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Jaws of the Dragon This dramatic Vietnam era painting depicts the F-105 piloted by Col. Fred Cherry, who spent seven years as a POW when his F-105D was shot down on a ground support mission.

Can a fence stop an army? Usually not. But as the number of U.S. casualties rose during 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara began to think a lot about fences. He wanted to build one along the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam. A fence that ran across Vietnam and into Laos would cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Despite repeated bombings along the trail, more and more NVA troops and supplies were coming south.

There weren't enough Americans or South Vietnamese to make a human fence. Instead, McNamara wanted a space-age fence that could smell, hear, and see enemy soldiers as they crossed the DMZ. A barrier like that could tell U.S. experts where and when enemy soldiers should be stopped.

McNamara talked the idea over with President Johnson and his military advisers. They agreed it was worth a try, and the Pentagon's weapons experts went to work. By the fall of 1967, most of the hardware devices for McNamara's space-age fence were ready to be placed in and around the DMZ.

Many of the devices were dropped from aircraft. As they landed, they sprouted antennas and lay in wait for enemy soldiers. Noises, vibrations, or scents triggered sensitive electronic receivers in the devices, which sent coded signals to a nearby military base. The base commanders decided what action to take.

An electronic, space-age fence sounded good on paper, but it failed in the field. The idea was symbolic of the many tactics that went wrong in Vietnam. Enemy soldiers destroyed a sensor whenever they found one. Wild animals often set the sensors off, triggering false alarms at a military base. Even the sensors that detected odors didn't work very well in the hot, humid air.

These and other exotic ideas showed that McNamara and his staff were looking for any method to turn the situation around in Vietnam. The Secretary of Defense was in the unhappy position of having to report to Congress that there was little progress in the war. A glance at the statistics told the story. America was spending three dollars to destroy one dollar's worth of enemy materiel in North Vietnam. It made little sense to bomb targets that were of small value to the enemy.

Other figures involved the cost of fighting an enemy whose troop strength seemed inexhaustible. According to reports by U.S. and Vietnamese field commanders, the NVA had suffered so many casualties they should have been out of troops. But enemy soldiers who died were replaced almost overnight. According to military records, it cost the U.S. more than $8,000 for every enemy soldier killed. As someone suggested dryly, why not just pay the enemy not to fight?

To make matters worse, the South Vietnamese ARVN soldiers were not doing well. After American forces cleared an area, the South Vietnamese were supposed to move in and work with the people, winning their hearts and minds for the Saigon government. ARVN commanders felt this role was beneath them. Thus, the very people who knew the language and customs of rural Vietnam best had little contact with its people.

The American public did not know that in northern South Vietnam the enemy had so much influence there was not a single village American intelligence considered "friendly." U.S. forces in the area, including the 1st and 3rd Marine divisions and the Army's 1st Cavalry, 4th, and Americal divisions, hardly saw any "friendlies" during their stay.

Having control of the country-side around the DMZ gave the NVA army an enormous advantage. They increased their military operations in 1967 in the area just below the demilitarized zone. The Marines responded by bringing more troops into the field. The two sides finally clashed in one of the bloodiest battles of the war near the valley of Khe Sanh.

The Marines first heard of the Khe Sanh area in May 1967. Earlier in the war, the U.S. had established a small base in this beautiful, rolling valley and staffed it with Special Forces (Green Beret) advisers who worked with the Montagnard people. By mid-1967 thousands of North Vietnamese troops had moved into the area near Khe Sanh during the monsoon rains. They set up camps in the surrounding hills. When the first Marine troops arrived, the NVA soldiers were well dug in. Marine patrols paid with their lives for every foot of ground they walked. Their units advanced until they met solid enemy fire, then they dug in and called for air strikes to drop napalm and explosives on the enemy.

Savage fighting turned the jungle into bare, ripped earth, deeply pitted with bomb craters. Marine casualties during two weeks in May were reported at 1,000 dead and wounded. The North Vietnamese endured American bombing runs and retaliated by pounding the U.S. base camps with rockets, mortars, and artillery fire.

The Marines were forced to defend hundreds of hills while under constant attack from enemy units that greatly outnumbered them. Their only hope for survival was air power and artillery, but these strikes did not always work. When a force of about 300 Marines was ambushed near Con Thien in July 1967, almost 100 Marines died in the fighting.

There seemed to be no clear-cut strategy behind the U.S. operations beyond hanging on to territory. A pattern was repeating itself in these grim battles that would become all too familiar throughout the rest of the war: the enemy acted and the U.S. reacted. Instead of having a plan and taking the initiative, American commanders waited for the VC and NVA to attack, then tried to wipe them out.

The North Vietnamese strategy seemed equally vague, however. Fighting in this remote part of South Vietnam was like trying to overrun the United States by capturing the Great Smokey Mountains. U.S. officials and military intelligence officers asked themselves what the North Vietnamese hoped to accomplish. Why seize territory that did not have much population? Why did they fight for a hill or valley, then abandon it as soon as the battle ended? Perhaps they intended to lure U.S. forces away from the cities, then attack the defenseless centers. Or was the enemy keeping score in the conflict by the number of Americans sent home in coffins?

By the end of 1967, the number of American dead was reaching disturbing proportions. The vast majority of U.S. deaths were among the Marines and Army personnel. The body of a soldier killed in combat usually was retrieved as soon as the battle ended. He was placed in an olive-colored plastic body bag and flown by helicopter to a main camp. A cargo plane or a truck then took the body to graves registration, which was located in an airplane hanger at Tan Son Nhut airbase outside Saigon. There the body was embalmed and put into a reusable aluminum coffin. As soon as a transport plane was filled with these coffins, it took off for the long flight to Oakland, California.

Before the body left Vietnam, the next of kin or family was notified. They were told by a military sergeant or officer who went to the home with the soldier's family priest, minister, or rabbi. The family also received telegrams confirming the death and telling them when they could expect the body. The officer would then find out which funeral home was to receive the body. A soldier on the transport plane from Vietnam saw to it that the coffin got to the right funeral home. The same soldier would also tell the family if the dead man's remains could be viewed.

Soldiers killed in combat were usually awarded the Bronze Star medal with a tiny "V" pin on the ribbon, which stood for "valor." Soldiers who died in other ways were given a plain Bronze Star. John Stolting, an Army staffer who worked in the 9th Infantry Division's awards and decorations office in 1967, recalls that about 30 percent of the deaths were caused by artillery fire from our own side, by drowning, or by accidents. On one occasion, Stolting was prepared to send Bronze Stars to four surviving families when an officer stopped him. "He said three of the guys should get Bronze Stars," Stolting remembers, "but the fourth guy didn't deserve one. He had been playing with a grenade as the four were riding in a helicopter. The grenade went off, killing all four men."

Most Marines who died at Khe Sanh were killed by enemy artillery, rockets, and mortars. If the shrapnel did not get them, then they were killed when their own ammunition or fuel was hit and exploded. No buildings in Khe Sanh survived the daily and nightly pounding by the North Vietnamese. The 5,000 Marines dug their trenches and foxholes deeper and deeper as U.S. planes dropped nearly 6,000 tons of bombs on NVA positions each day. Each night the only letup in the firing came when the NVA crept up to and through strings of protective barbed wire around the camp. The Marines drove them back, then dug in as rockets and artillery exploded around them in the darkness.

Spotter planes showed that as many as 35,000 North Vietnamese surrounded Khe Sanh. The Marines had pushed them back into the DMZ in mid-1967, but they had found another route through Laos that took them back to Khe Sanh. This alternate route wound through jungle-covered valleys where the enemy was difficult to spot. They moved at night, sometimes walking in total darkness with a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of them. Once they reached the hills around Khe Sanh, they constructed fortified positions. Huge artillery pieces were brought in and hidden in the hills. These big guns could be fired, then quickly rolled back into caves and shelters. This technique prevented spotter planes from seeing the guns and calling bombers in to wipe them out.

As the fighting continued, Westmoreland committed more troops and air support to the battle. Winning this fight had become a top priority not only to the military but to President Johnson. They were haunted by the spectre of Dien Bien Phu in which the French had been surrounded and defeated by a superior Vietnamese force. President Johnson even had a model of Khe Sanh built so that he could follow the course of the battle. The American people were told that a decisive win in this region could mean a quicker end to the war. Pictures of the fighting in Khe Sanh became almost daily fare on television back in the United States.

Military advisers believed the battle was the first step in an NVA push to the South. As one Marine major said, "This is the cork, right here. If they get past us, they can tear up the countryside way over to the coast." The Marines continued to send out patrols to scout enemy positions. No matter which direction they chose, they ran into enemy troops. When NVA forces outnumbered them, the Marines were usually overrun and wiped out. Occasionally, U.S. soldiers survived these fights to tell hair-raising stories. Two Marines, Corporal Steven Nelson of Elkhart, Indiana, and Lance Corporal Michael Roha, of National City, California, told of being captured northwest of Danang after their unit was overwhelmed. They were taken to a large bunker and held for several days. The two were able to escape by tiptoeing past a sleeping guard. They ran barefoot for seven miles through thick jungle to a Marine camp.

Not many prisoners were taken by the NVA or Viet Cong, because the enemy had no organized way to take care of them. Most soldiers and pilots who were captured were probably killed within a few days or sent to prison camps in the North. Only a few prisoners ever managed to get free. Deiter Dengler, a young jet pilot shot down over Laos in 1966, was the only flyer to escape during the entire war. Breaking away from his captors, he managed to survive 23 days in the Laotian jungle. Another soldier, Private First Class Roger Anderson, an infantryman, was captured near Can Tho in the Mekong Delta. He was held ten days before a U.S. helicopter fired on the boat where he was being held prisoner. He waved to the helicopter crew and was plucked from the muddy river water as his captors fled.

The Marines, surrounded at Khe Sanh, had no wish to become prisoners. They hung on grimly - putting up with the constant hammering of artillery, mortars, and rockets - and fought back. Numb from the battle, they sat in their foxholes in late January 1968 and wondered: What did the enemy have in mind? No one suspected that within a few days, the Viet Cong would launch the most massive attack of the war in South Vietnam.

David K. Wright. Trouble Ahead. War in Vietnam. Regensteiner Publishing Enterprises, Inc., Chicago. 1989.

The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara The Fog of War provides the background behind the Academy Award-winning documentary by Errol Morris. In this intriguing work, editors James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, who served as academic advisors on the film, bring together film transcripts, documents, dialogues, and essays to explore the issues raised by Robert McNamara's life and work.

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