Project Sekong 2012: People living along the old HCM Trail continue to pay the price for a failed military strategy.

Report 41

Very early in the Vietnam War American military planners considered using our ground forces in a blocking action to stop the flow of soldiers and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  Instead, the United States attempted to halt traffic through aerial interdiction.  We bombed peaks and valleys along the trail to the limit of our technology and treasure, lost numerous planes and pilots in the effort, but never appreciably staunched the flow of men, women and material moving south.

The Vietnamese used low-tech strategies that fit the environment.  Early on, they pushed supplies forward on reinforced bicycles.  (The record bike load weighed over nine hundred pounds and took two men to manage.)  Later, the Vietnamese sent convoys of trucks down the trail, driven by men so familiar with the route that they could maneuver through hazardous segments in the dark of night without using their lights. (Sometimes, women dressed in white garments would serve as human road markers so drivers could more easily detect the edge of the road).

The Vietnamese cut multiple roads through the forest so if bombing cut one segment, traffic could be quickly re-directed to an alternative route. By war’s end, the trail consisted of over 12,000 miles of interlaced roads, trails, footpaths and waterways.

The Vietnamese mobilized thousands of workers and assigned individual crews responsibility to keep just one, small segment of the trail in passable condition.  Working with hand tools alone, a crew could, in a single day, fill bomb craters measuring 15 feet deep and 75 feet across, frustrating American plans to dam traffic and create convenient pools of targets.

Vietnamese soldiers climbed to the top of trees that bordered roads and wove branches together to create a canopy so trucks could travel undetected below.  They laid bridges across streams, but just beneath the water’s surface so they could not be seen by American planes overhead.

Late in the war, to fuel truck convoys, the Vietnamese ran plastic pipe linking a series of pumping stations that dotted nearly the full length of the trail.  If American bombers made a lucky hit on the pipeline workers quickly repaired the damaged segment and soon had fuel flowing again. (In those days, with existing technology, it took more luck than skill to hit a target the size of a four-inch-wide pipe!)

The United States, in frustration, attempted bazaar experiments.  We dropped laundry detergent on steep segments of the trail hoping that the resulting mud would be too slippery for trucks to manage .  We planted listening devices that we hoped would detect the sound of soldiers or trucks in motion.  Subsequently, to create sufficient noise to activate those instruments, planes scattered gravel-sized bomblets whose snap, crackle and pop beneath feet or tires were radioed to listeners in Thailand who then dispatched bombers who often arrived after the trucks or soldiers had disappeared into the forest.  We planted devises intended to detect the odor of humans congregated in an area.  (In turn, the Vietnamese misdirected American bombers by hanging bags of buffalo urine near the monitors).

I would nominate as the most hair-brained scheme of the war, the planting of cases of beer along the trail in the hope that soldiers, porters, and repair crews who found them would become too drunk to perform their assigned duties.

In the end, the United States pinned all hope on a bombing campaign so massive that it ultimately became unprecedented in military history.  In essence, America attempted to use bombs to form a steel wall.  Over nine years America spent 150 billion dollars on that effort, dropped millions of tons of ordnance, sprayed millions of gallons of defoliants, lost hundreds planes, and still failed to appreciably diminish the flow of enemy soldiers and material.

One study documented that in the single month of March 1967, American planes flew approximately  8,500 attack sorties over the trail.  Still, in that month alone,  more than 8,600 Vietnamese soldiers and porters successfully concluded their journey south.  (In essence, one attack sortie for every People’s Army infiltrator). Another study put the cost of killing one enemy soldier on the trail at over a million U.S. dollars.

And, the cost to Laos?  The campaign to cut the trail resulted in more than 50,000 civilian casualties (20,000 of those have occurred since the war ended), a total that grows whenever old bombs detonate and create new victims.