Kontum: The Battle to Save South Vietnam

8. Our Firebases Fall

8 Our Firebases Fall The requirement to defend all will probably mean we will lose much. —Warning that Mr. Vann deleted from a II Corps message to MACV Although the advisers were supposed to just advise and in fact had no command authority over the ARVN forces, John Paul Vann, a civilian US State Department Foreign Service officer, exempted himself from that rule and essentially assumed command of all the South Vietnamese forces in II Corps during the Easter Offensive . Lieutenant Colonel Stanislaus J. Fuesel, the II Corps artillery adviser, said, “If I had attempted to do what Vann did, he would have fired me.” Indeed, although Vann tried to give the appearance of only advising—or at least working through—Lieutenant General Dzu, it was clear who was really in charge. Some of the ARVN officers on the II Corps staff referred to Dzu as “Mr. Vann’s man.”1 Vann’s biographer, journalist Neil Sheehan, explained Vann’s approach to defending Kontum City and ultimately the Central Highlands: John Vann planned to defeat his enemy as he had seen Walton Walker defeat the North Koreans in the Pusan Perimeter . He would not throw away infantry as Westmoreland had done in sending men against fortified positions in the wilderness . The roles had been reversed. To win the war, the Vietnamese Communists had to come to him, and when they advanced out of the mountains, he would break them on his OUR FIREBASES FALL • 83 strongpoint. The apparent objective of the NV A offensive in II Corps was Kontum, a garrison and trading center with a population of about 25,000, the capital of the province of the same name and the northernmost town of substance in the Highlands. Kontum was guarded to the north by the regimental base at Tan Canh on a plateau near the district headquarters of Dak To twenty-five miles up the ascending asphalt ribbon of Route 14. Just below Tan Canh and to the 0 miles 10 5 15 BASE AREA 609 14 14 58 512 Dak Pek Dak Seang Vo Dinh Dak M ot Ben Het Dak To II/Tan Canh Kontum Polei Kleng Dak To Dien Binh LAOS CAMBODIA QUANG NGAI PROVINCE QUANG TIN PROVINCE BINH DINH PROVINCE PLEIKU PROVINCE XX 2(VC)(+) XX 320(NVA) XXX B-3 XX 22(+) ROCKET RIDGE X 2 Fire Support Bases (FSB) 1 2 3 4 5 FSB 6 FSB 5 FSB C FSB D FSB NOVEMBER KONTUM PROVINCE 1 2 3 4 5 Kontum Province, dispositions 1 April 1972. Includes names of adjoining provinces and countries. Small inset map shows the location of Kontum Province within South Vietnam. 84 • KONTUM west of it, a series of ridgelines ran in a north–south direction , parallel to Route 14 and back down toward Kontum. These were known collectively as Rocket Ridge. . . . The U.S. Army had built a string of fortified artillery positions, called fire support bases or fire bases for short, down Rocket Ridge to shield the road and the northwest approaches to Kontum and had bequeathed these to the ARVN. Before the Vietnamese Communists could attack Kontum, they first had to overrun Tan Canh or crack the firebase line along Rocket Ridge.2 The chain of FSBs along Rocket Ridge dominated the valleys and highways on either side of it. Those FSBs and the Border Ranger camps along the border were positioned to control the surrounding area with their own artillery fire and by tactical air strikes. Almost 50 kilometers north of Kontum City on Highway 14, there was a district town named Dak To. Five kilometers south of it was an airfield named Dak To I. Adjoining Dak To I on the south was a big ARVN base named Tan Canh, and four kilometers west of it was another airfield named Dak To II. Lieutenant General Dzu was worried his forces in the Tan Canh/Dak To area would not be able to withstand an attack by the large enemy force headed his way. He proposed to reinforce his forward defenses by moving the two regiments of the 22nd ARVN Division in Binh Dinh Province on the coast to Kontum Province in the Highlands. Mr. Vann strongly opposed this move because it would leave Binh Dinh Province without any regular ARVN troops and defended by only its own province forces. Vann convinced Dzu to leave...