Vietnam War 1967 Declassified News
because of the following CBS News special report the program normally seen at this time will not be presented today what’s that right where is it they uh we can’t reach those big guns and they just keep dropping in there’s nothing you can do it’s like being a big bullseye on top of a hill and uh you’re just sitting there waiting you can’t be safe you can be lucky that’s it be safe you can be lucky that’s it stuff Landing all over bouncing off you and uh get just as scared every time and it gets worse closer they get the more they
throw the more you get scared then you get up it’s wonderful feeling just to be alive you be able to walk around after one of those if I live a 100 years I’ll just never ever be able to uh to to tell the story story uh the way it really happened these young kids who you just run up to them and uh when we were all boxed in they were all around and they were all over our perimeter and we’re throwing grenades and I got pretty close and uh just run up to one of these kids and say uh Marine we’re going to get out of here
aren’t we and uh the kid look up to you and say you’re damn right we are a skipper those Marines are talking about a place named conen an obscure American Outpost in Vietnam as teraa iojima and guadal Canal were once obscure kanana is a bitterly exposed Target just 2 miles below the DMZ American Marines have been under Fire there since last May in just the last 4 weeks they have suffered over 70 dead 1,000 wounded in the next half hour we shall examine the ordeal of Ken this is a CBS News special report the ordeal of
conen this broadcast is brought to you by West here is CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace Ken is here 2 miles south of the demilitarized zone at the narrow top of South Vietnam 12 mil Inland from the South China Sea it is a desolate Hilltop collection of guns and bunkers looking North across the DMZ into North Vietnam its crucial importance lies in the fact that it’s on a main infiltration route into the South the loss of conen could help open the way for the estimated 35 th000 communist troops now massed in the DMZ area its
loss would block the construction of that electronic barrier along the DMZ to seal off South Vietnam from the north but more than that its loss would give the North Vietnamese that one big elusive propaganda Victory they’ve been searching for at such a cost in lives they would prize a victory at Conan as a miniature replica of their victory over the French at yenen Fu in 1954 Ken is vulnerable it is the least defensible of any of the American outposts because it’s so close to North Vietnamese territory the enemy artillery
about 100 Big Guns Plus mortars and Rockets can pound conen around the clock with devastating effect and our ground troops cannot go into North Vietnam to knock out those guns for the Marines at conen this is what it’s like l go hear him whist your he went off
emergency metab back Gap chop priority put your arm R want me to give your hand take keep your head down take it easy red get
out no up there man I don’t I don’t think hey you want me to call tell get a wait a minute you’re not you got camera huh you
[Laughter] 680 one0 0 start 0 1 0 0 680 1 0 0 our Roger uh 81 should be able to do that as well is wave let’s get him on
there over get a out of okay look here are the two tanks you see them yes sir you see where that smoke is that the smoke landed about 300 M right where that big tree is out there 300 to 400 m uh southeast of okay what happened to your squad uh they was hit most of them was hit by shrap Mill and there was metap well tell me uh you came here at full strength I had 13 me when I came and it’s 4 days later now and how many are still here six I think we’re just uh occupying
ground and uh losing too many men I’m losing too many men we were stay here too much longer we we wouldn’t have much left of this platoon let alone the company I see what about three four people get it a day uh not not real bad but enough to be medac cut my platoon down well isn’t that all part of War as the generals say sure it is but for 7 months up here one battalion ain’t going to have much left if if that’s part of War that’ll rotate a little more I think send us back where we can get new men and train them see we’re getting new men
out here they coming out or what you might call Green and then they they don’t know really how to act the rifles have been jamming the the mud’s been uh has slowed everything down and the artillery comes in everywhere and uh it just gets pretty feudal and frustrating sometimes the really depressing part about it is uh like there isn’t really much you can do you know what I mean you see the rounds come in you see your buddies get blown away and wounded and stuff like that well I can’t say that I’m scared stiff but I’m scared I mean after a
while you know it’s going to come you can’t do nothing about it and you just look to gu it’s about the only thing you can do well do you get any idea from up around kanen how the war is going yes if if we uh if we don’t get some more people up in this area real quick and we don’t get some more B-52s real fast then these people are going to be all the way down to Denay before anybody knows it does everybody agree with that 100% what kind of support are the Marines getting General West Morland says the Americans are responding with
the greatest concentration of conventional Firepower in history the US Artillery fire is 10 times greater than the enemies it comes from donga camlo Jolin the other Outpost corners of what is called leatherneck Square and from these big guns at Camp Carroll the batteries fire off as many as 10,000 shells daily lobbing them over the heads of the men at conen deep into the demilitarized zone and then there are the B-52 bombers striking from nearby Thailand they Pound The Zone day in day out with tons of explosives
with this saturation why haven’t the North Vietnamese positions been destroyed Marine Commanders say the enemy guns most of them highly mobile roll in and out of deep caves and tunnels only a direct hit can silence them and there has been no silence at conen the story of how conen came to be a miniature Korea began last May the Marines there were in construction battalions clearing strips to help protect against attacks The Outpost was little more than a few trenches dug on a Hilltop still green and unscorched
manned by 300 South Vietnamese civilian Irregulars advised by a handful of American Special Forces troops the few bunkers looked more like temporary homes for the men who were there to operate the greaters and Earth movers but they were some protection against occasional artillery attacks then things got rougher on the morning of May the 9th burning tanks and personnel carriers marked a battle that had begun at 2:30 a.m.
and lasted till after Daybreak the hilltop was strewn with dead 200 20000 of them like this one North Vietnamese regulars the enemy had struck with a force of 1200 men captured enemy weapons were gathered from all over the perimeter the cost of the Americans in that first battle at Conan included 124 wounded of these 110 were Marines the rest Special Forces men and there were our own dead 44 Americans altogether all of them Marines the first to fall at Ken for the next few months there was less action than preparation for Action
the Marines had come to stay to take control of conen from the South Vietnamese the plan now was to establish a post on the hilltop that could be more easily defended that meant more bunkers and well protected gun imp placements the expectation then was for another ground assault enemy artillery was fairly inactive until July when it got busier the Americans retaliated with air strikes for the rest of July and August the Marines at conen used their own guns to good effect the ammunition an endless supply came in Daily and it was used up
daily this was the end of a supply Lifeline that began in dang and arrived at conen by way of donga 6 miles to the South there were tents nearby to house a compliment that included about a thousand men no matter how you look at it those were better days there was more time for things like the Casual cleaning of weapons but nothing at conen has been casual since September came for the first 25 days of this month conen had to fight back against ground assaults and a sudden calculated escalation of enemy artillery the most intense artillery
barrage of the war at times the shouts of incoming could be heard above the noise of our own guns there has been a slight let up in the last few days but Marines still must Patrol the perimeter of conen and for these men the danger is multiplied by the threat of Ambush the kind of War that’s going on around Ken inspired one young Marine to put his feelings into a poet when youth was a soldier and I fought across the sea we were young and cold hearts of bloody savagery point of indignation children of our time we were Orphans of
creation and dying in our Prime what made you write that poem well just the way things are the commanders and Vietnam the men who must decide when ordeals must be born look at the ordeal at Ken from a different vantage point we talked with General William West Morland commander of American ground forces and Lieutenant General Robert kushman who commands the Marines there there have been some questions from outside and in your own command structure all the way down to some privates I met on Ken about the defense of that Outpost and some who
perhaps aren’t as confident as the general may be well uh when you sit in a place such as that and uh Night comes on uh you really have to rely upon yourself and upon supporting fires and uh naturally the confidence uh may not be as great as it is back here where I can see the many forces that can be brought to bear and which those right on the spot may not be aware uh I am confident that we can hold this area and we have been doing it furthermore uh from what reports we’ve had uh from prisoners and documents we’
have been hurting the enemy badly they have attempted to uh make it appear that they are winning a military Victory uh their target is American public opinion uh they had hoped that by inflicting these casualties it being fully understood by them that the casualties inflicted upon their ranks were unknown to us that they would achieve their psychological Victory and this is the only way they can conceivably win this war Ken then you’re saying is not really a military action but a political or psychological warfare
act uh precisely their objective is political and psychological it is designed to weaken the will of the American people to uh make it appear in uh American and public and U World opinion that uh they are stronger than they are in fact and to uh discourage uh our uh resolve we asked two of our CBS News correspondants who’ve been under Fire with the Marines at Ken for an assessment of the situation there John Lawrence and Robert shackney we asked them first what are the Marines saying right now about Ken well Mike if the Marine happen to be
an infantryman he feels that he’d rather be someplace else I’ve heard a lot of Marines say that Ken is a very poor place to defend because the Marines can’t move out on the ground with infantry men and with tanks to attack the positions from which the North Vietnamese are firing their artillery that’s in the other side of the border now if the Marines were to pull back 5 or 10 miles and the North Vietnamese were to follow them with their artillery then the Communists would no longer be invulnerable from Marine Counterattack
on the ground the Marine Riflemen on Ken or grunts as they call themselves would rather be anywhere out in an operation marching or back at the rear sleeping anywhere but K Chen in their simple teenage philosophy they don’t understand the significance of holding on to what you’ve got or as it said in the orient Saving Face the Pentagon gives orders to the generals and the generals give order to the colonels and so on and all the orders are obeyed but the grunts don’t seem to understand that they’re holding Ken because of a pentagon decision to
win the war with a kind of modern majino line that hasn’t been built yet and what lies ahead for conen in the coming weeks there’s not likely to be much change Mike as long as the monsoons last the heavy range is supposed to start this month and their last two or 3 months and during that period it’s unlikely that the Marines can reopen the roads Marines say that they can resupply themselves for defensive purposes with helicopters but all that’s very limited the Marines won’t be able to move out and in force until the road dries out
now whether the North Vietnamese are going to use this period to continue to Shell the Marines or whether they’ll try something more substantial is of course something that nobody on this side can answer but during the monsoons Ken is most isolated air power is most limited and the Marines will be most vulnerable the big question really seems to be whether or not the north Viet enemies intend to overrun Ken the Marines have tripled the number of troops guarding the Outpost and they’ve moved up more Battalion to be
ready to reinforce if the North Vietnamese decide to attack Ken they must know it will cost them between 5 and 10,000 casualties they’ve only decided to do that once before in 1954 when they felt it would be the final Victory and it was but the United States could survive the loss of Ken get more troop backs and retake it so it would not seem to be in the best interest of the North Vietnamese to attack Ken in the near future they’ll probably continue to Shell it and the Marines will continue to take it two years ago when the first of 500,000
Americans began settling into their enclaves here with the fresh Pentagon Promises of a quick Victory the generals were promoting the new military strategy of the airmobile offense now in the the light of Ken the generals are explaining their successes with the words Mobile Defense Mobile Defense seems to mean putting 3,000 men on the ground and allowing them to sit in the mud and wait for the Shell with their name on it the military can no longer justify this war with a casualty count it may be that more Marines are dying along the DMZ
than enemy anyway no one doubts General gap’s strategy of sacrificing 10 of his own for one American and few here believe our own exaggerated guesses at enemy casualties the Marines have not run any operations into the DMZ since this summer because there are not enough regiments to be sure of Victory they stay fairly close to their bases to within a few hundred yards for most it begins to sound like a conventional war with a conventional front and in a few years the Marines who have come down off Ken will talk as proudly as those who
came back from the chosan reservoir what it all seems to mean is that American Marines have been committed to protect a key Outpost along a cleared fortified barrier it was originally conceived in controversy and at present cannot be constructed what seems to be overlooked is the ability of the North Vietnamese to escalate this war step by step with Washington you begin to suspect that we’ve reached the limits of our present strategy when the generals are talking openly about an invasion of the North and the men around K Channer talking
about the need for tactical nuclear weapons there seems little doubt that it is the administration’s resolve to stay at conen the president made that clear last Friday night in his speech to the nation when he pointed to the Marines up at the DMZ as the real peacekeepers Lyndon Johnson understands that a defeat or even a withdrawal now at conen could be for him a political dmbn Fu the president’s dilemma is how to persuade the North Vietnamese to quit up there up to now pure Firepower hasn’t done it and it seems unlikely that he would order
American troops into North Vietnam to do the job Moscow and P King would be bound to react sharply to such an escalation meantime for the Marines at Ken the months ahead look Grimmer than ever the fall Monsoon Reigns have just begun they will go on till February hampering American Air power depriving the men on the ground of at least some of the air support they desperately need the artillery Duel at conen will go on and on this battle is different from any other action in the war in that there is no letup day after unchanging day and as
long as the North Vietnamese can resupply their troops and guns as long as they can send down reinforcements there is little the Marines can do about it Mike Wallace CBS News New York CBS News film cameraman at Ken Keith K Gerard P John Smith Carl senson Kurt vuler pb1 and the CBS News soundman fan van way Bop Rod Boon fan Chan Fong Hill Ry DV re fam tanon this has been a CBS new Special Report the ordeal of conen this broadcast has been brought to you by Western Electric the manufacturing and supply unit of the
Bell System as part of their continuing coverage of important news events the preceding program was a CBS News special report programs regularly scheduled at this time will return next Sunday
