The Great Ghost Chase Visits the Circus of Khe Sahn
This whole business of being a capitalist lackey and running dog imperialist war monger is a tough gig. I mean, it’s a hard dollar when you make it by suppressing freedom loving peasants and supporting a puppet army. And if they’d told me I was going to spend most of my time at war cowering in fear of my own shadow? Why, hell no I would’t go. But I did — several times. I even came back nearly 50 years later on The Great Ghost Chase, which is now in Day 6 during which we discover just how evil us bastards were way back then.
Indeed. And if you fought here during the Vietnam War and really don’t believe you are all or any of those things, if you believe at this remove that your heart was in the right place even if your body wasn’t? Well, then. You just need to take a little jaunt along Vietnamese Route 9 toward what was once the Khe Sanh Combat Base and that’ll do for your education — or reeducation as the case may be. Up there, nearly in Laos and surrounded my mist-blanketed hills where Marines suffered under intense daily artillery barrages and held off legions of enemy soldiers trying to create Dien Bien Phu déjà vu, you’ll learn a thing or two.
Right there in the little museum you’ll learn that the peace-loving soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army didn’t really want to attack the cowardly yankee imperialists, but they just felt compelled by basic decency to trot on down the Ho Chi Minh trail and jerk a high-explosive knot in the American tail. And while they were at it, they killed 11,900 of the foreign invaders (real number of American KIA is 274), destroyed at least 400 aircraft piloted by Yankee Air Pirates (real numbers include one KC-130, two C-123s, and a half-dozen helicopters). The Khe Sanh museum also claims that tenacious fighters of the NVA also sank 80 ships during the 77-day siege. But look who’s counting. And there’s no reason to consider that Khe Sanh is completely landlocked when you’re amping up those numbers.
The whole show at what little is left of Khe Sanh Combat Base reeks of commie hokum. It’s P.T. Barnum in NVA greasepaint, and it raises primitive hackles among a few of us Marine Combat Correspondents who served there at one point or another during the war. The joint is strewn with what purports to be captured U.S. equipment. There’s even a partridge running along the overgrown airstrip. No sign of a pear tree. So let’s ignore the cheap-jack concrete sandbags and misspelled American graffiti designed to paint us as poor uneducated peons forced to brutalize brave freedom fighters. Yes. And let’s just give all that the old wink and nod while we ponder a few observations made on the trip to Khe Sanh from Hue.
There’s the elaborate suspension bridge over the Cam Lo River right at one of the old Ho Chi Minh trail access points paid for and built by Cubans. You’ve got to figure the forebears of some of Castro’s construction crews were here once before — up north where they served as anti-air advisors or POW interrogators. But no mention of that either.
Up here in the highlands, traveling a newly constructed highway that will lead to Thailand if you’ve got the time and inclination to make the trip by vehicle, there’s always a spooky mist hanging on hilltops like The Rockpile and Hills 861 and Hills 881 North and South. In the days American Marines fought to hold those rocky tors, it was an evil mist that made every nightfall a nightmare. As convection forced the fog up the forested slopes, NVA infantry often accompanied it, jumping out at startled defenders like heavily armed Halloween ghouls. And at Ca Lu, a spot on the map-sheets that later became Vandegrift Combat Base, where Operation Pegasus kicked off in April 1968 to break the Khe Sanh encirclement, there’s an elaborate graveyard and monuments to NVA soldiers killed in what became known to Marines as The Hill Fights. The numbers are a little more accurate here including a count of some 5,000 KIA. Mr. Vinh translates a sign indicating that they are all brave southern fighters of the National Liberation Front. He’s got a great wink and nod.
What’s cool and a little disconcerting in this blowtorch barrage of propaganda are the Montagnards we see up here puttering around their stilt-supported straw huts as they’ve done for centuries. The ones we see are mostly Bru, one of the 13 recognized Montagnard tribes populating the mountainous areas of Vietnam and Laos. While most of Vietnam has morphed into a semi-modern nation, the Yards still live a fairly primitive existence. They don’t want or need much from the government — which is fortunate because they are still a disadvantaged and depressed minority.
We see a lot of national flags everywhere. No upright or vertical stanchion is without that gold star on a red field. Could be there’s a swivet of genuine patriots up here. Americans have no monopoly on flag-waving. Or it could be that the folks living a back-breaking stoop-and-bend lifestyle in the extremely rural areas just below the 17th parallel are anxious to let Big Brother know they came down on the right side of the fight that boiled through their backyards for so long.
And that’s it for now. There’s just one reliable treatment for massive sensory overload. It involves mass quantities of intoxicants and my keyboard will only suffer so much abuse. Stay tuned for a wrap-up which will be filed from the land of the free because of the brave.
Marine officer Dale A. Dye rose through the ranks to retire as a captain after 21 years of service in war and peace. Following retirement from active duty in 1984, and upset with Hollywood’s treatment of the American military, he went to Hollywood and established Warriors, Inc., the preeminent military training and advisory service to the entertainment industry. Dye has worked on more than 50 movies and TV shows, including several Oscar- and Emmy-winning productions. He is a novelist, actor, director, and showbusiness innovator who wanders between Los Angeles and Lockhart, Texas. Look for Dye’s new Shake Davis novel, Havana File.
