January 2, 1968

On January 2, 1968, 19 days before the siege of Khe Sanh began, an unusual and little-known event occurred there that may have helped prevent that Marine combat base from falling to the enemy, perhaps changing the course of the war.

Captain Richard Camp was the commanding officer of Lima Company, Third Battalion, Twenty-sixth Marines, responsible for guarding the western end of the airstrip at Khe Sanh Combat Base. His battalion had just arrived in mid-December 1967 to reinforce the base due to increased activity in the immediate area by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). American intelligence determined there were three North Vietnamese Army divisions, numbering tens of thousands of soldiers, within fifteen miles of Khe Sanh, and American generals faced the possibility that the base might be attacked by all of them at once from several different directions.

Marine rifle companies typically put out listening posts in front of their positions at night, comprised of four Marines with a radio, hiding along likely approaches that might be used by the enemy. The NVA almost always attacked at night, so these LPs provided crucial early warning.

As Camp describes in his 1989 memoir Lima-6, in the dark early morning hours of January 2, one of these Marines reported in a whispered radio transmission that six unidentified people were approaching the base. Oddly enough, they were not crawling or attempting to hide their presence in any way but rather leisurely walking around, confident they would not be detected, or as one writer later put it, “As if they owned the place.”

Camp ordered a squad led by Second Lieutenant Nile Buffington to investigate. He also ordered his 60 mm mortar team to fire illumination flares. A few minutes out, Buffington spotted the six men standing together in the flickering illumination. He had been informed that no “friendly” troops were operating in the area, but challenged them in English to be sure. There was no reply. He then saw one of them motion as if going for a hand grenade while another opened fire with the pistol. The Marines responded with a massive concentration of M-16 fire, then returned to the base and waited for sunrise. 

At dawn, Captain Camp led a squad returning to the site and found five bullet-riddled bodies. A lone, wounded survivor managed to escape, but not before having the presence of mind to retrieve sensitive documents and maps from dispatch cases. Evidence at the scene determined that all the dead men were officers, and NVA networks erupted in frantic radio chatter as news of the killings circulated. Later, forensic examination of the bodies by US intelligence experts confirmed this, identifying them as a regimental commander, an operations officer, and a communications officer. Camp later learned these individuals were so significant that they were also identified by name. 

Each NVA regiment possessed experienced and skilled reconnaissance and sapper (combat engineers) teams that were assigned to probe American lines for information about troop strength, weapons placement, and terrain features. Before January 2, Marines at Khe Sanh, making routine inspections of the barbed wire, found that it had been cut by sappers in many places, the cuts skillfully disguised. Such preparation would allow enemy forces on the attack to move quickly into the Marine lines. 

As such, it remains a mystery why it was deemed necessary for such high-ranking officers to personally inspect this particular approach to the Khe Sanh base. The deaths of a handful of NVA soldiers would typically have gone unnoticed at high levels of the US military, but the prominence of these men in the chain of command immediately raised a red flag. 

Two Marine battalions were subsequently dispatched to Khe Sanh. The Second Battalion, 26th Marines, established positions on two high points, Hill 558 and Hill 861A. The First Battalion, Ninth Marines, dug in on a piece of terrain near the base known as the Rock Quarry. These moves effectively blocked the western approaches to the Khe Sanh base and airfield. 

Hill 881A would also support the two existing western outposts, Hill 881S and Hill 861, should the North Vietnamese try to imitate their 1954 victory at Dien Bien Phu by rolling up the hill outposts and capturing the main base, thus ending their war against French occupation forces. 

If an NVA attack were imminent on January 2, losing the regimental command staff would undoubtedly delay things. It was not until nineteen days later that the NVA attacked Hill 861 and, in early February, attempted to overrun Hill 861A and Hill 881S. Unbeknownst to many at the time, the main NVA attacking force was wiped out by a B-52 bombing strike as they were about to engage in the battle. As described in The Gunpowder Prince:

 “The day after the failed February 5 attacks on Hill 861 Alpha and Hill 881 South, the NVA’s 304th Division, Ninth Regiment, about fifteen hundred troops, was ordered to capture the Khe Sanh Combat Base and be prepared to ambush hundreds of reinforcements they expected would soon be arriving by helicopter. As the night march moved forward in a nearly mile-long column beside a meandering stream, the Second Battalion was completely engulfed in an Arc Light [Captain Mirza Munir] Baig had targeted.

The First and Third Battalions, marching behind them, were not hit in the initial strike, but when they rushed forward to assist the casualties, a second wave of B-52s arrived overhead, and hundreds of bombs exploded among them. “Flames and smoke filled the air,” the stunned Third Battalion commander later wrote. “Dead and wounded soldiers lay strewn through the trees and bushes on both sides of the stream.”[i]

As this was occurring, a reinforced Marine platoon guarding a knoll just a few hundred meters west of the combat base near the Rock Quarry came under intense mortar attack, followed by a broad infantry assault. The defenders were quickly overrun. Of the sixty-four Americans, twenty-four died, and another twenty-nine were wounded.

Between these attacks and the B-52 bombing of the NVA’s Ninth Regiment, they sustained hundreds, perhaps over one thousand casualties. While the exact number is unknown, records in Hanoi later indicated that over two hundred were killed in the Second Battalion alone, and large quantities of weapons and equipment were destroyed. The loss of so many of their comrades immediately impacted the morale of the survivors: “A number of soldiers deserted or shot themselves so they could be taken to the rear,” a regimental history later recorded, “but others wanted to directly attack the Americans to get revenge for their unit.” The Second Battalion, quickly rebuilding with replacements, would retain the honor of being the “primary assault battalion during the campaign to liberate Khe Sanh.” [ii] 

The NVA would make another attempt to take the base, this time coming from the south in late February 1968, but were again stymied by Captain Baig’s analysis and another timely B-52 bombing on the main attack force, which this time included tanks. The NVA would now have to bide their time, not achieving their goal until July, when the Americans finally accepted that the place was untenable and abandoned the Khe Sanh complex.

Most history is written about great events and great people. It often overlooks seemingly insignificant flaws or omissions that can directly contribute to the failure of more massive undertakings, such as the blundering nonchalance of those NVA officers on that moonless night outside Lima Company’s perimeter.  

If the significance of that event on January 2 had been missed by US military tacticians, and the NVA’s preferred avenue of approach from the west had not been blocked by two more battalions of Marines, the base and its six thousand defenders may have fallen. The spectacle of American survivors marching off into captivity would’ve shocked the nation as it had the French in 1954.