Dispatches

The U.S. Military Command has divvied up Vietnam into sections that take no account of the country’s natural geographic demarcations: the Highlands, or the way “the delta of Vietnam comprehends the Plain of reeds and frames the Saigon River” (92). In military briefings, Vietnam is broken up into parts, and “it would be impossible to know what Vietnam looked like from reading most newspaper stories as it would be to know how it smelled” (93).

The Highlands, particularly, loom large in the minds of the Americans who have seen action there. While many Montagnards, the indigenous people of the Highlands, sign up as mercenaries for the Allied forces, the mutual distrust between the Montagnards and the South Vietnamese has a negative impact on the cohesiveness of the alliance. It is generally assumed that the Montagnards are nomadic, but their nomadic lifestyle is a response to their crops being napalmed and their villages being destroyed in the fighting. The Highlands have an otherworldly feel to them, and unexplainable things seem to happen there. In the Battle of Dak To, there had been many U.S. casualties, but it was considered a win because it was assumed that the North Vietnamese casualties numbered approximately 4,000. However, after the battle, when the allies reached the top of the hill, they could only find four corpses.

There are some who think that the United States got involved in Vietnam, in part, because it was assumed that it would be an easy fight. It is a battle in the Ia Drang Valley, deep in the Central Highlands, that changes that assumption.

Between March and May of 1954, during the First Indochina War, there is the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The French plan had been to cut off the Viet Minh’s supply line, draw the enemy out, and then overpower them with superior firepower and air support. The result is that the Viet Minh surround the French troops and bring in antiaircraft artillery. The defeat of the French results in the French terminating their involvement in what was Indochina and is now Vietnam.

Thirteen years later, the U.S. forces are facing a situation in Khe Sanh that has many of the same hallmarks of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. It is the Marines that hold Khe Sanh, and during press briefings the correspondents ask whether Khe Sanh is in danger of becoming what President Johnson calls “Dinbinfoo” (Dien Bien Phu). The ratio between attackers and defenders is similar, as are the terrain and weather conditions,which don’t favor air support. Like the trenches that the Viet Minh had dug in order to attack the French, the North Vietnamese Army is also “digging a network of trenches that would soon approach to within a hundred yards of the Marine wire” (100).

Herr asserts that the Marines were chosen to defend Khe Sanh because of the belief that one Marine is better than ten South Vietnamese soldiers, so that Marine squads are:

fed in against [North Vietnamese Army] platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off. The belief was undying, but the [Marine] was not, and the Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans (102).

There was only one week in the war that, proportionally, the Army lost more men than the Marines. Working with other outfits becomes somewhat of a disappointment for Herr, after being embedded with the Marines: “They got savaged a lot and softened a lot, their secret brutalized them and darkened them and very often it made them beautiful” (103).