I had been crouched down behind those sandbags for so long that I couldn’t walk, my legs had cramped up so bad it took me an hour to get straightened out, but I was lucky, Bravo Company had over 35 men wounded, all of whom had to lie stretched out in one of the bunkers all night because they couldn’t get a helicopter in until the next day. There was only one medic to take care of them all and there wasn’t enough morphine, I think two of them screamed themselves to death before daylight. We also had 27 body bags to load up, a lot of them guys who had gone through basic at the same time I did, not much left of some of them. You really don’t understand the discipline the military gives you until you see your buddies shredded and blown apart all around you and still keep on doing your job. That’s what it’s all about, that’s what we sweated and trained and took shit for. Sgt. Stone was hit by a round right above the knee, but he just tied his leg off with a tourniquet, propped himself up behind the trench and helped reload the M-14s until he had to take over a position on the line when the rifleman defending it was killed. “Guess this is my ticket home, wish the rest of you sons of bitches were coming with me.” was the last thing he told us before he was loaded onto a Huey. Our battalion had suffered more than 60 % casualties in less than two days and we sure wished we were going with the Sergeant, but it wasn’t to be. We were to hold our position until we were relived, Lt. Stevens told us after all the dead and wounded was evacuated. “Until that time arrives, there is only one way out of this valley.” The LT sure found out how true that was two days later when an artillery round exploded right next to him and he was blown 35 feet through the air and went head first through a tree trunk. But he was right about us holding that position, the Army began sending in replacements and we were almost back up to full battalion strength within days.
Gen. Earl Halton: There are a lot of myths and downright falsehoods, mostly spread by people with agendas who don’t know what they are talking about, concerning the course of the war during the last months of ‘66 and early ‘67 and I hope what I say can help set the record straight.
First of all, the incursion into Laos and Cambodia was not a desperation move by an Administration with a failed war policy. These actions had been actively discussed for over a year, in fact Gen. Westmoreland had proposed carrying the war into these so-called neutral nations from the beginning. The Administration had resisted this move at first because President Kennedy had signed agreements with the Soviets to respect the sovereignty of Laos and we did not want to take any action that would drive Prince Sihannouk into the arms of the Red Chinese, as though that hadn’t already happened. As the war progressed, it became obvious that the backbone of the Communist invasion of the South was the Ho Chi Minh trail. They had built a system, using Laotian and Cambodian territory as their highway that could move, despite heavy bombing, 200 tons of supplies a day and over a thousand men a week into the South. Any attempt to interdict this pipeline short of sending in ground troops failed hopelessly. It was ridiculous for the United States to honor agreements that our enemies and their allies ignored while they killed American boys on a foreign battlefield. Yet this insane position had more than one proponent in the State Department and National Security Council. Apparently the Communists could widen the war at will while we tied our own hands.
This viewpoint began to change after the North Vietnamese spring offensive; Gen. Westmoreland formally requested permission to send a large force into both countries to attack enemy sanctuaries, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff backed him up. Secretary Nixon, on the other hand, was at first reluctant to take this major step and escalate the war, because as he told me, “We must keep the big picture in mind. What we do in South Vietnam is one thing, it is clearly the victim of aggression by one of Moscow and Peking’s satellites, and we are perfectly justified in coming to its aide; but the South’s neighbors are another matter. The Communist Giants may well view our escalation as a green light to move against West Berlin or attack South Korea. We are spread pretty thin as it is and if another shooting war broke out; we could be forced to go to the nuclear option much too soon.”
What the Secretary didn’t discuss, but what was clearly on everyone’s mind, was the domestic political cost of widening the war. Our enemies here at home were making great political hay by claiming that America was sending thousands of young men to die fighting an unwinnable war. The rising draft calls and corresponding casualty rates only added fuel to their fire. No matter how much we hated to admit it, the North Vietnamese’s domestic allies were a force that we had to contend with. It was a poorly kept secret in Washington that President Johnson was becoming highly impatient with both the progress of the war and the deteriorating situation at home.
The most important events were happening behind the scenes; in September 1966, intelligence information came into our possession that significantly changed the course of the war. I am talking about the “Peking Papers” that had been passed to a CIA officer in Paris. This event has been investigated and researched in other books, and there is nothing new that I can add here except to corroborate the impact it had on the military planners in Washington.
I was shown the documents in question by Secretary Nixon in his office. They were detailed reports, in Chinese, on their military assistance to the North Vietnamese. One page was a map of the country that showed the North Vietnamese airfields, supply bases, and anti-aircraft positions. The CIA had concluded that the documents were genuine and had come from a staff officer who reported directly to Lin Biao, the Chinese Defense Minister. “Of course this doesn’t mean that there is a mole in the Chinese Defense Ministry,” the Secretary explained. “This is a deliberate leak of sensitive material on the part of the Chinese. I might add that none of the information contained in those papers is anything we do not already know. What they are really doing here is sending us a signal that they do not desire a North Vietnamese victory.”
It was really quite Machiavellian, Secretary Nixon explained. The Chinese and Vietnamese were ancient enemies, united now by the thin bonds of Communist solidarity. In reality, the North was closely allied to, and received the bulk of its supplies from the Soviet Union. Thus a victory by the North over the South would mean the establishment of a large Soviet ally on China’s southern border, not to mention a deep water port for the Soviet Navy at Cam Ranh Bay. So in an extraordinary way the war had made very strange bedfellows of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao and Chou En Lai. It was all part of the internal politics of the Sino-Soviet split, something few in Washington had picked up on except for the Secretary.