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The following day I hitched a ride on a C-130 to Dong Ha and after reporting in to Regiment was told that Charlie Battery was now back at Ca Lu. It turned out that the battery had stayed at LZ Torch until June 18, seven days after the NVA attack, and had then been airlifted directly back to Ca Lu rather than Khe Sanh. The reason for that was simple enough, but it would be years later before I found out why. The facts are that the decision had already been made to abandon Khe Sanh and level it to the ground before we even ®ew to LZ Torch. When the time came to take Charlie Battery off the LZ, equipment and personnel were already being removed from Khe Sanh. By July 6, the base did not even exist anymore. According to his memoir, A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland realized that the NVA had taken the pressure off of Khe Sanh by mid-March, or as he said, “It was apparent that the enemy was giving up at Khe Sanh” (page 456). General Cushman, the senior Marine in Vietnam and commander of the III Marine Amphibious Force, had been pressing since at least as early as April 14 to close Khe Sanh. Westmoreland had ¤nally concurred, according to Edward F. Murphy in Semper Fi: Vietnam (page 167). In some ways, that could be construed as an admission that Khe Sanh had not really been that important from a tactical or strategic view in spite of Westmoreland’s defense of his actions after the war. Also in A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland states that the “critical importance for the plateau” was that “Khe Sanh could serve as a patrol base 17 The Final Days for blocking enemy in¤ltration from Laos along Route 9; a base for SOG [Study and Operations Group] operations [unconventional or commando-type operations] to harass the enemy in Laos; an airstrip for reconnaissance planes surveying the Ho Chi Minh Trail; a western anchor for defenses south of the DMZ; and an eventual jump-off for ground operations to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail” (page 442). It is hard to understand the practicality of such a conclusion when it is recognized that Khe Sanh was isolated and away from the main supply lines, exposed to the artillery imbedded in the caves of Co Roc Mountain, subject to bad winter weather that limited air resupply, and surrounded by high ground, giving it a tactical disadvantage militarily. If those negatives are taken into consideration, only one of the reasons that Westmoreland gave makes sense, and that was the possibility of using Khe Sanh as a launch site into Laos to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Even then, if Westmoreland, knowing the dif¤culty of supplying it during the typically horrible winter months, intended it as a jump-off point, the timing of building it up as a base was seasonally off track in that a much more massive buildup should have begun in April and the attack launched before the winter. It seems more likely that Westmoreland either was drawn into reinforcing the position with enough troops to show the NVA that they could not bully us around in that area or was deliberately dangling Khe Sanh out there as bait. If it was for the former reason, it may possibly have been the result of a planned attempt by the NVA to distract us from their real goal of launching the Tet Offensive. If the latter reason was the case, it gave Westmoreland the perfect opportunity to use the U.S.’s massive munitions capability, which he certainly did and which would have been nothing more than another effort to enhance the body count ratios. This last possibility is raised by Westmoreland himself and indicates that at least it was on his mind when he says in A Soldier Reports, “The base no longer served to lure North Vietnamese soldiers to their deaths” (page 457). He also con¤rms that he recognized some of the impracticality of using Khe Sanh when he explains why it was replaced by the new Vandegrift base at Ca Lu. As he puts it, “That base [Vandegrift] was beyond the range of North Vietnamese artillery positioned inside Laos” (page 457). The signi¤cance of that artillery threat has been highlighted in John Prados and Ray 248 IMPACT ZONE Stubbe’s comprehensive book on the siege, Valley of Decision: The Siege of Khe...

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