Lam Son 719 was one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.
In a new book, Invasion of Laos, 1971: Lam Son 719, author Robert Sander notes, “Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) 1st Corps, appears to have suffered more than 7,500 casualties, and the Communist forces approximately 13,000.”
American losses are harder to estimate. But at least 250 Americans died in support of the operation.
Particularly hard-hit were US Army helicopter crews who suffered more losses than at any similar period during the war.
Despite all this the battle remains understudied.
Sander, who was a helicopter pilot during the battle and a career army officer, was compelled to write the book to bring attention to what was one of the crucial battles of the Vietnam War: the last dry-season offensive by the ARVN. Had its commanders been more ambitious, the campaign could have helped buy South Vietnam valuable time to prepare for the impending American withdrawal.
The actual outcomes of the offensive were much more limited than even that.
Solving The "Ho Chi Minh Trail"
The operation was born out of Washington's desire to provide cover for further American withdrawals as the ARVN bought time for the South Vietnamese government. By 1971, President Richard Nixon was also facing mounting pressure to end an unpopular war.
Yet, there were strategic considerations as well. As Sander notes, the ongoing war limited America’s ability to respond to crises elsewhere: “When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the US considered participating in a NATO-led intervention, the largest body of troops considered available from the two US Army corps stationed in Europe was a single brigade of approximately 5,000 men.”
American warplanners had long realized the importance of severing the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” a term that referred to the supply network which stretched through Cambodia and Laos and allowed Hanoi to supply both Viet Cong forces and North Vietnames Army (NVA) units in the south. Since the days of the Kennedy administration, the Laotian town of Tchepone was a known hub in this network.
Yet, despite war plans drawn up by both South Vietnam and the United States, political considerations made a raid into Laos risky. Such a move into a neutral country risked drawing Moscow or Beijing into the war. But the Nixon administration’s policies of détente and outreach to China had significantly reduced that risk.
Hanoi had long realized Tchepone's importance and defended the town well. The NVA, Sander argues, had pre-prepositioned the latest Soviet air defenses to cover a potential helicopter landing zone even before the 42-day operation began.
Indeed in the early 1970s the Soviets freely gave the North Vietnamese their latest anti-aircraft weapons just as they would eagerly arm the Egyptian Army with the latest anti-tank weapons during the October War of 1973.
![US Army helicopter artillery ammunition South Vietnam Laos]()
The Causes Of The Mission's Failure
The Causes Of The Mission's FailureIt wasn’t just technology which accounted for heavy American losses. Sander points to other tactical failures.
He argues more gunships should have been made available to escort air mobile operations: “The availability of helicopter gunships for the escort mission was a major limiting factor in how many different airmobile operations could be conducted simultaneously.”
Additionally, American battlefield priorities weakened the combat effectiveness of the ARVN, who relied on American air support and played into the NVA goal of ambushing American forces.
One controversial example cited by Sander involves the fate ARVN FSB 31, where American efforts to rescue the pilot of a downed F4 Phantom were made at the expense of defending the fire support base, which eventually was overrun.
The NVA, Sander argues, understood American priorities to minimize casualties and used downed air crewmen as bait to lure rescue forces into battle on the NVA’s terms.
Such tactical failures were due to a lack of understanding by officers of the changing nature of war. Though the US military had realized the battlefield potential of the helicopter during the Korean War, there was a generational gap within the officer corps:
These were officers that, for the most part, were veterans of World War II. Attempts to rectify the gap in senior officer knowledge of aviation operations included sending senior officers to a VIP version of flight school. This effort produced marginal results. While the senior officers may have mastered the elementary skills of flying, the VIP flight school could not replace experience.
The ARVN leadership was even more muddled. Sander paints a picture of General Lam, who had overall command for the ARVN offensive, as overly hesitant or even incompetent.
Sander’s notes: "[U]nits brought to the fight were use sparingly. General Lam commanded roughly 30,000 soldiers, but committed only initially 18,000 to the Laos raid. During the battle American observers were shocked he did not commit his reserves 'at a time when the enemy has obviously committed his full resources.'"
Indeed, Sander points out at least 9 ARVN division were deployed elsewhere during Lam Son 719. Why were these nine divisions idle?
Sander suggests that much of the ARVN army were in effect home-guard units whose soldiers spoke regional dialects and who had little logistical ability to operate nationally.
An additional problem was “flower soldiers:” ARVN soldiers that existed primarily on paper or bribed officers to avoid military service. The contemporary reader cannot help but think of the state of another American-built army: the Iraqi Army of our era. A November 2014 audit of the Iraqi Army found 50,000 “ghost soldiers” on its payrolls.
Different Objectives In Washington And Saigon
Ultimately, the operation's limited success owed to political differences between the Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and President Nixon.
For Nixon, this was an operation meant to forestall a NVA offensive and to give an impetus to the Paris Peace Talks. Yet President Thieu fretted over the destruction of ARVN units he saw as his palace guard and urged General Lam to move certain elite ARVN back to Saigon as soon as possible.
Evidence is contradictory but it is likely Thieu had ordered his generals to begin to withdraw once 3,000 casualties had been reached.
Lam Son 719 was previously covered in two earlier books: Tom Marshall’s The Price of Exit and Keith Nolan’s Into Laos. Yet Sander has conducted exhaustive research in writing his account. This includes sources previously unavailable, including State Department cables that covered Vietnam from July of 1970 to January of 1972.
This book will be of interest to those interested in the history of air mobile operations, the diplomacy surrounding the end of the Vietnam, and those generally interested in what until recently was considered America’s longest war.
Joseph Hammond is a freelance journalist and former Cairo correspondent for Radio Free Europe. He has reported from Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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