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Hill 861 sits about 3 to 4
miles northwest of Khe Sanh as an arty round flies. (map) Along with nearby Hills 881North and South,
Hill 558 and Hills 950 and 1015, Hill 861 figured prominently in the so-called Hill
Fights between the Marines and the NVA in 1967. An excellent description of these
battles is told in several books--. The Marine base at Khe Sanh was protected by
these lonely outposts, each manned by a company or so of Marines. Hill 861 was a
tough climb. By the time we got started from the road, it was very hot and humid.
Today the hill is covered in a low grass right down to the road. It would be a hike
in the blazing sun. We followed a small trail up the hill until we reached a saddle
between one smaller hill to the north and 861 to our south. It was at this saddle
that some Vietnamese living in a shack down the side of the hill shouted up to us.
Our interpreter had an exchange with them. They told us that we should stay where
we are until they hiked up to us. We took a break and checked the maps. When these
young Vietnamese men reached us and found out that we wanted to continue up the hill
they told us it was extremely dangerous with alot of unexploded ordnance lying around.
They recounted that several water buffalo had been killed grazing on the upper reaches
of the hill. I always take this type of information very seriously. When I'm near
these battle sites I always stay on the "beaten" trail. It is not wise
to step off this beaten path. From where we were standing and looking up to the top
of 861 I couldn't see any real evidence that anyone had broken trail up there at
all. I would have loved to get up there but these Vietnamese also said that the top
of the hill is just littered with ordnance. We took our pictures and made our way
down. Further up the road from 861 is the area where the Breaker Patrol was ambushed,
see my Links page for a site that gives a good description of this battle. This is
a definite spot to try and find on the next trip out.Back to Diary
Con Thien (map) must have been one forlorn duty outpost. It was the closest U.S. fixed position
to the DMZ and was right in their face. When you stand at the site of the Khe Sanh
Combat Base today with some maps you'll get a great understanding of how large that
base was when compared to Con Thien. The difference is just amazing. Both bases took
incredible and devastating NVA artillery poundings, but Con Thien is just tiny by
comparison. It is just two tiny bumps of ground, not even hills. The area around Con Thien is now farmland
with furrowed rows of crops all around the old base. There are scattered water buffalo
grazing here and there tended by the usual "buffalo boy". A dirt road gets
you fairly close to the base and you hike in the rest of the way but a fairly well
beaten path used by the buffaloes, farmers and "treasure hunters". The
treasure hunters are young Vietnamese men that you find at most of the easily accessible
battle sites. These are guys that are looking for anything left from the war. The
ordnance they dig up can be sold for the black powder and the metal casings. They
also come across stuff left by the Americans and French. When you arrive at one of
these sites you'll be approached by several of these guys with their trays of "souvenirs"--some
real and most fake. Usually it's dog tags, bullets and casings, M-79 shells, pins,
etc. However, they leave alot of stuff still lying around the site because they don't
think it's worth anything. Back to the furrowed rows of crops now surrounding Con
Thien. These rows are plowed by hand. During the height of the Con Thien siege, like
Khe Sanh, this base was impacted with hundreds of rounds of mortar and arty. Every
so often at the ends of one of these rows will sit one or two rounds waiting for
pickup. It is real easy to spot these rounds as you walk to the two little mounds,
actually three, that make up Con Thien. While the area around Con Thien is row crops,
Con Thien itself is a tangle of overgrown foilage, brush and brambles. It is so thick
in spots that I'm sure we were looking right at old bunkers but couldn't see them.
We walked around the entire base. At one end there still exists above ground a very
solid cement bunker. The main firing window looks north over the Ben Hai River. We
climbed up on top of the bunker and with our maps and compass we were able to look
out at the sight of Operation
Buffalo and the Market Place massacre.
On my first trip in 1994, Con Thien and the area immediately around it was clear
of undergrowth. By the time of my last trip in 1996, it was very overgrown and surrounded
by a dense thick that was easily ten feet high in some places. Definitely stay to
the beaten path. I stopped and photographed an old guy digging for ordnance. He was
in a good sized hole, about five feet. He was looking for anything that he could
salvage and sell. Our interpreter told us that the year before when he came to Con
Thien with another American they had stopped and watched another Vietnamese digging.
They gave him some cigarettes and then continued to walk around the old firebase.
When they were on the other side, they heard a low, muffled whump. The digger had
just struck paydirt but sadly there wasn't enough of him left to collect a paycheck.
Con Thien is an awesome site to visit. The more you can read up on its history, the
more interesting will be you visit. Back
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Khe Sanh.(map) On my first trip in 1994, I walked all over Khe Sanh--or as much as I was
allowed since their was still quite a bit of unexploded ordnance lying around and
underground. Apparently cows and buffalo are killed now and then around Khe Sanh
and every so often a local farmer will stumble upon an old round with adverse consequences.
All that is left of Khe Sanh is the hard packed runway. There are depressions where
the major bunker complexes once stood against the incoming NVA artillery rounds.
Khe Sanh is in a transition phase and a coffee plantation has spouted up on the old
airstrip and base. On my first trip in 1994, the area was still somewhat untouched
and a lot of debris littered the area. When you first arrive at the site and step
out of your van, you are set upon by the souvenir salesmen. It's time to barter for
some original Khe Sanh memorabilia or very good fakes. The three best souvenirs I
found at Khe Sanh were just lying on the ground, passed over time and time again
by these guys. One was a bit of parachute chord, colored red by the Khe Sanh dirt.
It was from some drop to resupply the base during the siege. Another great souvenir
was a part of a bunker post with the rusted metal cap still intact. I was able to
bring those two pieces home however, the third great item I had to leave behind for
obvious reasons. It was the armored seat from a helicopter with a bullet hole shattering
part of the armor. It must have weighed 60 pounds and there was no way I could get
that home.
There are a number of decent maps of the layout of the
Combat Base in several books. If you ever travel to Khe Sanh you should definitely
bring one of these maps. Stand in the middle of the airstrip and orientate your map.
Then you can look around the base and get an idea of what duty must have been like
during the seige. Off to the west
and northwest you can see where the so called Hill Fights took place, Hills 861,
558, 881N and 881S. You should be able to see 558 and 861 from the base with a good
map and compass. To the north are Hills 950 and 1015. I believe Hill 950 had one
squad rotating on to it as an observation location. What a spectacular view it must
be from up there.
A visit to Khe Sanh should be an all day event. Do some reading on the history of
the seige. Familarize yourself with the layout of the base. Then spend some time
just wandering around it in the quiet. Back
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General Vo Bam (see picture)was
a major in the North Vietnamese Army in 1959 when he was tasked personally by Ho
Chi Minh to devise a method of getting men and materiel to the South. With a small
detactment of men they hacked their way through the wilds of the Vietnamese, Laotian
and Cambodian jungles to set up the rudimentary system. It was Vo Bam who devised
the series of rest stops along the trail spaced some twenty klicks apart. Gerry Schooler
of Viet Tour Expeditions had arranged for me to meet the General in Hanoi for a fee.
I had no problem paying to meet the General, in fact Gerry went in on the fee as
well. Compared to what Westmoreland and Schwartzkopf get for an evening speaking
engagement, the tiny fee we afforded General Vo was minute in comparsion. Just before
meeting the old General, we had all just come from the masoleum housing the preserved
body of Ho Chi Minh. Oddly enough, General Vo Nguyen Giap lives in a house right
next to Ho's masoleum. We could have met with Giap for a little bit more of a fee
but he was out of the country. To meet the General Vo we drove to a residential section
of Hanoi. We were ushered into a room to meet the General, his wife and his son.
Apparently his son was now a Colonel in the Army but had served during the war in
the area around Cu Chi. They received us very cordially and friendly. We were only
allowed to take photographs, no video or sound recording was allowed. According to
Gerry, he was fairly sure this had something to do with the recent broadcast on American
TV that dealt with the Ia Drang fight. Apparently some Americans had returned to
the site of the battle, accompanied by one of the news magazines. During the course
of the piece the crew had interviewed the NVA commander during the battle and at
some point this commander stated that the NVA were willing to "lose ten men
to kill one American". Apparently this didn't go over well with the current
government when they heard this, especially since the commander was interviewed without
government clearance. Anyway, when we met with the General the government was still
very sensitive about anything someone might say that could end up on national American
TV. Our interview session ended up with us just informally asking questions which
the General tirelessly answered. The one memorable question I remember was "General,
was the war difficult?" The General's answer was priceless and quick, "Which
war", he replied, "The war with the Japanese, the Chinese, the Americans,
the Cambodians, the French? They were all difficult." It was a pleasant session
to listen to the General recount his life. I wished that we could have stayed longer.
Back to Diary
Hue, the Tet Offensive and the embargo
being lifted all sort of came together on the same day
in April 1994. I was about 4 miles north of Hue looking for the location of the NVA's
command center for it's Tet 1968 attack on Hue City. The building is described on
page 317 of Eric Hammel's Fire in the Streets , a great account of the Battle
for Hue during Tet 1968. It was an American-built concrete structure about 3 stories
tall. We stopped out van along Highway One which runs along next to the village.
I estimated that the building was still about a mile back into the village. We couldn't
drive back into the depths of the village so I set off walking with the interpreter.
The villagers were extremely friendly and eager to help. When the building was described
by me to the interpreter and then to a local villager they all seemed to understand
and pointed back in a direction deeper into the village. I continued on. I didn't
know it at the the time (this was April 1994) but the trade embargo had been lifted
by Clinton. This accounted for the excitement of the villagers. To be continued.
. .Back to Diary
Camp Holloway, Pleiku--Home of the 4th
Infantry Division must have been an awesome site back during
the war. I had read that this base had over 25,000 troops on it at it's high point.
During the war I had only passed through the Pleiku airport. Now years later in 1994,
I was coming up from the south along Highway 14 from Ban Me Thuot headed on into
Pleiku. I told the driver that I wanted to stop at the Camp Holloway's location and
if did he know where to turn off. He said he did. I figured that such a huge base
was probably turned over to the South Vietnamese after the 4th left and then after
the South fell, the NVA moved right in. It probably would still look the same, except
for the sign out front. What a suprise I was in for when we reached the turnoff and
the interpreter said, "Here we are". I was stunned for all that is left
of this sprawling base is the cement island that must have been by the MP station
at the entry gate. That's all that's left, just the cement island. Even the metal
base that held the crossing arm is sawed off at the nub. When you look back into
what was the base there is nothing but low, rolling scrub. What was there is gone
without a trace. I took several pictures and that was about it. There is a large,
single mountain just south of the Camp that pushes up from the surrounding countryside.
I'm sure there was probably a base or observation outpost up there. We didn't have
time to try to get up there but it's something I would like to research. After that
we just drove on into Pleiku. Back
to Diary
Operation Buffalo and
the Market Place Massacre (see map) is described very well in the book, Operation Buffalo: USMC Fight for
the DMZ by Keith William Nolan. Starting on July 2, 1967, a column of Marines
of the 9th Marine Regiment is doing a sweep up a large trail or road about 1-1/2
miles northeast of Con Thien. The NVA lay in ambush positions and when they sprung
the trap, a tremendous battle ensued which is described in Nolan's book. Upwards
of 35 Marines are killed and when reinforcements are rushed in, the fighting escalates.
By the end, this ambush costs the lives of 96 Marines with 211 wounded.
Today this same road intersection sits in the midst of a thriving
village. I never knew anything of the particular battle until I read the book. It
was an incredible fight. I've walked on our Civil War battlefields and there is a
solemnity and magnitude to them. I get that same feeling when I walked around the
battlefields of Vietnam in places like Khe Sanh, Hamburger Hill, Lang Vei, and so
on. The map in the book is absolutely dead-on as to the location today. You can place
yourself quite accurately at each key location. Sure it probably looked different
back then as there were no civilians in the area and the foilage might have been
more scarce. Nonetheless, it is sobering to stand at the road intersection where
one marine machine gunner had set up an incredible base of fire, saving alot of his
men. My brother, Steve, broke out his metal detector and we set about scouring for
any signs left of the battle. It would be extremely rare that we would find something
after over 25 years of monsoons rains and flooding. The site is now home to a village
that spreads throughout the ambush area. As Steve swept the metal detector back and
forth, he was surrounded and followed by up to 30 kids and adults watching our every
move with extreme curiousity. I was relatively confident that any unexploded ordnance
left over from the War was long gone as the villagers were everywhere and unafraid
to walk wherever. However, when we were exploring an area that was probably where
NVA gunners had set up with a good view of the Marines on the road we started taking
some good blips on the metal detector. It was obvious that something fairly large
was buried under the ground. It was also in an area where people wouldn't normally
walk so I was a little cautious about digging. Using a plastic garden trowel I started
to gingerly remove the dirt like Leakey in Oldavi Gorge. I'd dig a little bit, then
let Steve blip it with the detector and then continue digging. This went on for several
minutes. All the while we are surrounded by a large crowd of chattering Vietnamese.
Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I see an object moving very fast and then thudding
in front of me where I am digging. Some farmer has decided to lend a hand with his
steel hoe driving it into the ground with a loud metallic clank as metal strikes
metal. I jump out of my skin, thankful that it was not some unexploded ordnance.
It turned out to be some unidentified metal. I thank the farmer for his help. Steve
and I realize that the area is too crowded to do a proper search with the detector.
If you ever get up to this site you should definitely read the book and become familiar
with the battle. As you walk along the road and come to the locations of the various
incidents described in the book it is very sobering. Wandering around this site and
using the information from the book was as powerful as any trip I've made to a Civil
War battlefield. This is the site of a horrific battle.
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