Con Thien: The Hill of Angels

Prologue

Death at Ground Zero

Throughout much of 1967, a remote U.S. Marine firebase only two miles from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating North from South Vietnam captured the attention of the world's news media. Portrayed as a beleaguered, artillery-scarred outpost overlooking the fiercely contested DMZ, Con Thien was the scene of numerous savage encounters between the United States Marines and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

Military maps of the area indicated a prominent terrain feature 158 meters in elevation labeled Nui Con Thien, which in English means a small mountain with heavenly beings, or simply the hill of angels. In earlier, more peaceful times, French Catholic missionaries believed there was something angelic about that isolated hill that reached up toward the heavens. Years later, battle-hardened Marines came up with their own names for the place—meat grinder, hellhole, and Dodge City. And they joked sardonically that DMZ meant Dead Marine Zone.

In some circles, Con Thien came to symbolize America's failed military strategy of waging a high-tech war of attrition against the North Vietnamese Army. Far-removed White House and Pentagon planners devised a barrier system of firebase strongpoints (cynically labeled McNamara's Wall) connected by a cleared swath of land sewn with barbed wire, mines, and anti-infiltration devices. This Maginot Line concept was supposed to deter northern invaders from moving across the demilitarized zone into South Vietnam. Con Thien was a key component of that much-maligned barrier plan and a linchpin in the defense of the entire northern border region.

Con Thien also came to represent the U.S. Marine Corps' resolve to persevere, to stand resolute against a dedicated, well-armed, and highly trained enemy. For nearly three years, the Marines never wavered in fulfilling their mission to hold that piece of high ground at all costs. But the cost was high.

Major infiltration routes traversed the demilitarized zone within sight of Con Thien, and the North Vietnamese desperately wanted to neutralize that key outpost. They brought to bear every heavy weapon they had in their arsenal to pound Con Thien's defenders. The NVA seemed to believe that, even if they could not take the base through a ground attack, they would make it untenable for the Americans to remain there.

Our government chose to consider the northern half of the DMZ inviolate territory; thus, through our own self-imposed rules of engagement, we were never authorized to move troops across the Ben Hai River. We limited ourselves to artillery and air strikes. The NVA knew they could emplace heavy artillery pieces north of the Ben Hai River and shell Allied firebases throughout the northern Quang Tri Province without fear of ground attack. The Marines at Con Thien, Gio Linh, and other bases below the DMZ, always vulnerable to enemy shelling from the DMZ, became human pawns in a bloody, stalemated war of attrition created by our own government.

July 27, 1967, was another broiling hot day around the DMZ. Gunnery Sergeant (Gunny) R. B. English and his platoon leader, 2d Lt. John Brock, knew that their tanks badly needed preventive maintenance performed. Their platoon had been busy that entire spring and summer, operating in the heat and dust around Con Thien alongside various infantry units. First came Operations Prairie III and IV, then Hickory, Cimarron, Buffalo, and Hickory II in rapid succession. Their tank platoon had been involved in some of the heaviest fighting of the war. They had suffered extensive losses in personnel and equipment to mines, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and incoming mortars, rockets, and artillery. RPG holes were patched; mine-damaged track, road wheels, and road wheel arms were repaired as well as one could expect in a combat zone. Blood and gore were hosed off the outside or wiped off the inside of the turret, and the tanks went right back out the next day.

As dusk approached, the fiery sun began to sink behind the slate gray western hills. Lieutenant Brock directed three of his fifty-two-ton, M-48A3 tanks to an open area behind the 105mm artillery battery just inside the southern perimeter minefield gate. He and Gunny English had decided to combine their platoon resources and do some much-needed preventive maintenance.

An expertly camouflaged two-man NVA forward observer (FO) team had waited patiently since dawn, concealed up in some densely leafed trees, waiting for a target of opportunity to present itself. They had to freeze, scarcely daring to breathe that morning, when a Marine patrol had passed close by their position, totally unsuspecting of their presence that close to the perimeter. But the mission of these NVA soldiers was to watch, not ambush.

From their vantage point six hundred meters southeast of Con Thien, they could look directly overhead and observe U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) helicopters making their landing approach runs from Dong Ha, following Route 561 north toward Con Thien. They noted that one helicopter landing zone (LZ) was located in a large, flat, bowl-shaped area next to a massive, mounded bunker where litter bearers entered and exited. Another LZ further to the east was where the resupply choppers, dangling fully loaded cargo nets beneath them, stirred up a whirlwind of thick dust each time they hovered over that LZ.

On the south side of the westernmost of the three small hills that made up Con Thien was another large bunker; row on row of bone white sandbags contrasted sharply with the bare, reddish brown earth around it. The FO team deduced that it was the command post (CP), the nerve center for Con Thien, but it was situated on the reverse slope of the hill, nearly impossible for them to hit.

Located at the flat base of the center hill was a battery of 105mm howitzers, each with a neatly laid, waist-high, sandbagged parapet encircling its five gun emplacements. A zigzagging, sandbagged trench line ringed the entire base perimeter just inside the minefield's inner band of concertina wire.

The NVA FO team paid particular attention to where the trucks, mechanical mules, and amphibious tractors (amtracs) traveled throughout the day. They would give away where the artillery ammunition bunkers were located. Even without their binoculars, the two North Vietnamese could see that Con Thien was a beehive of activity.

The FO team leader spotted them first—three tanks by the south gate. Excitedly, he radioed his artillery battery in the DMZ, north of the Ben Hai River, giving them the target description: Three tanks in a group with their crews on the ground! Key target locations at Con Thien were already preregistered, thanks to a few comrades who had months earlier infiltrated the Nung Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) detachments formerly occupying Con Thien. All he had to do was look at his chart and call it in. Fire one marking round, I will adjust fire, he whispered confidently into his handset, struggling to keep his adrenaline-charged voice calm.

Brock's tank crewmen labored, dripping sweat in the sultry summer evening air. Most of the tankers had removed their flak jackets, and no one wore steel pot helmets. Tank crewmen wore hard-shell com-helmets, and they almost always kept them perched on their tanks when they climbed out.

A lone incoming artillery shell screamed overhead and impacted somewhere out in the southern minefield area. All the tankers paused momentarily, listening intently for the sound of any more rounds being fired. A few of the newer replacements, not savvy yet to incoming, scrambled under their tanks. But the old salts, the veterans who had survived five months of almost continuous combat, were used to periodic single rounds of incoming. They went right back to work, and the new boots followed their lead.

An artillery lieutenant from the nearby 105mm gun battery walked over to the tanks and said, You tankers are all bunched up. Better spread ‘em out or they're gonna nail you.

It's almost sundown, replied the gunny. Now is the only safe time we can do this. The gooks won't risk having our FOs spot their muzzle flashes this late in the day, sir.

You tankers must think you're made out of steel like your tanks…. Well, you're not, the officer grumbled to no one in particular as he returned to his fire direction control bunker.

Then, in one terrible instant, a deadly barrage of NVA artillery bracketed the tanks. Three entire tank crews, a dozen Marines, were wiped out. The dead and dying boys, their young lives instantly blasted into oblivion, lay mangled in the dirt, appendages missing from bloody stumps, puddles of gore collecting beneath them. Killed outright were Cpl. David E. Flaningham, 22, Rockford, Illinois; Lance Cpl. Miles E. Jansen, 20, St. Paul, Minnesota; and Pvt. Raymond Ludwig, 19, Wilmington, Delaware. Corporal Manuel M. Garcia, Jr., 19, from Los Angeles, California, was standing in his tank commander's cupola, yelling something down at one of the men alongside his tank, when the incoming rounds hit. He would succumb to his grievous wounds the following day. Gunny English somehow ended up underneath his tank, riddled with shrapnel, but he would survive, as would Lieutenant Brock and the other six wounded crewmen. No one in the group escaped injury.

Lance Corporal Howard Blum, an Alpha Company flame tanker from Maryland, and two other tankers were taxied up from Dong Ha the following morning with instructions to retrieve the three tanks, still sitting in their triangle-shaped formation just inside the south gate. Blum chose the tank sitting at five o'clock and commenced loading scattered tools aboard. The grunts from the 3d Battalion, 4th Marines that manned the perimeter had not gotten to them yet, apparently leery of being seen by an FO near the zeroed-in tanks. Blum carefully skirted some large, purple red stains in the hard-packed clay soil where the life-blood of dying young men had soaked into the earth overnight.

Blum noticed a four-foot-long pipe, five inches in diameter, lying in the dirt. He knew it was important; the pipe was used for leverage when adjusting track tension. As he picked up the pipe, stagnant blood and entrails poured out onto his boots. He recoiled in disgust, retching as he grabbed his K-bar knife and sliced through his bootlaces, kicking off his gore-soaked jungle boots. Thoroughly revolted, Lance Corporal Blum managed to drive his tank all the way back to Dong Ha barefooted. He later learned that Private Ludwig had been holding that pipe when he was ripped apart by an incoming shell blast.¹

PART ONE

ROOTS OF CONFLICT

It is impossible for Westerners to understand the force of the people's will to resist, and to continue to resist. The struggle of the people exceeds the imagination. It has astonished us too.

—Pham Van Dong, former prime minister

Democratic Republic of Vietnam

1

Before the Americans Came

THE VIETNAMESE

The Vietnamese people originated in ancient times from what is today south China. Thousands of years ago, this Mongoloid race of people was gradually pushed southward into the jungles of Indochina by the inhabitants of north China. Those early Annamites mixed with Thais and Indians along the way. They also intermarried with Indonesians. By the first millennium BC, they had created a home they called Nam Viet, or Land of the Southern Viet People. The western Indochina peninsula they came to call Vietnam comprised three large areas: Tonkin (north); Annam (central); and Cochin-China, the southernmost part of Vietnam.

For the first ten centuries ad, that portion of Vietnam known as Tonkin was ruled by the Chinese, but the Annamites continued to resist domination. For a thousand years, defeat after defeat did not deter them from resisting foreign assimilation. The Chinese ruled the country, but the Annamites maintained their language, customs, holidays, and religions. In the tenth century, the rebellious Annamites drove their Chinese governors out and declared their independence.

Kublai Khan sent a half-million Mongols south in 1284 to conquer the Viets. The Mongols were repulsed by a fanatical Vietnamese army made up of women, children, and elderly who took up arms and joined with their fighting men in a common stand that decimated the Mongol invaders. But their victory was a costly one, and a weakened Vietnam was again invaded by the Chinese, who conquered the Annamites in the fifteenth century. The Ming Dynasty governed ruthlessly, heavily taxing the populace and enslaving millions of men to clear forests and dig mines. A resistance movement arose, and within ten years they had evicted the Chinese once again.

The Annamites pushed south, defeating the Chams (Hindu Empire), then drove the Khmers back into what is present-day Cambodia. By the middle of the eighteenth century, all of Cochin-China had been conquered by the Viets. In 1789, Emperor Quang Trung surprised and defeated a Chinese army at Tet, while the Manchus were sleeping off the food and wine of a day's feasting. Still celebrated to this day, their victory was a major event in Vietnamese history.

Gradually, a new menace appeared on the scene: Europeans. First came the Portuguese, then the Dutch, English, and finally the French, who successfully forced out all other European competition. French colonial activity commenced in 1860, and by 1907 the entire Indochina peninsula was under its domination.

On September 22, 1940, three months after the fall of France to Nazi Germany in World War II, the Vichy French government capitulated to the Imperial Japanese Army in Vietnam. Up until mid-1945, the Japanese called the shots, gradually increasing their clout and dominance over the former French colonialists. This did not go unnoticed by the Vietnamese, who saw a former European power humbled by an Asian army. Even though the French later regained full administrative control over Indochina after the Japanese surrender that finally ended World War II, this perception weakened the French presence in the minds of the Viets.

The seeds of Vietnamese rebellion against the French, planted earlier under five years of Japanese rule, commenced to sprout under the tutelage of Ho Chi Minh. His Communist organization, the Viet Minh, grew from a poorly equipped band of resistance fighters into a modern army that vanquished their former French masters at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.

A central concept of Vietnamese military doctrine was that a weaker force handled properly could defeat a stronger one. For hundreds of years, their military teachings stipulated that the stronger force had to be worn down by protracted warfare. Vietnamese forces would employ hit-and-run tactics, morale-busting booby traps and ambushes, until the timing was right for a sudden shock offensive delivered with maximum surprise and deception.

The Vietnamese had always thought of themselves as giant killers, smarter and better organized than their enemy. Odds mattered little. They were used to beating the odds. They had repeatedly thrown back the Chinese, routed the invincible Mongol hordes, taken the remainder of their country from the Thais and Khmers, and soundly defeated the French. They never doubted that they would be victorious over the American puppet government in Saigon. They were a people accustomed to war, a people who indeed defined themselves by war and struggle.¹

TWO VIETNAMS

After eight long years of struggle with the French army, the Viet Minh nationalists closed for the final kill in a remote valley in northern North Vietnam called Dien Bien Phu. A Vietnamese Communist force of fifty thousand troops commanded by General Vo Nguyen Giap surrounded and laid siege to a French force of thirteen thousand paratroopers, indigenous soldiers, and foreign mercenaries. The Viet Minh soldiers dug a maze of trenches and tunnels that surrounded Dien Bien Phu. Under Giap's orders, the Viet Minh had disassembled their Russian-made heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns and hauled them mile after tortuous mile over hundreds of miles of mountainous terrain, then put them back together in the hills surrounding Dien Bien Phu. It was a feat no one, certainly the French, believed possible.

On March 13, 1954, General Giap gave the signal to attack. For fifty-six days, the French fought back bravely, despite being outnumbered and outgunned. With their artillery emplaced on the high ground surrounding the valley, the Viet Minh pounded the once-proud French fortress to rubble. The beleaguered French garrison hung on tenaciously without relief or resupply. Finally, on May 7, 1954, with their medical supplies exhausted, and almost out of food and ammunition, the French commander radioed Hanoi for the last time: Au revoir, mon general; au revoir, mes comrades. Minutes later, hundreds of flag-waving Viet Minh soldiers overran the command bunker and hoisted the flag of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Ten thousand Frenchmen were taken prisoner. But victory had not come cheaply, as the Viet Minh suffered twenty-three thousand casualties.

Despite the loss by the French of many of their finest soldiers, the most important result of the battle was psychological. A demoralized French government faced escalating protests by a war-weary populace who demanded an end to the Indochina war. French leaders were resigned to negotiating a settlement.

In Geneva, Switzerland, a meeting called the Four Great Powers Conference was already under way to negotiate a Korea settlement. The day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, an armistice conference convened with representatives in attendance from the United States, France, Britain, the USSR, China, North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Top priority was given to resolving the Vietnam situation.

Under pressure from both China and Russia to agree to the principle of partition, Vietnam's Pham Van Dong argued that the line should be drawn at the thirteenth parallel, which would have placed two-thirds of the country under Communist control. The French demanded the eighteenth parallel as the armistice line. Russia's Molotov, the wily old Bolshevik, arbitrated a last-minute solution on July 22, 1954. The line to divide North from South Vietnam was drawn at the seventeenth parallel, with a demilitarized zone five miles wide. Placing the demarcation line there won for the French the excellent port of Tourane (Da Nang), the ancient imperial capital of Hue, and the only direct land route between South Vietnam and Laos.

Another Molotov verdict allowed for elections in two years that would permit the people of Vietnam to finally determine their own fate, to live under either Ho Chi Minh and the Communists or Ngo Dinh Diem's American-backed government.

Hastily arranged and lacking formal signing by most of the participants, the Geneva Accords were primarily cease-fire agreements intended to buy time for the warring sides to disengage and withdraw their troops. The agreement was not a formal political settlement. The U.S. government did not join in the agreement, although it assured the other participants that the United States would not interfere with its implementation. Diem considered the provision for elections to be unfair and had no intention of carrying through with that part of the agreement. Unforeseen at the time, the Geneva Accords laid the groundwork for many more years of bloody conflict in Vietnam.

CON THIEN

The demilitarized zone (DMZ) dividing the two Vietnams was sixty miles long and five miles wide. It started at the mouth of the Ben Hai River (Song Ben Hai) where it emptied into the South China Sea among barren expanses of sand dunes and occasional swamps. Inland a few miles from the coast, the lowland terrain becomes increasingly verdant and alive with rice fields, orchards, and occasional hamlets bordering the river. Another ten miles inland, the relatively flat ground gives way to rolling hills that soon merge into rugged limestone mountains covered in thickets of bamboo and fields of elephant grass, with triple-canopy jungle forests that could conceal an army. The Ben Hai shaped the northern and southern boundaries of the demilitarized zone, following the broad river's winding course west for thirty miles until it subdivided into narrow tributaries in the western mountains. Mapmakers followed the seventeenth parallel in a straight line the remaining distance across Vietnam to the border with Laos.

South Vietnam's northernmost province, Quang Tri, butted up against the demilitarized zone. Located in Gio Linh District, two miles south of the DMZ border and a dozen miles inland from the coast, was a place called Con Thien. Topographic military maps from that era by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers indicate a surveyed horizontal control point 158 meters in elevation. Printed above it is the Vietnamese name for the hill, Nui Con Thien, which translates into English as the hill of angels. The French army had appreciated its observation potential and built a concrete fort on the highest of three knolls on this small mountain rising up from the surrounding lowland countryside.

Con Thien's origin is volcanic. The soil covering the area is red laterite clay, rich in iron, and good for growing coffee, tea, black peppers, pineapple, and bananas.

This area of Vietnam experiences blowtorch hot days from May to August. Then, almost overnight, the weather changes into the fall/winter monsoon that blows in from the northeast, bringing typhoons that often produce flooding. Another facet of the monsoon is called the crachin, from the French word for drizzle, and it consists of a light, steady, cold rain that lasts for two and three days at a time, accompanied by thick, blanketing fog. When not raining, the monsoon sky is often gloomily overcast. Even though temperatures rarely drop below forty-five degrees in the winter, the constantly damp chill in the air permeates one's very being. Northern I Corps is the rainiest place in Vietnam, averaging well over one hundred inches