The End of the Line: The Siege of Khe Sanh

by Robert Pisor

A war correspondent's searching account of a crucial battle in the Vietnam War. It was the most spectacular battle of the entire war. For 6,000 trapped marines, it was a nightmare; for President Lyndon Johnson, an obsession. For General Westmoreland, it was to be the final vindication of technological weaponry; and for General Giap, the architect of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, it was a spectacular ruse masking troops moving south for the Tet offensive. In a compelling narrative, Robert Pisor sets forth the history, the politics, the strategies, and, above all, the desperate reality of the battle that became the turning point of the United States's involvement in Vietnam.

Genres: History, War, Nonfiction, Military History, Military Fiction, Historical

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Robert L. Pisor was a journalist, historian and bread maker during his 77 years. He was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, on Dec. 7, 1939, the first son of a U.S. Army artillery officer and an elementary school teacher. He majored in history at the College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio. He earned a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

In 1963, he joined the Detroit News, then the largest afternoon daily in the U.S. He also served as the Detroit News' war correspondent in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.
He served three years as press secretary to Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young, became editor of Monthly Detroit Magazine and moved to Detroit's WDIV-TV to offer newspaper criticism and political coverage for 11 years. His book on the Vietnam War, The End of the Line, won the Society of Midland Authors' prize for non-fiction.
In 1995 he opened Stone House Bread,an artisanal sourdough bread bakery. He retired in 2006. Mr. Pisor passed away July 7, 2017 from Kidney Cancer.

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a mediocre book with a misleading title. Robert Pisor's focus is not the battle of Khe Sanh. An insubstantial part of his work deals with the siege. The rest is a concise history of the Vietnam conflict that can serve as an introduction to the topic if there are not any other books available. It reads like a guide to some things a beginner needs to know about the conflict.

There is a relatively informative chapter about General Westmoreland, the MACV commander, who was the Douglas MacArthur of the 1960s. The author recounts his career before and in Vietnam, as well as gives an on-point characteristic of his personality – overconfident, egotistical, and irrationally optimistic. Westmoreland's confidence was rooted in richer soil than the racial superiority that many commanders felt: the absolute certainty that American troops would go into combat with overwhelming, unconquerable superiority in firepower, mobility, and flexibility. 

Otherwise, Pisor's account is rather mediocre. He jumps back and forward between what was happening on the hills of Khe Sanh and the background information about the Vietnam conflict that he wants to include. His narrative lacks focus, which makes the reader quickly lose interest in the story of the American Marines' sacrifice. I read somewhere that Pisor's work was considered ground-breaking when it was first published, which might be true, considering that it is not heavily biased in favor of the Americans like the bulk of combat memoirs. However, a lot of new information has been declassified since the 1980s, when it was written, so I found it dated. There is nothing here that I did not already know from other historians' works. 

Furthermore, to rank among the better accounts of the siege of Khe Sanh, it needs more maps and a narrower focus. Most well-written battle memoirs choose either an individual perspective or a unit perspective. However, Pisor switches randomly from individual Marines to commanders to General Westmoreland, which allows the reader to see neither the details nor the bigger picture. The author was a journalist, not a military historian, and it shows.

I do not know what else to say about his work. As I already mentioned, do not get deceived by the title. There is little about Khe Sanh here, and the chapters that are devoted to this famous battle are confusing and chaotic. After I finished it, I felt that I have wasted several hours of my time. By the time I read the first half, I actually knew that it would be a waste of time, but I decided to finish it so that I would be able to write a review and warn others not to waste their time.

THE END OF THE LINE is to be skipped. Khe Sanh was one of the most bloody and nightmarish battles of the Vietnam conflict. Its history gives plenty of food for thought. It was a tragedy for both sides. Pisor has not succeeded in capturing any of this in his narrative. This book has one impressive aspect – the author's descriptive writing – but it also is overshadowed by the lack of structured storytelling. I do not recommend it.

[Scottnshana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read everything I can on the French experience in Indochina, especially the climactic battle at Dien Bien Phu. I mentioned this to one of my co-workers and he said that if I want to broaden the scope I should pick up something on Khe Sanh, because General Giap tried to do DBP again there against the U.S. I am glad that the first book I picked up on Khe Sanh was this one, because "The End of The Line" spends a lot of time discussing General Westmoreland's and LBJ's efforts to prevent DBP II. The close look at General Giap in Chapter 6 alone makes this book worth reading. I enjoyed the description of the C-123 as the workhorse in keeping the Marine garrison re-supplied and the in-depth analysis of the U.S. "Why send a man when you can send a bullet?" approach (Westmoreland was, after all, a Field Artillery officer) and the comparison of Giap's strategy to Muhammad Ali's "Rope-a-Dope" maneuver. The book seals the deal nicely via a look at materiel tonnages and casualty estimates (while criticizing "Body Counts"). I think that Pisor also artfully argues that even though Khe Sanh was a far outpost fed by aerial resupply and General Giap was leading the siege, it was never meant to be the apocalyptic battle of destruction that Dien Bien Phu was. The idea that Khe Sanh was instead an effort to tie down Westmoreland's best units during the Tet Offensive (no matter how you feel about Tet, you must agree that it had strategic effects) of 1968 holds some weight, and Pisor does a fine job-- in his narrative on the generals, the Marines, and the diverse participants in this landmark battle -- of pushing that perspective.

[Julie Tulba · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for research for my third novel that I'm currently working on. It's definitely the most "military heavy" nonfiction book I've ever read, but it was never dense or dry (said by someone with no military background, etc).

I knew a little about the Siege of Khe Sanh from the (Hollywood) film, We Were Soldiers, but to read a non-fictionalized account about what the men on those hills went through for months (the siege lasted from January until July of 1968), was just unimaginable. Resilience doesn't even begin to describe the 5,000 Marines at Khe Sanh who were surrounded by roughly 20,000 North Vietnamese troops and who had no reinforcements or supplies to them except by air since all of this was happening during monsoon season when the volatile weather would limit flights. They were ordered to fight and hold the base rather than evacuate and what the Marines accomplished at Khe Sanh is a testament to their slogan, "the few, the proud, the Marines."

While the book chiefly focuses on Khe Sanh and events leading up to it, Siege of Khe Sanh is still a good enough read for anyone lacking a more in-depth education on the Vietnam War-the arrogance of some high ranking military officials, the war that was clearly never winnable (even in the early days), and the powerful and utterly brave might of the average American soldier/Marine when so many of them were mere boys.

[Bruce Bean · Rating 5 out of 5]

The General Who Wanted a Battle
Robert Pisor, The End of the Line: The Siege of Khe Sanh (W. W. Norton, 1982)

There is a particular kind of military disaster that arises when a commander with ample firepower goes looking for a fight, and Robert Pisor’s account of the seventy-seven-day siege of Khe Sanh is the best book in print on what such an enterprise looks like from inside the wire. Pisor, a Detroit News correspondent who covered the war and then spent a decade reading and interviewing his way into the documentary record, builds his case patiently, and the case is devastating: William Westmoreland sent five thousand Marines to a remote plateau near the Laotian border because he wanted Vo Nguyen Giap to mass against them, because he believed superior American firepower would then annihilate that mass, and because such an annihilation—something “decisive, something crippling,” in Westmoreland’s phrase—would justify the invasion of Laos and possibly North Vietnam that he had been trying for months to talk Lyndon Johnson into authorizing. The Marines did not want to go. The Marines understood, as Westmoreland did not, that Khe Sanh was too isolated to be supported reliably and that the spring fog could shut down resupply for days at a time. They went because Westmoreland told them to.

Pisor opens the book with a portrait of Westmoreland that is restrained almost to the point of cruelty—Time magazine’s Man of the Year, in Pisor’s phrase, was “a man waiting to be photographed”—and then methodically supplies the evidence. Westmoreland arrived in Saigon in 1964 during what Pisor calls the “carousel of colonels” running South Vietnam, with American forces totaling about sixteen thousand and ARVN losing seven thousand deserters every month. The arithmetic was already grim, and Westmoreland’s response—that the Vietnamese could not save Vietnam, that only the Americans could—set the trajectory for everything that followed. He believed, Pisor writes, in “the unconquerable superiority in firepower, mobility and flexibility of U.S. forces.” The French at Dien Bien Phu had a dozen helicopters; Westmoreland had three thousand. The French had two hundred aircraft of all types; Westmoreland had two thousand fighters, three thousand helicopters, and more than two hundred B-52s. He also had, until Washington made him shut it down, a study group considering tactical nuclear weapons.

The trouble was the enemy. Pisor is good on the way Giap—five feet tall, a hundred pounds, who had begun his war in December 1944 with thirty-four volunteers and had since fought the French, the Japanese, the French again, and now the Americans—refused to provide the set piece Westmoreland needed. “American commanders found it almost impossible to make the enemy stand still long enough to be destroyed by supporting arms,” Pisor writes, and the war could go on indefinitely so long as the VC declined to oblige. Westmoreland was looking for a battle. Khe Sanh, he became convinced, would be the battle. Everyone on his staff had read Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place, and Lyndon Johnson, who had sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1954 and opposed any American intervention to save the French at Dien Bien Phu, was particularly haunted by the parallel. Johnson, Pisor reports, required his generals to put in writing that Khe Sanh would not fall.

The siege itself begins on January 20, 1968. Three days later the Pueblo is seized off the Korean coast; ten days after that, Tet erupts across South Vietnam and the Viet Cong flag flies over Hue for twenty-five days. Westmoreland, remarkably, regards Tet as a feint and Khe Sanh as the main event, and Pisor lets the misjudgment speak for itself. Inside the perimeter sits the 26th Marine Regiment—the first time since Iwo Jima that all three battalions of the 26th had fought together—along with one Air Force officer, two Army officers, 242 Marine officers, 5,528 enlisted Marines, and, eventually and only at outside prompting, the 318 men of the 37th ARVN Ranger Battalion. The hills around the base are held in penny packets: India Company of the 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines, commanded by Captain William Dabney, son-in-law of Chesty Puller, sits on Hill 881 South for the entire siege, a third of his men draftees, throwing themselves at Hill 881 North in attacks that produce casualties Pisor describes as ruinous and gains he describes as negligible.

What followed is one of the more concentrated displays of aerial firepower in military history, and Pisor catalogs it without losing the human scale. By mid-February, Operation Niagara was, in his phrase, “a great thundering waterfall of explosives.” B-52s dropped more than a thousand tons of bombs every day. Of the 8,383 fighter-bomber sorties fragged for North Vietnam in this period, 5,900 were diverted to targets around Khe Sanh. The total numbers, as Pisor records them, are staggering: 158,891 artillery shells fired in defense of the base, 9,691 Air Force fighter-bomber attacks, 7,078 Marine attacks, 5,337 Navy attacks, and 2,602 B-52 sorties. [If only superior numbers counted.] None of this silenced the NVA artillery, two-thirds of which Pisor says was firing from concealed positions in Laos twelve to fourteen miles away—beyond the reach of Khe Sanh’s artillery, though the Army’s 175mm guns at Camp Carroll and the Rockpile could have ranged them, had they ever made it to Khe Sanh. They did not, having been turned back by an NVA ambush months earlier, and they sat where they were for the duration of the siege.

The aerial resupply story is its own minor epic. After February 13, when Air Force General William Momyer halted C-130 landings, the work fell to C-123s with auxiliary jet power that could spend as little as three minutes on the ground, to LAPES extractions that Pisor judges largely unsuccessful, and to parachute drops on the Dien Bien Phu model. The hilltop garrisons depended on the so-called Super Gaggle, a choreographed assault of A-4s suppressing the surrounding tree lines while helicopters dashed in with ammunition and water. It was inventive, costly, and constantly improvised, and Pisor uses it to make a point that runs through the book: the technological asymmetry between the two sides was almost incomprehensible, and it did not produce the result Westmoreland had promised.

Pisor is at his best on the texture of the place. By the first week of February the combat base is a trash pit; by early March, in his words, it looks like “a shanty slum on the outskirts of Manila,” littered with helicopter blade fragments, hingeless truck doors, hopeless tangles of communications wire, blowing cardboard, shattered windshields, and rotting sandbags. One Marine in ten has been killed or wounded. The NVA trenches creep forward another hundred yards every night, though never to the Dien Bien Phu density. The fog comes in leaving five feet of visibility. The fall of the Lang Vei Special Forces camp on February 7—the first NVA armor used in the war—goes essentially unrelieved because Colonel David Lownds at Khe Sanh refuses to mount the rescue that had been the plan all along. Pisor reports this without commentary, which is the most damning approach available.

The book’s political chapters are equally unsparing. On February 23, the Wall Street Journal concludes that “American firepower seemed to be destroying the country it was supposed to save;” four days later Walter Cronkite tells nine million viewers that the best the United States can hope for is stalemate. On March 12, Eugene McCarthy comes within 330 votes of Johnson in the New Hampshire primary; four days after that, Robert Kennedy enters the race; on March 23, Johnson announces that Westmoreland is coming home; on March 31, Johnson stops the bombing of most of North Vietnam and renounces a second term. Westmoreland, characteristically, wanted to stage-manage the end of the siege himself, and required that his successor, Creighton Abrams, be the officer of record for lifting it—which Abrams did six days into his command. Operation Pegasus, the relief column up Route 9, was, in Pisor’s judgment, largely a charade. The First Air Cavalry general who led it described what he found at Khe Sanh as “the most depressing and demoralizing place I ever visited…strewn with rubble, duds, and damaged equipment, with troops living a life more similar to rats than human beings.” The Marines, predictably, replied that they had never wanted to be there in the first place.

Pisor saves his sharpest chapter for the body count, and it is here that the book’s underlying argument finds its target. The official Marine KIA figure for Khe Sanh—205—is, he demonstrates, a piece of statistical theater that depends on excluding the hill fights of April 1967, the loss of Lang Vei, deaths from the Operation Pegasus relief, and casualties at the surrounding firebases. “Most body counts,” Captain Dabney told him, “were pure unadulterated bullshit,” and Pisor, who clearly likes Dabney, gives him the chapter’s last word. The enemy numbers were, if anything, more imaginary still. The Marines never learned about the caves on Hill 881 North until after the siege; the bombing, however thunderous, had been hitting hills, not the men inside them.

If the book has a limitation it is the limitation of any battle history written within fifteen years of the events: the North Vietnamese sources are essentially closed to Pisor, and what Giap and the 304th, 320th, 324th, and 325C divisions actually thought they were doing at Khe Sanh—whether they intended a Dien Bien Phu, whether they intended a feint to draw American attention from the Tet cities, whether they intended both at once and were content to let history sort out the proportions—remains conjectural. Later scholarship has pushed in the direction of the second interpretation, and Pisor would surely have welcomed it; the book’s argument does not depend on Giap’s intentions but on Westmoreland’s, and those Pisor establishes beyond reasonable doubt.

What lingers, finally, is not the firepower or the politics but the quieter passages: the French coffee planters whose terraces Westmoreland’s bombing turned into what Pisor calls “a red orange moonscape”; the American missionaries committing the Bru tribal language to writing while Air Force fighter-bombers strafed Bru civilians in April 1967; nineteen-year-old Marine short-timers, half of them never having fired their weapons in anger—the Korean-era discovery that aimed fire was the exception rather than the rule sits in the middle of Pisor’s book like a small embarrassment—facing veterans who had been at war since before the Marines were born. Giap’s line to a French interviewer, which Pisor quotes near the end, is the one no American voice in the book ever utters: “We are in no hurry.” That sentence, more than any of the firepower statistics, is the book’s real epitaph for Khe Sanh, and for a great deal else.

The End of the Line is now more than forty years old, and the literature has thickened around it—John Prados and Ray Stubbe’s Valley of Decision (1991) is more comprehensive on the operational detail, and Gregg Jones’s Last Stand at Khe Sanh (2014) is more vivid on the small-unit experience—but Pisor remains the indispensable single volume, the one that connects the plateau to the White House situation room without losing its grip on either. It is a model of what a journalist with patience and access can do with a battle, and it is also, quietly, one of the better arguments ever made for civilian control of the military. Westmoreland did not get his invasion of Laos. He did not get his decisive battle. He did get his picture taken.

[Jim Stennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent introduction to the Vietnam Conflict for beginners in the subject as it is really more of a synopsis of the entire war - less than a quarter of the study is specifically on the siege itself. Serious students of the war might not be impressed by his effort, but casual readers will take away a solid foundational base to the tale.

Pisor avoids the traps of most military histories, by not getting bogged down the jargon and intricacies of military operations. He writes for the layman, keeping it short and sweet.

If you want to be frustrated just read some of the chapters about how much the US spent in Vietnam and all the technology we used to accomplish nothing.

[bob walenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in the third person, this book is really an overview of the entire Vietnam War through with an emphasis on the siege of Khe Sahn. It was filled with information and insight, clearly benefitting from the clarity of hindsight and decades of time. Pisor's research was admirable and chapters of the book focused on U S General Westmoreland, North Vietnam's General Giap and the entire Tet Offensive of 1968. There was perspective and a richly nuanced overview.
I learned a lot, sorted out much I already knew and feel like I have a broader understanding of this history.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great historical detail of a well known outpost during the Vietnam war. Lots of detail but easy to follow. Well written and no political bias contained within.

[Randall Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lot of behind the scenes information in this one. All in all a good read.

[Doug Caldwell]

I was serving in Vietnam during the period of the siege although I wasn't aware of the details. Many years later I met Captain Dabney who was mentioned several times in the book.

[An Le · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I liked:
+Great writing that holds the attention of the reader
+Good broad coverage of the military and political backgrounds of the battle of Khe Sanh
+Solid assembly of different first-hand historical sources to support the author's narrative
+Excellently quick read not because of short depth but because of Pisor's ability to take the reader through the story of the battle

What I disliked:
-Misspellings of Vietnamese names
-Author seems to suggest that there is only one right narrative of the Vietnam War
-Not enough analysis of the battle itself and lacks the historical depth expected from initial impressions of the book

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good "backgrounder" that gives a broad overview of Khe Sanh within the context of the Vietnam War. There are several very good chapters that focus on the Vietnamese commander and the history of the town of Khe Sanh, but for the most part this book is really a commentary on General Westmoreland and his Vietnam strategy. If you want something that is a firsthand, nitty gritty look at the siege, a much better option is Valley of Decision by Prados. Hill Fights by Murphy is also a good one. This book is more of a post-hoc accounting.

[Carlton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read about the siege of Khe Sanh. I first read this in 1983 and was impressed with the portraits of General Vo Nguyen Giap and General William Westmoreland. The fall of Lang Vei was chilling. The Tet Offensive, Operation Niagara, The Hill Battles are all here. LBJ's dilemma... I remember watching this play out nightly on the evening news, when I was a child. I found this book again in my attic and had to re-read it. One thing I know, now, is that we should have never been involved in this war. Of course, hindsight is 20/20.