Customer Reviews

Expendable Warriors: The Battle of Khe Sanh and the Vietnam War (Praeger Security International)

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First the disclaimer. I am mentioned very briefly, actually 2-3 times, in the book. I was one of the three American officers in the compound during the NVA attack. You'll have to decide whether this review is completely objective in light of my direct involvement.

I was there. That's the way it happened.

It is a very little known part of the Vietnam War. Everyone's eyes have been focused on the Marine Corps Combat Base at Khe Sanh and the months that it was under constant artillery and mortar bombardment. Without taking away from the bravery of those who had to withstand it, there is only brief mention at most in the history of Khe Sanh that the District headquarters compound, consisting of a mix of 175, mostly Vietnamese paramilitary and Montagnard tribemen troops under the direction of US Army and Marine Corps Advisors, and the Vietnamese military District Chief, repulsed an attack by a North Vietnamese regiment-sized force of about 2,000 fresh troops with brand new equipment that had just crossed from North Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The attack lasted for a period of about 36 hours before the defenders were ordered to abandon the District Headquarters. We were able to survive because the author of this book, a West Point graduate, called artillery "air-burst" rounds directly over our position at the height of the attack. The book describes the bravery of the Army medic, the Air Force spotter who directed jets to bomb the enemy positions, the failed attempt to bring in reinforcements who were ambushed by NVA lying in wait, and the "Puff the Magic Dragon" plane circling during the night firing its Gattling guns to protect the defenders. The defenders were eventually evacuated by helicopter on the second day or had to traverse enemy territory by foot to make it to the Marine Corps Base.

Having been ordered to abandon the District HQ, the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) took control of the area between the Marine Corps Combat Base and the Lang Vei Special Forces Camp, which the NVA later attacked and overran with amphibious tanks, thereby totally isolating the Marine Corps Base Camp.

If you want to know the full picture of the Battle of Vietnam, especially the complete story of the Battle at Khe Sanh, you need to know how the NVA planned and executed an objective that was intended to be the American version of the defeat of the French at Diem Bien Phu. The NVA, ultimately, lost the Battle of Khe Sanh militarily but "won the war" through its continued insurgency and the resultant media attention and reporting back home.

Are there lessons to be learned for our present military operations? I'll leave that for the reader to decide.

I was stationed not far from Col. Clarke, although in a usually more tranquil area. I met him on a few occasions, including on a trip to his Khe Sanh village. I also knew several of the headquarters leaders he wrote about. Let me say, that, although I have not finished Clarke's book, almost every page gives me the chills, and - no - I don't suffer from flashbacks. I keep saying to my wife - "Are you asleep?; I've got to read this to you!" Hard to believe almost 40 years have gone by. The story is incredible.

Bud Stevenson Fairfield, CA

Being born only months before CPT Bruce Clarke was to become a district advisor in Khe Sanh, it would be understandable for this ultranationalist and patriot not to understand the meaning of the book Expendable Warriors: The Battle of Khe Sanh and the Vietnam War. But, the way the story was told allowed this reader to become part of that time in history. Having served with Colonel Bruce Clarke later in his career, I witnessed his leadership skills first hand. Yet, as depicted in the book, even in 1968 he already possessed these skills, no doubt refined even further by the time I met him. This book is part memoir, part tactical assessment and part history clarifier. You need not be a career army or marine officer to appreciate and understand this book. I highly recommend it.

Richard Charles Dewees

Douglassville, Pennsylvania

President, The Dewees Group, Inc.

Former member of the "Fighting First"

Dagger Brigade, 1st ID - Big Red One

used this book for a source for research paper on the Battle of Khe Sanh and it proved to be a good source of information.

The author recounts his command at the initial battle of Khe Sanh village, a shockingly one-sided precursor to the better known siege of the Marine fire base, which was again the prelude to Tet, the culminating point of the Indochina war.

By way of full disclosure: I know the author and think highly of him, but had no idea of his involvement in this battle, so long ago now.

This is a small book mostly intended for military professionals, but full of interesting detail for the outsider. It appears neither as literature nor as a scholarly work, but more as a collection of eyewitness accounts, anchored by the author's recollections, to cast new light on the whole Khe Sanh debacle. Together, they fill a void in history, and the book will surely be welcome among both veterans and professionals.

Colonel - then Captain - Clarke states that his goal is to offer lessons that should be heeded today. I found that his and his compadres' plain narratives are the strongest part of the book, and the lessons more subject to controversy. A body of opinion holds that you can't learn from history; it is countered by the observation that there is nothing else to learn from. My view is that we must learn from history, but if we try too hard we sometimes learn the wrong things.

Those of us who haven't been shot at have to be cautious in commenting on such matters, so I will stick with general observations. Clarke felt that missing Unity of Command was a millstone for the Allied combatants; specifically that the USMC, the US Army, and the ARVN were fighting different wars and did not aid and inform each other as needed. Clearly, as an advisor working with ARVN and Montagnard forces, he did not see eye-to-eye with the USMC at the fire base, nor apparently with General Westmoreland's general strategy of attrition and the obsession with body count.

For my part I never understood why the USMC is fighting land battles. I thought the Marines were supposed to board enemy ships. Perhaps they are not the first choice for COIN (counterinsurgency) duty.

Clarke and his hard-pressed, multinational team did not have this problem with the Air Force. If I saw a lesson here it was surely to not even think about "trying stuff like this at home" unless you have a superb FAC (I suppose UAVs today) and air power on demand, night and day. And clearly, that was Westmoreland's idea: let Giap try his Dien Bien Phu Nr. 2 and he'll see what difference B-52s make. Indeed, the report included calls Khe Sanh a "Dien Bien Phu in reverse." Air Power is usually oversold, but not when used in tactical support of troops. Just look at the "wrong lesson learned" by Israel in Lebanon, thinking to duplicate NATO's air-only campaign in Kosovo, a big enough disaster in itself.

Cpt. Clarke was most upset that his village was evacuated after having withstood a ferocious onslaught of three NVA battalions over 36 hours. It seems logical though - the place would either have to be majorly reinforced, or it was a goner eventually. And it bears mentioning that the NVA thought it was their victory, not Clarke's, as they forced the Allies to withdraw. (A 50-1 kill ratio means nothing to the Politburo.)

The lessons I was most interested in were classical COIN methods like the CAP (Civil Action Program) and the strategic villages concept. Clarke implies that these were the true path to victory, not "body count." Because of all the propaganda out there, it is worth noting that the ARVN fought bravely, the Americans had especially trusting relations with the Montagnards, and few in this area at least seem to have wanted to be under Communist rule. As in 1975, almost all headed for the helicopters, or the road to the coast.

When the first reports came back from Iraq of US soldiers kicking in doors and confiscating weapons, I thought of the praised CAP effort in rural Vietnam and went uh-oh, not good. Surely in COIN you work with the people, as Clarke did, not against them; you don't take their weapons, you give them weapons. If they turn them against you, you shouldn't be there to start with.

As everyone knows, William Colby got his idea for the strategic villages from the Rif-Kabyl situation; but in a general sense it is really the cornerstone of colonial or civilizational development. It was the idea behind the Roman colonias. It may be the only thing that works for Western governments, genocide being off-limits. Thus the ink-blot theories from Iraq - secure the people first, then agonizingly slowly, institutions can take hold. And no one can occupy the whole place. So when Westmoreland asked for 206,000 more troops, he might as well have said: My strategy (attrition) sucks.

Has there ever been a general who thought he had enough troops? When Clark Clifford became SecDef, he asked "what's the strategy for victory?" - There was none, except more of the same. Colonel Clarke reinforces my suspicion that it needn't have been that way. The VC was crushed during Tet, and there was no uprising. The rest was basically NVA against ARVN with diminishing US support. Before the 1972 offensive, it appears the Republic of Vietnam had the wind with it, except that American determination had collapsed at home.

Clarke sheds new light on an old plan. It always seemed that certain moves were critical to win: cut across to the Mekong and stop the NVA directly in Laos; close Sihanoukville, which turned out to be more important for resupply than first thought; and interdict the two railways to China and the harbors (which did happen in 1972). I remember Westmoreland writing (A Soldier Reports) in an offhand way that he thought the Laotian panhandle was the key to victory, but it was never tried. Or at least not until 1971 (Lam Son 719), which was a bloody nose for the ARVN, who could not do this by themselves. Clarke recounts how the plan for such an operation was floated in continuation of Khe Sanh, only to be shot down when LBJ went on TV and declared that he'd had enough, both in office and in Indochina. Thus Vietnam became a disaster squared - dumb to go in, wrong to leave. McArthur is always quoted as warning against getting sucked into a war of attrition on the Asian continent (and he should know) - but his point was that if you're not going for victory, you shouldn't be there in the first place.

I found lots new and interesting in this book: The Royal Laotian Army joining in with the Allies; Cambodian mercenaries being used by the USMC; close combat with rats and rabies, and so on. When all this was going on I was just a boy listening to the news, but I recall that this was expected to be culmination point of the war, which it sort of was; and I recall the posturing about "escalation" by going into Cambodia (and secretly, into Laos). Clarke makes clear what nonsense that was. The first rule in guerilla warfare is you cannot defeat an enemy who has sanctuary. Do the niceties of diplomacy apply to us but not to the enemy?

Finally, some words about presentation. This is a poorly edited book. Dropped punctuation,"it's" as a possessive, "Calusewitz", open-ended quotations, repetitions - you don't expect this from a major publisher. It makes for choppy reading in places. The author's practice of referring to himself in the third person can be disorienting, especially as he slips into the first towards the end. Some trivial errors: The O-1 is not a Piper Cub, and the speed of sound certainly not a kilometer per second. Reviews would have caught things like that.

One non-trivial slip stands out: Not once, but twice - as bookends, so to speak - the Colonel refers to Coventry as an example of how Churchill sacrificed a city to protect the Ultra secret, just, as he asserts, Westmoreland left the young captain exposed so as not to alert the NVA that he knew what was coming. Army folks might not have heard this, but this is one of the hoariest old saws in air power history; it is such a good story, like that of the Danes with their yellow stars, that no matter how many historians you throw at it, it will not go away. There's not a shred of truth to it, and if you thought about it, it couldn't have. The PM could not have saved Coventry if he had tried, and he couldn't have tipped off the Germans; for, unlike the RAF fighters, radar does work at night, and the enemy would have been none the wiser.

Just had to get that out! But it is irrelevant to the book's purpose. It is very good and interesting, and recommendable to all with both a general and specific interest in the subject.