DMZ - Densely Militarized Zone

The Vietnamese DMZ runs south of the Ben Hai River, the dividing line set up when the Geneva Convention of 1954 pulled out the French troops and provisionally established 2 Vietnams until a general election to be held in 1956. The election was never held, and villages that were once in the middle of Vietnam found themselves instead in the middle of the Vietnam war.

I went on a tour of the DMZ out of nearby Hue. You can get a motorcycle driver, often ARVN (South Vietnam's regular army soldiers) vets, to give you a personalized tour of the area, but I paid $10 for my group thing instead of $60 for a day on a motorcycle covering 300+ km.

The Ben Hai River was bridged, and split down the middle as North and South territory. Each side set up flagpoles, competing to build the tallest. The South kept trying to repaint their side of the bridge, and the North kept trying to match the color (there was only 1 Vietnam in their eyes). Each side set up batteries of loudspeakers, blaring their propaganda increasingly loudly to the other side. The US settled the competition in 1967 when an F5 sank the bridge into the river.

South of Ben Hai is the 5km thick stretch of the DMZ. It's rice paddies now, a flat plain hill-less to almost the horizon. During the war it was defoliated and shelled daily, one shell or bomb for every square meter of the 5km by 50km region. The villagers didn't run away, though, instead digging tunnels and hiding out. They knew that if they left, the VC (South Vietnamese communist guerrillas) would be unable to receive supplies from the NVA (North Vietnamese Army, the regulars). The Ho Chi Minh Trails originally ran straight through Vietnam, through this region, with local guides escorting cadres and troops and supplies from the North in the middle of the night. The US had indisputable control of Vietnam during the day, when there were only harrassing attacks, but at night they mostly had to hole up in their firebases, and that's when the Vietnamese took the offensive.

I learned why the US had troops and launched bombing raids in Laos and Cambodia. As the US tightened control of the DMZ, bombing it to uninhabitability and lining it with razor wire and minefields, the HCM Trails had to move around it, skirting out into Laos and then back into the country further South. The US special forces teams and bomber missions were there when they thought they'd detected the trails. Interestingly, while the US bombed the North, it never really sent troops there, as it would mean declaring war. I'm sure there were black ops, as in Laos and Cambodia, but it was small scale. But anyway, the US command, probably rightly, thought that if they could cut off the supply trails from the North they'd win the war. The McNamara Line was under construction, extending the razor wire and mine boundary to include motion sensors and fire bases, trying to isolate the South from the North. The project was never finished, though, and the trails never shut down. It's interesting to me, though, where VC supplies came from. Before 67 or 68, when Chhiense AK-47s and artillery were rolling in, they were scrounging for material, building home-made guns. They used tins from discarded US rations to make grenades and mines, unexploded shells were disassembled for explosives. The waste created by the US juggernaut was turned against it. It sounds to me like this was realized, and there was a 'bash, burn, and bury' policy instated for all waste, but that it wasn't followed very closely. I think this was a huge failure on the part of the US. The troops weren't convinced of the importance of not leaving Coke cans for the enemy, and so they left them one day only to have them thrown back filled with explosives and shrapnel the next. US intelligence should have, if they didn't, set up a display with captured VC weapons and bombs, showing the GIs exactly how what they discarded could be used to kill them.

We went to the Dakrong Bridge over the Han River, another one-time dividing line. South of the DMZ on Route 9, the Rockpile is one of the many hills emerging from the plains, this one particularly tall and named by the marines who saw it stripped of all vegetation. They set up an observation post on top, calling in air and artillery strikes and looking for activity. When I visited the vegetation was back. It's amazing how this country seems alive again. Dioxins from the Agent Orange are still in the ecosystem, and will be for ages. Unexploded mines and shells still kill people. Vets still walk around (or don't walk) crippled. But the countryside looks almost unscathed. I didn't see the craters the guide pointed out until I knew what I was looking for. They're deep and round, but covered in foliage, with clumps of bamboo growing out of the bottom. The amount of life in the tropics never ceases to amaze me, it's a creeping hand that, without constant human intervention, would clench the region into a tightly curled fist of jungle in just a matter of years.

We drove past the Lang Vay special forces base, invisible unless it's pointed out. There a group of Green Berets and the indigenous fighters they trained were assaulted by NVA regulars. It shocked the US at the time, especially troops in the region, because of the tactics. Bangalore Torpedoes took out the defensive wall, the advancing troops had tanks, and they sprayed the bunkers with flamethrowers. It was an incident where the US were fighting the tactics they had trained against, well-equipped warfare in open combat, but it came as a surprise. The special forces in Vietnam, as I hear about them, amaze me more and more. 14 of the 24 survived the assault. Many of the troops they were training were killed, but despite being outgunned and outnumbered they still inflicted tons of damage on their attackers and many managed to get away.

One last thing to talk about. When the Lang Vay troops escaped, they made it to nearby Khe Sanh. The Khe Sanh Combat Base is on a plateau overlooking Laos, the DMZ, and the central highlands. It had an airstrip capable of landing C130s, but didn't do that much in order to prevent their loss. The Dispatches book I read talks about it a lot, as the author was there during the US buildup. Before the Tet Offensive, Vietnamese troops used Khe Sanh as a diversion. US command, up to President Johnson, who had a relief model of Khe Sanh in his office, were afraid of a defeat there like the French suffered in Dien Bien Phu. They poured more and more troops in, up to 6000 at the height, and were ready with support from all over the country in case the surrounding troops turned the situation into an actual siege. Lots of US planes were lost in the region, shot down by Chinese-madee rockets or mortared just after landing on the airstrip. The author of Dispatches describes how, on landing, you had to immediately run for trenches and cover to avoid the shelling, and how the Seabees there spent most of their time repairing the strip and clearing the remains of destroyed aircraft from the runway.

Khe Sanh has a museum now. There's a guestbook that I read cover to cover (at least the English entries). Most of those entries were from US vets or their families, which were very moving, but alternated with general anti-American diatribes. I've met a lot of foreigners in my travels, and no one has ever gone off on America to me like they did in that book. I guess it's easier to pour it out on unresponding paper than to someone's face.