began on November 1st, 1967 and ended on March 31st, 1968, were included in the official casualty count.

This is ridiculous because the time period doesn't really coincide with the fighting as troops on the ground perceived it. It starts before the siege began and ends before it even ended. Like, let me give you an example. On January 14th, Marines from Company B, 3rd Recon Battalion, were moving up the north slope of Hill 881 North, a few miles northwest of Quezon Combat Base, when an enemy rocket-propelled grenade killed 2nd Lieutenant Randall Urie and Corporal Richard Johns.

Although these Marines died before the beginning of the siege, their deaths were included in the official statistics. The NVA used Hill 881 North to launch 122mm rockets at the Marines during the siege. On Easter Sunday, April 14th, the 3rd Battalion, 26 Marines, would assault Hill 881 North in order to clear the enemy firing position, and Lima Company finally seized the hill after overcoming determined NVA resistance.

But unlike the Marines killed in the same place in January, since Operation Scotland had ended, the four Lima Company Marines who died in this attack were excluded from the official statistics, even though they died in the exact same place. But wait, it gets worse. The American military presence of Khe Sanh consisted not only of the Marine Corps Khe Sanh Combat Base, but also Forward Operating Base 3, which is U.S. Army FOB-3.

Many American casualties were caused by the 10,908 rounds of rockets, artillery, and mortars the North Vietnamese had fired into the base and kill positions. Army deaths at Ford Operating Base 3, however, were not included in the official statistics either. So they just weren't counting a bunch of them. See, when you were listing off all of that stuff of the kill-death ratios, I was like, oh, um...

It's propaganda. Like, it just sounds like propaganda. And then you're like, yeah, it's propaganda. No, because it straight up is. I mean, if you think the disrespect regarding accurate reporting of kill totals was limited to just army deaths, think again. On March 6th, a C-123 cargo airplane was attempting to drop off Marines who were to be fresh reinforcements just transferred into the 26th Marine Regiment. There were 44 passengers and a crew of five on board.

As they came to land, artillery rounds began to slam into the runway. The pilot attempted to execute a go-round and try for another landing when it was struck by multiple burst machine gun fire as well as recoilless rifle fire. The plane crashed in a huge fireball a few miles east of Quezon. But get this, because the plane wasn't stationed out of Quezon and the Marines on board it weren't yet attached to the 26th Marine Regiment,

None of their deaths were counted. That by itself would have increased the casualty rate by like 20% alone. And it was not counted. Operation Pegasus casualties included 59 U.S. Army soldiers and 51 Marines dead. They also were left out of the official case on casualty count. Air Force deaths, which were estimated between 5 and 20, were also not counted.

On July 10th, Private First Class Robert Hernandez of Company A 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, was manning an M60 machine gun position when it took a direct hit from NVA mortars. Hernandez was killed. 10 more Marines and 89 NVA would die during this period. They were not included in the official case on counts. And they were most definitely part of the group evacuating the base during Operation Charlie.

The actual fighting at Khe Sanh command base ended the next day, which was the final day of Operation Charlie. But it just doesn't count. The total given by U.S. military of 205 killed over a period of six months was manipulated in order to present the battle as an overwhelming victory. And this is likely due to Westmoreland's damn near need for a decisive victory to silence his doubters. Taking a larger but more realistic view, the Khe Sanh campaign resulted in the death total of American military personnel at like 1,000.

Ray Stubb, a U.S. Navy chaplain who is the foremost historian on the Battle of Quezon, says that this is a much more reliable figure. And unlike the official figures, Stubb's database of Quezon casualty includes verifiable names and the dates of the death. The official public estimate of 10,000 to 15,000 North Vietnamese killed in action stands in contrast to another estimate made by the American military.

On April 5th, 1968, MACV prepared an analysis of the Khe Sanh battle for General Westmoreland, and the report, originally classified as secret, noted that intelligence from many sources indicated conclusively that the North Vietnamese had planned a massive ground attack against the base. The attack was to have been supported by armored artillery.

Due to severe losses, however, the NVA abandoned his plan for a massive ground attack. The losses, indicating that the enemy suffered a major defeat, were estimated at 3,550 killed in action by delivered fire. That'd be like aerial artillery bombardment, this sort of thing. And 2,000 killed in action from ground action. For a total of 5,550.

This being the number of estimated killed by March 31st. That is half to a third the number of what the Americans anticipated that they actually killed. Wow. Ho Chi Minh once told the French, quote, you can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at these odds, you will lose and I will win. He understood. Bidding bars. Yeah. He was willing to sacrifice people to reach that.

He understood that a man who fights for his homeland will fight to the death more willingly than any outside invading force. He also understood his people and their needs and reactions. 10 to 1 is something that they could deal with. 3 to 1, that was chump change for the Vietnamese.

The Marines knew that withdrawing from Khe Sanh would give Hanoi a huge propaganda win. And sure enough, a communist spokesman would later claim the Americans had not only been forced to retreat, but the Battle of Khe Sanh was the bravest tactical and strategic defeat for the Americans in the war. That being said, it was the only time that the U.S. abandoned a major combat base because of enemy pressure. That would still make it one.

When discussing the results of the Battle of Quezon, it turns out that either side really won a decisive victory, though. If you go purely by kill counts, then sure, yeah, the Americans won. But if you look at the last impact, it didn't really change as much as many people would like to think, unless you're talking about the response to it from Americans watching it develop in the media. But in Vietnam, within a few months, a new American base was built at Halu, just a few miles to the east of Quezon down Route 9. Bombings and fighting would continue across the country.

Yeah, West Berlin finally got his PR victory. Yeah, the Marines and soldiers fought bravely in defensive caisson, and they did kill thousands of enemy soldiers. And yes, the North Vietnamese killed more Americans than expected. In the end, it was more of the same. The war just continued. And while there would never be a bigger battle than this in Vietnam, the war was still just beginning at home in America, where public opinion was severely divided over the war.

In November of 1968, a new Republican president, Richard Nixon, would be elected, promising to end the war that Johnson, McNamara, and Westmoreland had fumbled. And so, yeah, we're going to take a shot at telling you how the year 1968 went for Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. And if you got the word that I used right there, the answer is not well. But to hear that story, you will have to go and join us on Patreon, where our Vietnam episodes are being posted. We have more to cover there, and it is all coming to an end here soon.

Thank you all here for joining us today. I appreciate all of you. And I will see you all here next time. Goodbye, my friends. Bye.