Battle for Hamburger Hill During the Vietnam War

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What the military did not realize was that the American public had always been the greatest limitation on the use of military force. As General Fred C. Weyand, General Abrams’ successor as MACV commander, wrote after the war: Vietnam was a reaffirmation of the peculiar relationship between the American Army and the American people. The American Army really is a people’s army in the sense that it belongs to the American people who take a jealous and proprietary interest in its involvement. In words particularly applicable to Hamburger Hill, he wrote, When the Army is committed the American people are committed, when the American people lose their commitment it is futile to try to keep the Army committed.

Given the public and political reaction to Hamburger Hill, a change in war-fighting policy was not long in coming. In order to hold down casualties, what had been a policy of keeping maximum pressure on the enemy was changed to one of protective reaction–fighting only when threatened by enemy attack. As Lewis Sorley wrote in Thunderbolt (Simon & Schuster), his 1992 biography of General Abrams, when Henry Kissinger, then special assistant to the president for national security affairs, was asked whether Abrams ever received any instructions, written or otherwise, to hold down the level of U.S. casualties, Kissinger replied, ‘Not from the White House.’ General Alexander Haig [Kissinger’s deputy at the NSC] provided a different answer to the same question: ‘Of course.’

Sorley continued: On June 19, just a month after the battle at Ap Bia Mountain, President Nixon cleared up any uncertainty there may have been about the existing policy. He had given explicit orders to General Abrams, he later said: ‘They are very simply this: he is to conduct the war with a minimum of American casualties.’

Vietnamization of the war had begun. At the same time Nixon gave his orders to General Abrams, the president also ordered a 25,000-man U.S. troop withdrawal by July 8 and removal of 35,000 more by early December. The U.S. military was on the way out of Vietnam, and the fighting on the ground would gradually be turned over to the ARVN. At the strategic level of the war, time had run out. As State Department Foreign Service Officer Norman Hannah, author of The Key to Failure (Madison Books) and one of the more insightful critics of the war, observed, This is the tragedy of Vietnam–we were fighting for time rather than space. And time ran out.

Because time had run out at the strategic level, battlefield successes that had been won at the cost of so much blood and sacrifice were also rendered meaningless. In Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon, I told my North Vietnamese counterpart on the Four Party Joint Military Team (set up by the Paris Peace Accords to deal, unsuccessfully as it turned out, with the POW/MIA issue), You never beat us on the battlefield. He thought about that for a moment, then replied: That may be so. But it’s also irrelevant. And that irrelevance is what made Hamburger Hill so frustrating.

Previously, battlefield successes had been relevant indeed. Operation Apache Snow, of which the battle for Hamburger Hill would be a part, was designed by the U.S. XXIV Corps to keep the NVA forces in the A Shau Valley off balance. The goal was to prevent them from using the valley as a staging area for an attack on the old imperial capital of Hue and the coastal provinces, as they had done the previous year during the Tet Offensive.

The 45-kilometer-long A Shau Valley, located in rugged country in southwestern Thua Thien province along the Laotian border, was the site of Base Area 611. This base area was a terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a series of roads, trails and pipelines along the Chaine Annamitique mountains that begin in North Vietnam and continue southward along the Laotian and Cambodian border areas to some 60 kilometers from Saigon.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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