Crack the sky. Shake the earth.
PRE-ATTACK MESSAGE FROM HANOI1
The flashes came from right behind, like lightning on the ground, erasing the night. Then the thunder boomed, close, really close, 122mm rockets and 82mm mortars and God knew what else. The explosions crumped and cracked, one right after the other, banging into the heart of the big U.S. Long Binh base complex. Nothing good was happening inside the fence back there. The place contained so many juicy targets: field force headquarters, three brigade command posts, the replacement barracks, the stockade (Long Binh Jail, Vietnam’s own LBJ), multiple supply warehouses, fuel storage tanks, two field hospitals, a post exchange—a damn military department store, of all things, chock-full of color TVs, lawn chairs, and coffeemakers—plus 60,000 rear-echelon troops, and the entire conglomerate snuggled up next to a gigantic ammunition dump, like putting your house on the slope of Mount Vesuvius.2 From outside the long fence line, you couldn’t hear the sound of running boots and the frantic shouting as the Long Binh faithful ran for their lives like startled cockroaches in a suddenly lit kitchen. But you knew.
PFC Chuck Hagel sure did. In the strobing half-light of the successive impacts, he looked at his wristwatch, the one Private Jerry Duvall gave to him back at Fort Dix, when the Nebraskan volunteered for this good deal. Duvall said his brother wore the timepiece for a year in Vietnam and never got a scratch.3 It looked like the watch’s juju would get a workout this time. Three a.m. “Oh-three-hundred” in army lingo. The witching hour, all right. In Vietnam, nothing positive ever happened at 3 a.m.
It didn’t do any good to look over your shoulder at the sound and light show. That problem cooking off back there belonged to the poor bastards inside Long Binh Post. Hagel and the rest of Company B had their orders. They had been told to watch the dark jungle right in front of them, to scan the trees and underbrush fronting either side of the black gap in the vegetation that marked Highway 15.4 The bombardment of Long Binh base sure seemed like preparatory fire. Any minute, an enemy infantry assault wave might come boiling out of the tree line, like some crazy banzai charge from a World War II movie. Sweaty hands tense on their plastic and metal M16 rifles, Hagel and the other riflemen stood by.
Unlike most Americans in country, Hagel and his fellow troops were awake, ready, and almost in the right position. To their backs, the Tet Offensive had just kicked off. At Long Binh, and across the country, the onslaught didn’t come out of the jungle, but from the inside, right from the guts of South Vietnam’s towns and cities—and there was a message in that, for sure. Tet was massive. It was desperate. It was decisive. And in the end, it cost America the war. But at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, January 31, 1968, nobody knew that yet.
WELL, ACTUALLY VO NGUYEN GIAP and the rest of the North Vietnamese army general staff knew it. So did Ho Chi Minh and his politburo. They called the plan Tong Cong Kich-Tong Khai Nghia (General Offensive–General Uprising). By simultaneously going after 120-plus key urban sites during the annual weeklong truce marking the Tet Lunar New Year holiday period, akin to hitting America during the stretch from Christmas to New Year’s Day, the North expected to set off a countrywide rebellion in favor of the communists. The Hanoi leadership thought they’d win the war in a single stroke.5
The Tet operation arose because the NVA needed very much to change the war’s trajectory. Political rhetoric aside, the North was getting pounded, and attrition, dead Vietnamese, did matter. The U.S. aerial bombing of the North might be randomly turned on and off, inconsistent in its choice of targets, and baffling in its focus. Just what in hell were these capitalist war mongers up to? But where the bombs struck, they struck hard. And in the south, the unstoppable flail of U.S. firepower took an immense toll. The NVA and VC ran and hid, but not all the time, and not well enough. If this continued, maybe the terrible arithmetic would eventually add up for Westmoreland and MACV. Ho Chi Minh dare not go there. So this situation must change. The communists had to recast the battlefield. That required taking the initiative, an attack on the grandest possible scale. In the spring of 1967, probably around May, the decision makers in Hanoi directed plans for what would become the Tet Offensive.
The North understood Westmoreland’s American-led attrition strategy and used it against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies. For the last few months of 1967, NVA regiments forced major engagements in the sparsely populated north and northwestern border regions of South Vietnam. Eager to kill their enemy at remote places like Con Thien, Dak To, and Khe Sanh, Westmoreland’s MACV battalions went hard after the NVA. By early 1968, half of all U.S. combat battalions had shifted to the north and northwest, following the bait. The marine combat base at Khe Sanh became a focal point. The Americans thought they were taking out NVA soldiers faster than Hanoi could replace them, the long-sought crossover point. Yet for the NVA generals, MACV had done exactly as intended, leaving the hapless ARVN shielding their country’s major population centers to the south and along the coast. North Vietnam suffered heavy casualties. But as Giap stated: “The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, or tens of thousands of human beings, even if they are our own compatriots, represents very little.”6 The NVA had the aggressive Americans and the ineffectual ARVN right where they wanted them. The communists called this “preparing the battlefield.”
With MACV and the ARVN in their places, some 84,000 Viet Cong, heavily reinforced by NVA cadres and selected units, drew the main tasks. The rest of the NVA (more than 400,000 strong), both in country and just outside, in Laos and Cambodia, waited to reinforce success. Stealthy VC assault detachments infiltrated into the vicinity of their carefully chosen urban objectives: 5 of 6 autonomous cities, 36 of 44 provincial capitals, 72 of 245 district centers, and numerous locations inside the national capital of Saigon, including the brand new American embassy, MACV headquarters, and the huge U.S. Army base at Long Binh. During January, the VC reconnoitered their many Tet targets. They rehearsed. They prepositioned key weapons and explosives. And then they waited for the order to go.7
The men in Hanoi overreached. Like able military men everywhere, they looked for opportunities. But their assumptions stretched well beyond any sober wartime calculus. The communists believed the ARVN would fold up, quit, or maybe even turn coat. Worse, they trusted that the collapse of Saigon’s military would trigger a huge groundswell of politically motivated southerners, welcoming the VC and NVA as liberators and offering hearty assistance. Worst of all, they then leaped to the conclusion that this mass movement would take arms and, led by VC main force battalions and NVA regiments, drive the Americans into the sea, a supersized countrywide Dien Bien Phu. So the communists hoped.
But hope is not a method, as experienced U.S. Army planners are wont to say. The wide-ranging VC attacks—yes, those could well happen, and might do a lot of damage. But finishing the 800,000-man ARVN? Rousing the sullen southern population? Running off 500,000 well-armed, well-trained Americans? Maybe a few too many May Day pep rallies, or too many ceremonial toasts, or too many puffs of the pungent local marijuana—no, those outcomes sure looked unlikely. The best the NVA might do, to borrow from General Erich Ludendorff and the German army in 1918, would be to punch a hole and see what happened next.8 And by the way, it didn’t work out too well for the guys from Berlin.
One thing the Hanoi leadership did not intend at all was to cause some kind of domestic upheaval in America. The NVA general staff, Giap in particular, denigrated the influence of the peace movement in the United States. The North Vietnamese appreciated the sentiments and warmly welcomed various dissident delegations. But the Hanoi inner circle thought President Lyndon Johnson unlikely to knuckle under to throngs of hippies chanting outside the White House. It never occurred to those up north that a much bigger slice of American opinion-leaders and unhappy citizens, lulled by Westmoreland’s assurances of military progress, might react very strongly to the shock of the Tet Offensive. As NVA lieutenant general Tran Do noted, any such development would be, as he understated it, “a fortunate result.”9
CHUCK HAGEL AND the other men of Company B expected trouble. The Tet holiday cease-fire started at 6 p.m. on Monday, January 29. Liberal leave for South Vietnamese soldiers allowed them to go home for family meals. Local street celebrations occurred in hamlets, towns, and cities. Firecracker strings popped and sparklers lit the night as all of Vietnam welcomed the Year of the Monkey.
Monkey business followed. Somebody in the NVA, or more likely jumpy VC part-timers, got their days mixed up. American units up north reported eight attacks, and not the usual hit and run shenanigans, either. At thirty-five minutes after midnight, VC mortarmen plunked six rounds just outside a South Vietnamese navy site at Nha Trang; a battalion-sized ground assault followed. An hour later, two enemy battalions attacked into the center of Ban Me Thuot, the provincial capital. Another hostile battalion pushed into the little district capital of Tan Canh. About 2 a.m., three VC main force battalions assaulted the provincial capital buildings in Kontum. An hour after, another ground column assailed the district capital at Hoi An, just south of coastal Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second-largest city. In Da Nang proper, VC infiltrators struck the local AVN corps headquarters. At 4:10 a.m., two VC battalions took the government radio station compound at Qui Nhon. A half hour later, a major attack struck the highlands provincial center at Pleiku.10
Those details, of course, never made it down to PFC Hagel and his guys. Across most of South Vietnam, U.S. and ARVN commanders read intelligence reports that some more concerted enemy strikes might be imminent. Naturally, the intel guys, nervous neddies all, predicted ten out of every three attacks that might hit you. Commanders did more or less to get ready. The Americans sure as hell weren’t on some kind of Tet holiday. And the ARVN cancelled the Tet furlough for South Vietnamese troops, although in their usual lackadaisical fashion, some units obeyed, some did not, and most got it about half right.
But in the Saigon area, the word got out. Way up the chain at II Field Force headquarters at Long Binh, Major General Fred Weyand, reporter Johnny Apple’s unnamed critic of the attrition strategy, repositioned his American battalions to protect key sites around Saigon. Weyand had plenty of combat experience, to include service in the forbidding China-Burma-India theater in World War II, infantry battalion command in Korea, and two years in charge of the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam, fighting from just north of Saigon out to the Cambodian border. Weyand read the tea leaves well. The enemy was up to something. So Weyand moved his pieces around to block the bad guys. Westmoreland and many of the rest of the MACV staff would later claim they saw it coming, too. If so, they sure didn’t do much to get ready. 11 But Weyand did.
Thus Chuck Hagel, Company B, and the rest of the 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 47th Infantry found itself fronting the jungle southeast of the barrier fence around Long Binh Post. On the maps at II Field Force headquarters, a blue rectangle marked the 2-47th’s lonely position. Inside the field force command post, ducking pieces of the ceiling lights raining down, dutiful sergeants marked red squares all around, reported locations of various elements of the “Bien Hoa” VC Sapper Company, 238th VC Local Force Company, U-1 VC Local Force Battalion, 274th VC Main Force Regiment, 275th VC Main Force Regiment—a division-scale attack.12 Nobody had ever seen anything like this. It promised to be a very interesting day around Long Binh. And it had started early.
CHUCK HAGEL WAS right there. He’d come a long way from that well-lit office at Fort Dix, New Jersey, to a hot, humid defensive line in the small hours of the morning just outside Long Binh Post. His journey took him from Fort Dix to a five-day leave in Nebraska, to the Oakland Army Terminal in California, to Travis Air Force Base, to a contracted jet airliner over the Pacific, to the hot tarmac of Tan Son Nhut Air Base, to a ride on a green school bus with mesh over the windows—keeps the hand grenades out—that stopped for a few days at the 90th Replacement Battalion at Long Binh Post, one of the unhappy recipients of VC ire early on the morning of January 31, 1968. From the crowded tents of the 90th, Hagel boarded a sandbagged 5-ton cargo truck and, escorted by armed vehicles, rode in a long road convoy headed south on Highway 15. The convoy’s destination was Camp Martin Cox at Bear Cat, home of the 9th Infantry Division, the Old Reliables, Westmoreland’s World War II outfit. A stint followed at the Reliable Academy, five days of intense jungle school, the “inside tips” on Vietnam tactics not covered at Fort Bliss and Fort Ord. Finally, after about ten days of all of those draining preliminaries, Hagel arrived at Company B, 2-47th Infantry. The company issued him an M16 rifle, helmet, flak jacket, and other field gear. The battalion sergeant major welcomed Hagel and the other new guys. Remarks by the company commander and the first sergeant came next. Then came chow and some fitful sleep on a cot inside a tent. At five the next morning, a week or so before Christmas, the rifle company, Hagel among them, moved out on a weeklong operation.13
This long, tiring picaresque didn’t always make sense at the PFC level. For the U.S. Army it constituted business as usual. To the institutional army, Chuck Hagel equaled MOS 11B10. His arrival in country on December 4, 1967, filled a hole. And Company B, 2-47th Infantry had one.
Hagel arrived in the same way his father Charles Dean Hagel showed up in Hawaii in 1942 and the way his brother Tom entered Vietnam on February 7, 1968—as an individual replacement. The U.S. Army formed units stateside and then sent them to war. When they took losses, like the 42nd Bombardment Squadron did in 1942, the system sent replacements, such as Charles Dean Hagel. In World War II, units and men fought for the duration. With few exceptions, nobody went home early except the severely wounded. When people got sick, or hurt, or died, the army sent in replacement soldiers, like feeding fresh bullets into a machine gun.14 It all had a certain logic in Washington.
The army used the same system in the Korean War. At first, entire regiments and battalions deployed. But Korea was a limited war, and keeping troops in for the duration did not wash with hometown America. After a year or so, as the squalid Asian conflict settled into a static trench confrontation and casualty numbers dropped, soldiers were allowed to serve about a year and then go home, to be backfilled by individual replacements.15 As another limited war, Vietnam seemed tailor-made for this same method: units first, then individual replacements, soldier by soldier.
When units entered Vietnam in strength starting in 1965, MACV smoothly established man-by-man rotations, set as twelve months for soldiers and, drawing on some arcane USMC arithmetic, thirteen months for marines. Experienced in World War II and Korea, Westmoreland never considered any other approach: “The one year tour gave a man a goal. That was good for morale.”16 So he thought.
Thus units trained and deployed together, like the 1st Cavalry Division from Fort Benning, Georgia; the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky; and the 9th Infantry Division from Fort Riley, Kansas. Within a year after arrival, it all went to pieces. The division flags stayed in Vietnam, but the wholesale shuffling of people began and never let up. It resembled trading a finely forged steel sword for a glued-together collection of metal shards. All the leadership in the world couldn’t retemper that blade. The best you got might be a blunt instrument.
Sending troops into Vietnam one by one, as individual replacements, may have satisfied the adjutant general officers and the efficiency experts surrounding Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Reams of thick studies proved again and again how training two-year draftees for several months in the United States and then sending them to spend a year in Vietnam constituted optimum use of manpower.17 All the number crunchers agreed.
Frontline officers and NCOs did not. Men are not machine gun bullets, nor are they widgets or screws to be shuffled from drawer to drawer around the globe. People fight for the guys on either side of them. They willingly obey leaders they know and trust. Other armies—the British, the Canadians, the French, the Australians, all veterans of many wars in the more unpleasant corners of the world—have long deployed by battalions. The United States could have done so. Instead, we settled for war one soldier at a time. And somehow, even so, with a half million men in theater, units in Vietnam remained understrength, short on NCOs, and replete with individuals mismatched to their training, square pegs in round holes. MACV daily awaited their share of “the invisible horde of people,” as described by Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair as far back as 1944, “going here and there but seemingly never arriving.”18 When steady men like the Hagel brothers showed up, they went right to work.
Chuck Hagel later commented on what he experienced in country. “We were terribly understrength at every level,” he said. “As I recall, we were even rotating cooks and clerks into the field to fill some of those gaps.” He went on: “You had guys rotating in and out daily. You would break the continuity of leadership. You’d break the continuity of confidence, of teamwork.” Soldiers near the end of their year, “short-timers,” avoided risks. They sought duty at the base camp. That meant others went out on more patrols, filling the gaps. Young soldiers like Chuck and Tom Hagel stepped up for the senior NCOs who were wounded or not assigned. “It was a very bad policy,” concluded Chuck.19
You could make a case, and some wiser officers and NCOs did, that units in Vietnam fought most effectively in the first few months after deployment. Once the first year ended and the cohesive original organizations came apart—exactly what happened to the 9th Infantry Division in December 1967—things rarely went as well.20 Good leaders, even great leaders, inspirational figures like George Washington or George Patton, would be hard-pressed to pull together a mass of individuals. To do so under fire in a frontless war against guerrilla enemies? Well, forget it.
The younger professional officers and NCOs in Vietnam saw the problem only too clearly. Men like General Colin Powell (captain and major in country) and H. Norman Schwarzkopf (major and lieutenant colonel at the time) insisted on unit deployments and unit rotations in the Iraq War of 1990–91. Unit swap-outs were the rule in Haiti in 1994–96, Bosnia starting in 1995, and Kosovo in 1999. U.S. Army vice chief of staff General Jack Keane (captain in Vietnam) ensured the unit approach in 2003 as it became evident the dual Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns required a long-term commitment.21 We may not be happy with the course of those indecisive wars, but our units held together year in and year out. So we got that right. Wars must be fought by units, by formed teams, not by a gaggle of strangers. Vietnam taught that hard lesson in blood. Some of it belonged to Chuck and Tom Hagel.
CHUCK HAGEL MET his enemy on a day before Christmas of 1967. He and the rest of the riflemen had been out for days. The army referred to the mission as route security, code-named “Riley” and “Akron” and “Santa Fe,” keeping Route 1 and Route 15 open to traffic.22 The troops called these efforts “roadrunner operations” or “thunder runs.” Most U.S. units searched and searched to find the opposition. But if you spent enough time going up and down the major roads, the VC found you.
Hagel’s 2-47th Infantry wasn’t elite. Not marines, not special forces, not paratroopers, not airmobile heliborne troopers, the 2-47th amounted to just another American infantry battalion, typical of them all. Indeed, for the 1994 movie Forrest Gump, when Vietnam veteran Winston Groom and screenwriter Eric Roth chose a unit for their fictional protagonist Forrest and his friends Bubba Blue and Lieutenant Dan, they selected Company A, 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry.23 The movie got many details right enough for Hollywood, but missed a big one.
The real 2-47th brought something extra to the fight, and that capability made them ideal for roadrunning. In Vietnam, most U.S. Army and Marine infantry walked, even though often they went into action by helicopter. But 2-47th relied on the M113A1 armored personnel carrier (APC). This 12-ton tracked vehicle looked like the world’s largest shoe box, sixteen feet long, nine feet wide, seven feet tall. Behind its sloped flat bow squatted a 215-horsepower diesel engine. The vehicle’s aluminum armor ranged from a half inch to an inch-and-a-half thick, better than nothing, but not by much. An M113 could shrug off fragments and rifle bullets, although the heavier stuff punched right through. A heavy armored ramp on the back let eleven men get on or off. When the ramp dropped, those inside ran off like troops leaving a landing craft on D-Day. The APC driver sat to the left front; a track commander handled a long .50-caliber machine gun centered in a little turret on top. Both men could keep their helmeted heads up (not very safe) or slam the hatch and peer out through a ring of thick glass vision blocks and try to drive that way (also not very safe). The 2-47th called their vehicles “one-one-threes” or “tracks.”
Having four M113s per platoon made 2-47th “mechanized,” one of only ten such U.S. outfits among the 117 maneuver battalions in all of MACV; there were also ten armored cavalry squadrons (with tanks) and four tank battalions (two army, two marine). The 9th Infantry Division owned two mechanized infantry battalions, and used them to keep major highways open—and as quick reaction forces when trouble erupted unexpectedly. Heliborne troops flew only in good weather and arrived with hand weapons and the ammunition they carried on their persons. Helicopters were fast as hell, over a hundred miles an hour, but unarmored. On a hot landing zone, with the VC machine gunners blazing away, you could lose a lot of helicopters very quickly, and the survival rate in chopper crashes wasn’t good. M113s only moved at twenty-five miles an hour on good roads (not many in Vietnam), but they carried a lot of ammunition, those powerful .50 calibers on top, and a rack of riflemen aboard, and ran in all weather. Most importantly, M113s mounted long-range amplified radios, the lifelines to medical evacuation, resupply, reinforcements, artillery, and air support. If hit, M113 APCs could be towed out, and likely repaired. Nobody towed off a UH-1D Huey helicopter except to blow it up.
Looking at the 2-47th, it seemed like Hagel belonged there, even though he’d had very little mechanized training before he showed up in country. His father, Charles, had certainly fought out on the far side of the Pacific, and now son Chuck was there, too. The .50 caliber, “a tremendous, effective machine gun” in Hagel’s words, just happened to be the same heavy weapon his father once used to defend B-24 Liberator bombers. In another coincidence, 2-47th Infantry, like Charles Dean Hagel’s 42nd Bombardment Squadron, used the black panther as the unit symbol. If you believed in fate, or karma, or the Lord moving in mysterious ways, you noticed such things. Chuck Hagel did.24
While a good number of senior officers, paratroopers like Westmoreland for example, thought the M113s almost as good as tanks, the men who fought aboard the aluminum-hulled APCs had no such illusions. Mines and VC rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) posed significant threats. One solid hit and the track would rip apart or even flip over; sometimes the diesel fuel started on fire. Once heated up, aluminum burned, too. Tracks sometimes burned down to a pile of steaming silver slag. With this in mind, men rode on top when moving from point A to point B. “You didn’t find it particularly healthy to be on those armored personnel carriers,” Hagel found out. “There’s no point in losing six or seven men to one rocket. So it’s better to lose a driver and a machine gunner,” said Hagel. “If you’re going to lose men, lose two, not seven.” Even a new guy like Hagel learned that hard equation very quickly. If the unit expected contact, or deployed to clear a road, the riflemen got out and moved through the brush on either side, about a hundred yards out. Men on foot with mine detectors and sharp eyes—engineers if available—walked in front to check the route itself for buried munitions. It took an hour to move a mile like that.25 But it cleared the road and kept Americans alive.
So it might have been Santa Fe, or Riley, or Akron, or a mission without a formal name on Route 1, somewhere between Saigon and Xuan Loc. After a week or so in country, Hagel knew the drill. As a PFC rifleman, he followed the man in front of him. The Americans moved slowly through the thick greenery. They could hear the tracks trundling along on the roadway, but if the troops looked over their shoulders, the heavy vegetation made it hard to see more than distant dark outlines. The soldiers had been doing this on other stretches of highway both day and night over the last ten days. Some other platoons had glancing contacts, pop shots, an old mine—French era—unearthed. But so far today, nothing.
Supposedly, December counted as the dry season near Saigon. The humidity ran around 80 percent, an uncomfortable match for the 88° temperature. The taller trees shaded the rest, dimming an already dull day. Imagine walking through an abandoned greenhouse run riot—in a sauna—and you’ve got it. Under the gray, overcast sky, sweating, steel helmet bobbing on your wet head, you just tried to stay alert.
The guerrilla enemy loved days like this. A U.S. unit droning along, midday, nothing much going on. It looked like they were pretty worn out. Flip to that page in the Mao Zedong hymnal, and sing along… enemy tires, we attack.
The flat crack of an AK-47 sounded—first one, then three, then plenty, all from the front. After you heard it enough, you always recognized an AK. Those hot little 7.62mm slugs had a voice all their own. “The bullets were whizzing through the underbrush and trees,” Hagel wrote later. “You could hear and see them tearing the leaves a few feet over your head.” The rounds zipped as they broke the sound barrier near your ears. American drill sergeants like William Joyce always preached “shoot low.” A marksman can always adjust up on to target, watching puffs of dirt or bark or whatever. But high rounds just launch out into the atmosphere. Thankfully, most VC shooters didn’t get that class. PFC Hagel was learning the difference between hearing fire (common in country), receiving fire (less often), and receiving effective fire (uh-oh).
Some of the VC got it right. “The guy in front of me was hit,” said Hagel, “then the guy next to me, square in the chest.” For a nanosecond, in that weird slowed-down sense of time common to firefights, Hagel thought he was next. But “the training kicked in.”26
The U.S. riflemen curled near tree trunks and snuggled behind mounds of moist dirt. They shot back. A few M16s rattled on full automatic. Individual shots rang out, one after another, a metallic snap, snap, snap characteristic of the M16’s high-velocity 5.56mm bullets. Hagel pulled the trigger, facing outboard, not toward the road and the tracks. He couldn’t see any enemy. He didn’t know yet that you never saw them. You heard them, or glimpsed muzzle flashes, maybe. But in modern battle to be seen is to be shot. And that wasn’t good. So people on both sides tried very hard not to be seen. In the jungle, that was almost always the story.
The M60 pig started snorting, its .75-inch-long 7.62mm bullets banging away. The experienced machine gunner ran through a belt, not the neat six- to nine-round bursts taught at Fort Ord, but a long rip, maybe a hundred rounds in one whack. Then, from out on the highway, one of the M113s opened up with its .50 caliber, pumping inch-and-a-half-long slugs through the greenery just in front of the beleaguered column of U.S. riflemen. That was enough for the enemy. They pulled away. The shaken Americans dealt with two wounded.
This kind of glancing encounter happened often enough to be unremarkable, and Hagel would see his share and then some. The official 2-47th summary of the multiweek operation reads like a shopping list, with about as much drama. The battalion claimed “a confirmed body count of 300 VC/NVA,” a nice, round number. If any VC died in Hagel’s little skirmish, nobody found them. But then again, they always dragged off the bodies, right? In addition to the enemy casualties, 2-47th captured “100 pounds of salt, 11 pounds of documents, 3 RPG-2 [rocket-propelled grenade launchers], 200 rounds of AK-47 ammo, one 81mm mortar, and eight 81mm mortar rounds.”27 At that rate, the war of attrition might have wrapped up by 2067, give or take a few decades.
Thus the VC introduced themselves to Chuck Hagel. The troops called them “Victor Charlie” in the military phonetic alphabet, and “Charlie” day to day. When the enemy got serious, they called them “Mr. Charles.” That’s who showed up for Tet.
ONCE THE VC STRUCK in force along the perimeter of Long Binh Post, it took a while to figure out exactly what to do with 2-47th. Military school instructors counsel “tactical patience,” taking time to “develop the situation” before committing forces. Maybe the people under attack at Long Binh were doing that. The military police units and ad hoc gaggles of headquarters guys had their hands full with energetic VC. Sorting out how best to use a mechanized infantry battalion had to wait.
At 3:35 a.m., battalion told Company B to prepare to move. Hagel’s commander, Captain Robert G. Keats, had only been in charge for a week. But the quick-thinking West Pointer knew what to do. He brought in the two ambush patrols, teams of four men out in the jungle to snare VC snoopers and provide early warning. The men began to roll up their concertina wire, circles of razor-sharp barbed wire that could be expanded or folded up just like an accordion. The track commanders stayed up on the .50-caliber machine guns and the riflemen continued to man their fighting holes. Nothing had come out of the jungle yet. But the VC clearly had stepped it up this time. So maybe they were baiting the Americans to move too soon. Then they could rush the fence.
At 5:20, just before dawn grayed the sky, orders came by radio. Normally, the captain received a coded message. But this time, Lieutenant Colonel John B. Tower spoke in the clear, addressing all companies simultaneously. Company A and the battalion headquarters had to clear the village of Ho Nai, just north of Long Binh. Company C was told to go into the center of Bien Hoa city, near the U.S. airfield, to defend the ARVN III Corps headquarters. Company B drew the short straw—clean out the ammunition dump. And do it without getting blown into the stratosphere.
When one of the company commanders asked about filling foxholes and pouring out sandbags, Tower cut him short. Leave it all. Move now.
Keats did not hesitate. He ordered Company B to go. “We left—we left ponchos,” said Hagel. “We left everything right on the ground. And we grabbed guns and were on those APCs and down that road.” It was 5:35, twenty minutes before dawn. The first hint of morning twilight lightened the eastern horizon.
Captain John E. Gross, commanding Company C, described the scene:
As we turned right onto Highway 15, an unbelievable spectacle stretched before us. Having been struck by mortars or rockets, the fuel tanks at the air base, as well as several buildings throughout Bien Hoa, were burning brightly. Flames illuminated the clouds, forming an eerie glow; flares hung in the sky and helicopter gunships crossed back and forth firing red streams of tracers into the city.28
By 6 a.m., Hagel’s company, assembled into a long column of twenty-two M113s, pulled out on the road, en route to the Long Binh ammunition facility. Riflemen rode atop the tracks. They had to be careful, as the base’s defenders were trading bullets with various known and suspected VC. Of course, you couldn’t see any bad guys. But they were there. Random bullets zipped by and skittered off the pavement of Route 15.
The Company B tracks drove hard for the ammunition dump’s gate. The lead platoon reached it at 6:38 a.m. Men jumped off the lead vehicles, running for the dirt-covered ammo storage bunkers. Where were the VC? Where were their timed charges? The racket of gunfire rose in intensity, most of it from the arriving Americans. The big .50 calibers hammered away. In a James Bond movie, the hero confidently located the right wire, snipped, and stopped the insanity. But that busy morning at Long Binh, nobody found any painfully obvious ticking time bomb with big red digits clicking down. The VC didn’t roll that way.
Company B’s brave riflemen did identify a few bulky khaki backpacks, ripped out the time fuses, and flung the detritus far outside the compound. While frantic soldiers searched for more, the clock ran out. Evidently, VC sappers had placed enough charges, focused on explosives arrayed out in the open. A pallet of 175mm artillery propellant went first. Three others followed, then more. The immense concussions, fire, and smoke boiled up “like a nuclear mushroom cloud,” said Hagel.29 A nearby Long Binh headquarters soldier said, “We could see the shock wave coming through the foliage. Everybody ducked as it passed over, stirring up a tremendous amount of dust in its wake.”
Hagel’s vehicle was just outside the fence when the eruption cooked off. The two tracks in front of Hagel’s M113 had dropped their infantry already—a lucky thing. When the ammunition went up, that pair of APCs were “essentially as vaporized as you can be,” said Hagel. Amazingly, all four men in the wreckage survived, though badly wounded. Smacked by the blast, Hagel’s APC leapt off the ground and slid into a ditch. Some aboard were burned, but nothing serious. It was only 7:39 a.m. 30
Well, that was a hell of a start. The ammunition dump was toast. Sympathetic detonations and fires continued throughout that day and well into the next. No more could be done there. But the stretch of government housing across Route 316 seemed to be lousy with VC. If the ammo stocks couldn’t be saved, they could be avenged.
Company B’s tracks turned toward Widows Village for the next round with Mr. Charles.
THE SAIGON GOVERNMENT had built the little community as a model town for the wives and children of those ARVN soldiers killed in action. It appeared to be a Vietnamese version of suburban tract housing, eight rows of twenty identical little homes, stretched about a thousand yards along the roadway. The widows staked out concertina wire—thank you, America—to delineate their garden plots. Maybe seven hundred people lived there.
In the days before Tet, ruthless VC elements infiltrated the village. They killed the troublemakers and cowed the rest. For Mr. Charles, attacking into Long Binh Post from Widows Village amounted to win-win. If the great offensive worked, all well. If the Americans counterattacked, they’d be compelled to smash through some of the most loyal South Vietnamese in so doing. It was insidious, but you had to tip your hat to the opposition’s chutzpah. They played at the big money tables, all right.
The VC battalion commander’s orders for Tet instructed him to attack across Highway 316, smack into the II Field Force Headquarters on the northwest edge of Long Binh Post. Had that attack succeeded, Major General Weyand might have really had his hands full. But the VC officer lacked initiative. He’d been told to wait until several hundred rockets pummeled the U.S. base. When he only counted ninety, the VC commander chose to hold his position. His machine gunners opened fire, and so did a few snipers. But most of the enemy battalion just sat there.31
Lieutenant Colonel Tower, by now up in a bubble-top OH-23 helicopter (very much like the kind used in the movie and TV show M*A*S*H), saw the opportunity. He ordered in both Company B and the battalion’s scout platoon. Part of Company B went first, with Chuck Hagel’s platoon trailing a ways back. First Lieutenant Henry L. S. Jezek brought his four 1st Platoon tracks on line and started working from southwest to northeast. He put an M113 on each narrow street and fanned out his rifle squads to check the silent houses.
House clearing is one of the most difficult infantry tasks. The men checked each little building. If they suspected anything dangerous inside, the riflemen led with a fragmentation grenade, just as they taught you to do at Fort Ord. Of course, these structures stood on concrete slab foundations. If you tossed in an M26 grenade, you had better stand back or eat a faceful of your own frag. It took about an hour to clear the first third of the village. The VC lay low.
Then they didn’t.
In an instant, Mr. Charles opened up with AK-47s, a lot of them, a steady ripple of the all too familiar sharp cracks, some marked by the foe’s green tracers. (Americans used red tracers.) An RPD machine gun joined in. That thing was an AK-47 on steroids, firing the same deadly Russian-designed short 7.62mm slugs. Its gunner shot high. You could see the tracers winging overhead.
Stunned by the fusillade, the Americans ducked and flinched. Riflemen scrambled behind the little buildings. A few crouched in the lee of the idling M113s. AK bullets pinged off the broad track fronts. One green tracer ricocheted straight up.
In seconds, U.S. troops began to fire back. They couldn’t see much. But they shot anyway, aiming in the direction of the VC shooting. The U.S. M16s snapped away. An M60 pig fired, too, snorting out a belt of ammunition, one red tracer for every four unseen 7.2mm bullets. Shooting low—thank you, drill sergeants—the Americans tore up the bottom corners of a few suspicious houses. At this juncture, close was good enough.
Then a VC rocket-propelled grenade streaked out, headed right for an M113 halted right near Highway 316. In the little turret, Corporal Robert A. Huie saw the thing coming—they flew slow enough to watch, but fast enough to get you—and he cut loose with the .50-caliber machine gun, aiming at the source of the smoke trail. The projectile hit in a shower of sparks, rocking the track. Huie didn’t let up. His .50 kept right on pounding.
Another RPG lashed out. The second rocket warhead burst right on the turret gunshield, killing Huie. His long machine gun swung around, unmanned.
Lieutenant Jezek ran to the stricken track. Along with Huie, clearly dead, Privates Donald Matchee and John Corrilla also lay dazed inside the stricken M113. They had severe wounds. An AK round smacked Jezek hard on his right side, then another RPG blew up near his head. The lieutenant went down in a heap. Somebody dragged him behind the disabled track. The cacophony of shooting kept right on going.
Seeing the platoon leader bowled over, Sergeant First Class William Nelson Butler took charge. He knew he had one dead, one APC immobilized, and three badly wounded. Matchee and Corrilla both barely hung in there. Jezek look bad, too. His head lacerations bled freely, as such injuries often do. These guys needed medical evacuation, a dust-off helicopter.32 And the VC weren’t letting up.
With their hands full, Butler and his men fought to hold their position, banging away at Mr. Charles. Butler’s platoon, three good tracks and a dozen sound riflemen, anchored themselves on a woodpile near Highway 316, right on the east side of the housing area. They faced an aroused VC battalion. The platoon awaited the arrival of the rest of the company, including PFC Hagel, and the scouts.
In this kind of situation, the stationary U.S. platoon usually called in artillery to pin and beat up the enemy force, lest they break contact and escape. Overhead, Lieutenant Colonel Tower wouldn’t allow any artillery fires. He worried about the South Vietnamese civilians potentially still hiding in Widows Village—and in fact, there were a few. Sergeant First Class Butler’s men hadn’t seen any locals, innocent or not. More ominously, one American grenadier actually sighted a fleeting armed figure and pumped out a 40mm round, scoring a direct hit. If the VC had the guts to show themselves, that couldn’t be good.33 Butler’s men kept up the fire. So did the VC.
But in the clear light of midmorning, as the VC machine gunners and AK-47 guys kept at it, Mr. Charles began to slip away, right out of the guerrilla playbook. Enemy advances, we retreat. Overhead in his little OH-23 helicopter, Lieutenant Colonel John Tower saw the hostiles exfiltrating by threes and fours, hopscotching away from house to house, creeping down the drainage ditches, and crawling behind the folds of red dirt. Tower had been to this rodeo before. If only he could have used the big howitzers to flail the Cong. But how many widows and children was Tower willing to sacrifice? None, if he could help it. Still determined to catch the withdrawing VC battalion, Tower urged his other units into the fight.
The rest of Company B was way behind. PFC Chuck Hagel and the rest had gotten entangled with some stubborn VC shooters en route to Widows Village. At 10:15 a.m., during the firefight, Captain Keats reported nine wounded in action. It took a while to clean that up. PFC Hagel did his part.34 Nothing was easy. It all took longer than anyone wanted. Every movement got somebody else hurt.
Meanwhile, about the same time, First Lieutenant Brice H. Barnes and his eight scout platoon tracks rolled in to link up with Sergeant First Class Butler’s guys. In most battalions, the scouts comprised the top lieutenant, the sharpest sergeants, and the best junior soldiers, all in an oversized combat platoon with extra radios. In conventional warfare, scouts went out front to locate the opponents first. In Vietnam, the scouts served almost like an extra rifle company, handy for the battalion commander to use to make a difference. That sure held for the pugnacious Barnes and his guys in 2-47th.
More help came at 10:35 a.m., when Company B, 4-39th Infantry arrived. They descended into an open, dusty dirt patch just southwest of Widows Village, brought in by a flight of UH-1D Huey helicopters. The VC lit up the landing zone, dirt puffs and green tracers and holes punched in the Hueys. But the choppers made it in and out okay, and so the fresh rifle company did, too. Somebody up higher had shifted the 4-39th riflemen from a different battalion area, seventeen miles away. When air mobility worked, it was a wonderful thing.
The 4-39th captain, Barnes, and Butler got together behind an M113. They agreed on a simple plan—the foot troops to the west, scouts in the center, Butler’s men to the east. When the rest of Company B arrived, they’d fill in behind and “mop up,” a rather innocuous term for the dangerous work of winkling out any VC die-hards. The U.S. ground attack commenced about 11:45 a.m.
The tracks led, .50 calibers shooting up each house. The M113 gunners didn’t spare the ammunition, either. Riflemen followed, popping off 5.56mm rounds at known, likely, and suspected VC, which is to say every muzzle flash, dust devil, and suggestion of movement. M79 grenadiers blooped their deadly 40mm eggs behind buildings and into ditches. The U.S. line advanced methodically, chewing its way north. The echoing din and dry dirt clouds were tremendous, a man-made storm front rolling slowly north through Widows Village. Several houses started on fire, adding smoke billows to the already acrid midday air.
Overhead, Lieutenant Colonel Tower watched the attack from his usual perch. How those battalion commanders relished their ringside seats a thousand feet up! From that altitude, it all seemed like a board game. See the big picture. Move the pieces around. Coordinate supporting arms. The guys on the ground, sweating and struggling, hated the sky-box micromanaging, except when the flying commanders brought in needed help. This time, Tower delivered.
The lieutenant colonel scared up two new AH-1G Cobra gunships. With real humans doing the aiming, Tower trusted the helicopter guys to look before they fired inside Widows Village. The aviators would be a lot more accurate than a pattern of artillery shells fired off a map estimate and arcing in from miles away. Tower warned his men on the ground to halt in place. Then he cleared the helicopters to go after the VC holed up in the north end of the streets.
Both armed helicopters passed overhead as their crews sized up the situation. Then they swung wide, lining up, one behind the other. The lead bird dropped its nose and went to work. The Cobra unleashed a brace of seven 2.75-inch folding-fin rockets, tearing up the VC-held houses. He pulled away. Then the second Cobra slid down, rocketing the same shattered, smoking buildings. As the trail helicopter rose up and clattered off, the lead AH-1G came back around, aligned its nose turret, and gave the hostiles some mini-gun (from six 7.62mm gatling-style rotating barrels) for good measure. A throaty rasp, some kind of god-awful chainsaw, ripped the air. The second bird then followed suit—more chainsaw, then silence. A cloud of reddish dust bloomed over the beaten zone.
When the Cobras finished up, declaring “Winchester” (out of ammunition), a follow-on pair of UH-1C Huey Hogs appeared, repeating the pounding with more rockets and machine gun bullets. The two rounds of gunship strikes finished off the VC, minus the stragglers, the stubborn, and the stupid.35 Hunting them down fell to the rest of Company B, including Hagel. It took most of the afternoon.
Scout lieutenant Brice Barnes earned the Distinguished Service Cross after dodging fire all day, culminating in a rare face-to-face shootout with an especially doughty VC. Company B, the scouts, and the 4-39th Infantry together claimed seventy-seven enemy killed and ten prisoners taken—very impressive, but also an indication that hundreds of men from the VC battalion got away. The intel people at battalion confirmed that supposition just before sunset. To take Widows Village, the Americans lost three killed (two scouts and Corporal Huie) and sixteen wounded (twelve from Company B, three scouts, and one from 4-39th). At least two local civilians, hiding out in the ruins of Widows Village, got killed, too. The ARVN’s model settlement had been thoroughly trashed. But after a very long, very dicey twenty-four hours, Long Binh Post was safe.36 The Americans called it a victory.
Chuck Hagel knew it had been a hell of a fight. More action followed for the next few days. “We took tremendous hits,” he said. Many were leaders. To add to the pain, two days later, the riflemen moved forward through a different ramshackle hamlet, looking for VC. Hagel was near Captain Robert Keats. “We were in a cemetery one morning,” said Hagel, “and a sniper shot him right between the eyes, and he was right next to me.”37 After evacuating their fallen captain, the company kept going. The war didn’t let up.
TOM HAGEL LANDED in Vietnam two weeks before the Tet Offensive. He didn’t linger at Long Binh. He had hoped to serve with brother Chuck in country, and got pretty close when the clerks at the 90th Replacement Battalion sent him, too, to the 9th Infantry Division at Bear Cat. Like Chuck, he sharpened his battle skills in five days of jungle training at the Reliable Academy. In those relatively routine last days of January, nobody there had any idea of the storm about to break over Vietnam.
During his week or so at Bear Cat, Tom sewed on the 9th’s Octofoil shoulder patch, the eight-pointed red and blue flower surrounding a white circle, all mounted on a round, olive-drab background. In medieval heraldry, the white circle designated the ninth son—the division—surrounded by his eight brothers, red for artillery, blue for infantry, and not coincidently America’s national colors.38 Irreverent young soldiers called the patch “flower power” and the “psychedelic cookie.” And both Hagels wore it. By army measures, they didn’t live in the same house, or even the same street. But they were in the same town of 16,000 souls. They shared the patch.
That wasn’t by request, nor by design, but by the routine machinations of army accounting, the individual replacement system puttering along, the widgets and screws drill. The 9th had first deployed to Vietnam in December of 1966 and January of 1967. With the first year up, the division needed a huge infusion of soldiers to backfill the departing original deployers.39 Losses in Tet only turned that crank faster.
Nobody had time to ease Tom Hagel into the war. He reported to the 3rd Squadron, 5th Cavalry just as the Tet Offensive cooked off. The 3-5th had sustained significant casualties before, during, and just after Tet, with eighty-two men—pretty much an entire troop—lost right about the time Tom Hagel made it to Vietnam.40 The squadron needed men.
This unit employed M48 tanks, M113 armored personnel carriers, and dismounted soldiers, too. In keeping with the cavalry tradition, the battalion-size outfit was designated a “squadron,” the companies were “troops,” and the men proudly called themselves “troopers.” The frontier Regulars at long-ago Fort Robinson, Nebraska, would have recognized the nomenclature immediately, and indeed, the original 5th Cavalry had carried the day back in 1876 in a scrap with the Cheyenne at War Bonnet Creek, Nebraska. Great-grandfather Herman Hagel used to resupply the old-time 5th Cavalry. Now son Tom served in the Vietnam-era version. Much like the mechanized 2-47th Infantry, 3-5th acted as a reaction force when things went haywire. The Tet Offensive surely qualified.
To chase down and finish off troublesome pockets of VC infiltrators, the 3-5th “Bastard Cav” was on loan to the biggest separate armored organization in country, the powerful 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. PFC Tom Hagel went right out on operations near Bien Hoa Air Base. He took a minute to jot a note to his brother, courtesy of the army post office:
Well, by now I’m sure you’re wondering what the hell happened to me. I am in what amounts to a recon squad and securing force. When we move to the DMZ [demilitarized zone; the border with North Vietnam], I’ll really be busy. I’d just as soon be with the 2/47 as here. The CO [commanding officer] is a real prick. Well, take it easy and I don’t know when I’ll be seeing you next.41
It’s unclear to which particular prick Tom Hagel referred, as he had a troop, squadron, and regimental commander, and one, two, or all three certainly might have qualified for the epithet. In any event, as Tom warned Chuck, the squadron’s activities around Saigon soon wrapped up. On February 16, 1968, Tom’s Headquarters Troop scout platoon, Troop A and a platoon of Troop C left Blackhorse Camp en route to New Port, Saigon.42 The Bastard Cav was about to get a new daddy. They were headed north.
GENERAL WILLIAM C. WESTMORELAND got his first whiff of the full import of Tet when he went to the courtyard of the U.S. embassy. Dead VC, shattered masonry, and expended cartridges lay here and there. Blood stained the walkways. Nineteen enemy sappers breached into the compound. But they never entered the chancery building. It was over after a few awful hours.
Now came Westmoreland. Impeccably attired in his clean green jungle fatigues, four silver stars on his cap, upright and forceful, the MACV general inspected the site. A gaggle of cameramen and reporters trailed in his wake. Then, at about the same time on the morning of January 31 that 2-47th waded into Widows Village, Westmoreland turned to address the accompanying press.
The commander summarized the embassy incursion, being careful to note that all the VC were dead and the chancery remained intact. “In summary, the enemy’s well-laid plans went afoul,” he stated. It was factual as far as it went.
He continued: “The enemy very deceitfully has taken advantage of the Tet truce in order to create maximum consternation in South Vietnam, particularly in the populated areas.”43 You could say that, all right, with more than a hundred separate assaults throughout Vietnam. It took days to clear out the attackers in Saigon. It was the same in the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands. Up north was even worse, which was why Tom Hagel and 3-5th Cavalry were headed that way. A marine regiment remained encircled at Khe Sanh. The fighting inside Hue city went on for weeks, with the Viet Cong flag flying over the old imperial citadel right to the end.
Just in and around Saigon, the list went on and on: Bien Hoa Air Base, Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam’s Independence Palace, the national radio station, several ARVN command posts, and even MACV headquarters. Westmoreland had to duck rockets whistling into his command post and then dodge bullets on the harrowing ride to the embassy. Hell, if MACV headquarters and the U.S. embassy weren’t safe, what was?
Stalwart as ever on the trashed embassy lawn, Westmoreland emphasized his bottom line. “The enemy exposed himself and he suffered great casualties.”44 So there you had it. We killed them by the gross. Therefore, we won.
As a victory announcement delivered over the background racket of gunfire and explosions around Saigon, it rang hollow, perhaps even delusional. The fact that the NVA and VC could pull off a massive surprise offensive, when supposedly beaten to their knees and on the verge of quitting, riveted attention back in America. North Vietnam might have taken horrendous losses, but they didn’t shy from more, and there was zero indication that Ho Chi Minh and his politburo might throw in the towel. Even as the opening round of Tet attacks died down, NVA and VC elements kept right on fighting. And young Americans kept right on dying. Crossover point be damned. If this was winning, a redefinition of goals seemed overdue.
As television networks beamed back burning cities and crashed helicopters, and U.S. casualties mounted—the average American only tracked our side of the MACV ledger—a groundswell of shock and dismay rolled across America, the ammunition blast wave at Long Binh magnified to a continental scale. Pole-axed by the unsettling public reaction, generals and Johnson administration officials blamed the press. A good number of reporters certainly sexed it up and painted the canvas darkly. But in the United States, the press is a mirror, and despite the fonder hopes of some agenda-driven editors, only rarely a prism. Journalists reflect what we already know. As anchorman Walter Cronkite of CBS said, off the air for the moment: “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war.”45 Uncle Walter, as he often did, spoke for Mr. and Mrs. America.
Many military men, including Westmoreland, compared Tet to Adolf Hitler’s last-ditch Ardennes counteroffensive, a desperate attempt to win a lost war.46 Yet in December of 1944, no objective person could argue that the Allies were not winning, and decisively so. The great Battle of the Bulge caused a setback, not a reset. Even as German panzers tried one last lunge, you knew how that war would end up.
Westmoreland believed that the Tet Offensive validated his attrition strategy. Driven by the bloodletting of 1965–67, the enemy came out of the shadows, stood up, and fought. And died. According to MACV counting, through February 11, the Tet Offensive cost the North’s forces 32,000 killed and 5,800 captured. American losses were 1,001 killed, and the oft-maligned ARVN lost 1,081. Hanoi’s general offensive went off on schedule, achieving a high degree of surprise. But to the astonishment of many, maybe even themselves, ARVN troops held. The popular general uprising fizzled completely. Pushed out front by NVA officers, Viet Cong guerrillas in particular bore the brunt of the beating. To Westmoreland, it smelled like a victory.47 Then and now, most military observers agreed.
But war is more than trading shots with the other uniformed foe.
In Vietnam and America in 1968, Tet cast into question all of the progress claimed to date. The numbers, always the numbers, the metrics of death, us versus them, trends and forecasts, ratios and percentages—they went on and on. The old NFL adage applied. Statistics are for losers. Getting stunned by a massive countrywide surprise offensive sure didn’t feel like victory. That other crossover point—U.S. public support for the war—was fast approaching. A half million Americans in uniform in Vietnam, Chuck and Tom Hagel among them, were about to find out what it meant to be on the losing side.