Siege of Khe Sanh by Robert Pisor

Author:Robert Pisor [Pisor, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7.

THE TET OFFENSIVE

General Westmoreland was jolted awake at 3 A.M. by the rocket artillery of three enemy divisions in the suburbs of Saigon. Three thousand Viet Cong soldiers and commando teams were already in the city—striking toward the radio station, the airport, the Presidential Palace, the South Vietnamese military headquarters, the port facilities, and other key targets.

Enemy anti-aircraft guns—big ones, on wheels, with seats for two gunners—jabbed the night sky with green tracers. They had been towed hundreds of miles by hand to be parked at the gates of Tan Son Nhut.

Reports flooded Westmoreland’s command center. Hue was under heavy attack—and so were thirty-six of the forty-four provincial capitals in the country. Every major airfield was being hammered by mortars and rockets, and some were fighting off infantry assaults. Soldiers were battling in five of the nation’s six autonomous cities, in sixty-four district capitals, and scores of smaller towns. A strong enemy force had hit the Delta city of My Tho, where South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu was spending the Tet holidays with his family.

The U.S. ambassador had been rushed to a secret hiding place. The U.S. Army’s military police, outnumbered and outgunned, were taking heavy casualties in the streets. A Viet Cong sapper team had blasted its way into the U.S. embassy compound, killed four guards, and was now trying to batter down the four-inch-thick teak doors with shoulder-fired rocket grenades.

The shockwaves rippled almost instantly into the Situation Room in the basement of the White House, where President Johnson’s assistant for national security affairs, Walt W. Rostow, was giving a late afternoon tour to several Washington Post reporters. He had hoped to show them that the war was going much better than the skeptical Post was reporting. They were looking at the photomural of Khe Sanh when the first printer chattered out its urgent message. Then another printer spoke, and another. Aides began hurrying in and out. The phone from the Oval Office rang.

The President of the United States wanted to know what the hell was going on.

• • •

WESTMORELAND WEIGHED THE hundreds of reports and juggled his forces—especially to meet the threat on the capital city. But his ear was most attuned for news from the north—from Khe Sanh.

At 9:20 in the morning, the general motored through tense, empty streets to the recaptured embassy compound. A helicopter had put thirty-six 101st Airborne paratroopers on the embassy roof just as MPs and Marines battered down the main gates with a jeep and went in shooting. Nineteen Viet Cong commandos, and three embassy chauffeurs who had waved their identity cards in a futile bid for life, lay crumpled along the wall or beside the round concrete planters on the embassy lawn. The rivulets of blood on the embassy steps were still bright red, and the crump of mortars and swish-BAM of rockets sounded occasionally in the near distance. The embassy compound’s high walls offered excellent protection, but even soldiers in the crowd of reporters, MPs, paratroopers, and embassy officials flinched as overrounds and richochets careened overhead.

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