In 1965, The Viet Cong Hit Pleiku And Changed The Vietnam War Forever 

In 1965, The Viet Cong Hit Pleiku And Changed The Vietnam War Forever 

 In the early hours of February 7th, 1965, while most of Camp Holloway slept, two fiveman teams moved silently through the dark. They carried mortar tubes and satchel charges. They knew exactly where to go. 10 minutes later, it was over. What the Vietkong didn’t know, couldn’t have known, was that they had just made the worst mistake of the entire war.

By early 1965, South Vietnam was falling apart. Not slowly, fast. The government in Saigon had cycled through coup after coup after coup. In just over a year, there had been more military takeovers than most countries see in a decade. General Naguan Khan was technically in charge, but he was barely holding on.

 His own generals were plotting against him. Buddhist activists were in the streets demanding negotiations with the communists. And out in the countryside, the Vietkong were gaining ground every single week. Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, the man Johnson had sent to Saigon to hold things together, was sending cables back to Washington with the kind of language that keeps presidents up at night.

 He warned that the South Vietnamese armed forces had, in his words, begun to show evidence of fragmentation and that there was no longer an effective chain of command. In Washington, Lynden Johnson knew what was coming. He had known for months. His advisers had been drawing up plans for air strikes against North Vietnam since the summer of 1964.

The targeting lists were ready. The carrier groups were in position in the Gulf of Tonkan. But Johnson was waiting. He needed two things before he could act. First, a stable government in Saigon. Second, a clear justification the American public would understand. The Vietkong were going to hand him both on a silver plate.

 There had already been two earlier attacks on American installations. In November 1964, Vietkong mortars hit Ben Hoa air base, killing four Americans and destroying several B-57 bombers. In December, a bomb went off inside the Brinks Hotel in Saigon, an officer’s billet, killing two more and wounding dozens. Johnson didn’t retaliate either time.

 One attack happened days before the 1964 presidential election, the other on Christmas Eve. The optics were terrible, so he held back. He kept his powder dry. Then in early February 1965, Mc George Bundy, Johnson’s national security adviser, one of the most powerful men in Washington, boarded a plane to Saigon. His job was to assess the situation firsthand and report back to the president.

 He landed in Saigon on February 4th. 3 days later the attack happened while Bundy was still in the country. The timing was almost too perfect. Camp Holloway was a US Army helicopter facility about 3 km east of the city of Pleu. It was home to roughly 400 men of the 52nd Combat Aviation Battalion. UH1 Hueies lined the revetments.

 The base had been operational since 1962. The men stationed there were officially classified as advisers, not combat troops. At approximately 2:00 in the morning, two fiveman Vietkong sapper teams moved through the darkness toward the base perimeter. They had been watching the base. They knew the layout. They knew where the helicopters were parked.

 They knew where the barracks were. Over the next 10 minutes, they fired approximately 20 mortar rounds into the helicopter revetments and the barracks. While the mortars landed, Sapper teams moved in on foot with satchel charges, demolition packs strapped to their bodies, detonating them against aircraft parked in the open.

 Then they were gone back into the jungle before the American response could organize. When the smoke cleared, eight Americans were dead, 126 were wounded, 10 aircraft had been destroyed, 15 more were damaged. It was the largest single incident US casualty toll of the war up to that point. News reached Saigon within the hour. Mc George Bundy and General William West Morland, the commander of US forces, flew to PLU the same morning to survey the damage.

The photographs from that morning, Bundy in a suit, West Morland in uniform, picking through the wreckage of twisted rotors and scorched earth, became some of the most iconic images of the entire war. West Morland later declared that the attack represented a new phase of the war.

 He was right, but not in the way the Vietkong had planned. Bundy got on a phone and called the White House. He told them it was time. As I recall, the problem of whether or not to reply to specific attacks on American installations in South Vietnam by perhaps by air action against the North.

 It was very much a question that was being pushed forward for a decision. There were people who thought it urgent to reply to these attacks and others who were more cautious and the president had naturally kept the decision in his own hands. I think that there were two episodes toward the end of 1964 where I think he decided not to take action for essentially special reasons.

 One of them was an attack that occurred just before the election and an action taken right on the eve of election might have magnified effect one way or another that made it an inappropriate moment for a serious choice and another one occurred just at Christmas Eve as I recollected and again there are all sorts of reasons for not. It was evening in Washington when the first reports came through.

 Johnson convened an emergency NSC meeting in the cabinet room, the 545th NSC meeting of his presidency. Around the table sat the men who had shaped the next decade of American foreign policy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and a very cautious, lonely voice at the end of the table, Under Secretary of State George Ball, who had been warning for months that escalation in Vietnam would be a catastrophe.

 Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had been invited. He sat quietly and before the meeting was over, he spoke his mind plainly. The American people, he said, were not behind this. The local population in South Vietnam was not behind this. The Vietkong could not have carried out a surprise attack like Pleu, he said, without local help and local sympathy.

 That meant something. Nobody in that room changed their vote. The consensus was clear. It was time to act. Johnson’s mood that night was captured in the language he used in the room. He told the assembled officials that he had been keeping his guns over the mantle for a long time, that his boys were being shot at, that the United States could not continue absorbing these attacks without responding.

 He stayed up through the night tracking the aircraft. He told his staff, “I want to be called every time somebody dies.” He later telephoned former President Harry Truman who told him, “You bust them in the nose every time you get a chance.” Within roughly 12 hours of the PLU attack, American aircraft were airborne. This is where the story takes its turn.

Nobody expected. Operation Flaming Dart was the name they gave the retaliation. 49 sorties, US Navy carriers, the Coral Sea, the Hancock, and the Ranger launched jets toward North Vietnamese Army barracks near Dong Hoy, just north of the DMZ. This was the first time the United States had deliberately bombed North Vietnam as official policy since the one-off Gulf of Tonkan strikes 7 months earlier.

 The intent was to send a message, a controlled, measured, limited message. But here’s the detail that everyone missed at the time. The Soviet Union’s premere had arrived in the North Vietnamese capital the day before the PLU attack. He was there with a team of missile experts discussing military aid, and American bombs were now falling on his host country while he sat in it.

 The Soviets responded by dramatically stepping up military aid to Hanoi, anti-aircraft systems, surfaceto-air missiles, the infrastructure that would eventually begin shooting American pilots out of the sky over the next 3 years. 3 days after the flaming dart, on February 10th, the Vietkong detonated a bomb inside a US enlisted men’s hotel in Quinon.

23 Americans were killed. 21 more were buried under the rubble. Johnson ordered a second round of air strikes, Operation Flaming Dart 2. And this time, when he described the strikes to the American public, he did not call them reprisals. He called them a response to continued aggression.

 That was a different word, a deliberate word. On February 13th, Johnson approved the concept for Rolling Thunder, a sustained ongoing bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Not reprisals, not responses, a permanent campaign. Rolling Thunder began on March 2nd with 104 American and 19 South Vietnamese aircraft striking targets inside North Vietnam.

 It ran for 44 months until November 1968. And then came the decision nobody had quite anticipated when Flaming Dart was first authorized because the air bases needed to protect themselves. The bombers needed secure runways and secure runways needed men on the ground. On March 8th, 1965, less than 30 days after the Pleu attack, two battalions of United States Marines waited ashore at Da Nong.

 3,500 men, the first US ground combat forces on the Asian mainland since Korea, and they were not advisers. Pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything. If you’re finding this story as compelling as we do, hit subscribe. We cover the Vietnam War every week. The battles, the decisions, and the men caught in the middle of all of it.

 Now, here’s what nobody talked about at the time. Here is the core of this story. The Vietkong who struck Camp Holloway on February 7th, 1965 were carrying out what in their own assessment was a fairly ordinary military operation. At a conference in Hanoi in 1997, decades after the war ended, a Vietnamese general named Dang Vu Hip was asked about the Pleu attack directly.

 He called it an utterly ordinary attack. He said his superiors hadn’t been criticized for it. In fact, they had been commended. He also noted something remarkable. Given that the American air response came within roughly 24 hours of the raid, the general suspected that the strikes must have been planned months in advance.

 He was right. Because here’s what the historian Frederick Logaval documented in his landmark study choosing war published in 1999. One of the most respected accounts of US escalation in Vietnam. Lugal argued that escalation was not something forced upon the United States by Pleu. It was a choice.

 The plans were already drawn. The targeting lists were already written. The carrier groups were already in position. Mc George Bundy himself reportedly said it plainly to colleagues at the time. Incidents like pleu, he said, were like street cars. You wait a few minutes and another one comes along. What the Vietkong miscalculated was not military.

It was political. They attacked an American installation at the exact moment that a senior American official was in country with carrier groups already staged, targeting lists already drawn and a president who had been waiting for a reason to act. The attack did not trigger US escalation. It gave US escalation the political cover it had been waiting for.

 From 10 dead Americans and 10 destroyed helicopters to half a million troops. That is the arc of one decision made in one morning in the central highlands of Vietnam. The Vietnam War did not begin at Pleu. It had been building for years under multiple presidents through decisions made in rooms most Americans never knew existed.

 But Pleu was the moment the door opened and stayed open. By the time the last American combat troops left Vietnam in 1973, 58,220 Americans were dead. Estimates of Vietnamese casualties on all sides run between 2 and 3 million people. The Vietkong unit that struck Camp Holloway was commended by its superiors. They had no idea what they had set in motion.

That is what makes PLU one of the most consequential military miscalculations of the 20th century, not the attack itself. What it unlocked. Pleu’s story doesn’t exist in isolation. The decision Johnson made that night in February 1965 connects directly to every escalation that followed. Rolling Thunder, the Eadrang Valley, Kesan, and eventually Tet.

 If you want to understand how America went from 23,000 advisers to half a million troops in 3 years, this is where that story starts. That video is on screen right now. Subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s breakdown. We’re going deep on Operation Rolling Thunder.