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This is the hundred-eighteenth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series or go back to the master post to pick up where you will.

Seven Firefights in Vietnam features a battle within that first week after the Tet Offensive. It takes place near the besieged Khe Sahn and it, too, is not really part of the “general uprising.” In fact, one wonders how this assault played into the North’s grand strategy.

As I was reading about the Battle of Hue, I got to thinking about a speculation made by Volko Ruhnke and Mark Herman about the Tet Offensive. I was sure I’d written about it before but I can’t find anything as I search back through my own posts. I guess I’ll have to mention it here.

In his section of the Designer Notes for Fire in the Lake, Mark Herman writes how “Hanoi’s hidden agenda during Tet was to decimate the ranks of the VC.” He described how the in-game concept of a “pivotal event” derived from the Tet Offensive as “the character of the war did pivot in its aftermath… [T]he 1954 to 1964 period had all the trappings of a Civil War that carried forward, until Tet’s military failure neutered the VC agenda.” The hint here is that the North may have deliberately architected a VC-led failure so as to eliminate the future political competition that the Southerners would represent in a unified Vietnam.

For the most part, nothing I’ve read outside of the Fire in the Lake manual supports this last supposition. In particular, Hue 1968 suggests that those who planned Tet believed that it would truly lead to a “General Uprising” and victory. Those who did not believe it would succeed tended to oppose the planned operation and were sidelined (most notably General Giáp, but also other senior commanders). That leaves little space for those who believed that Tet would fail and thus supported it for that reason. Of course, the source of information in the likes of Hue 1968 are currently-living Vietnamese who would certainly not be ratting out their own government, even assuming they knew of a plan to essentially betray their southern brothers in arms.

But here in Seven Firefights in Vietnam is the faintest whiff of a counterpoint. At a time when it would seem that every available resource must be dedicated to the capture and holding of the Southern cities, the NVA managed to organize a dozen or so tanks and use them, for the first time ever mind you, against the Americans. They deployed them, furthermore, not to try to secure a victory in Hue or to advance any other Tet objectives. They used them to overrun a remote CIDG base near the border with Laos.

I recognize that getting tanks to Hue would have been difficult if not impossible. It just seems that if you’re betting everything on one giant offensive, you would not have any energy or materiel left over to diddle around doing other things too. Thus, The Battle of Lang Vei on February 7th, 1968, might be one bit of reading that does back this theory of Volke and Herman. Maybe the high command in the North wasn’t really “all in” with respect to Tet.

Or not. For all I know, books written on Vietnam have a far better explanation for how tactics and strategy wove together in February 1968. One obvious conjecture is that Lang Vei was an attempt to draw attention towards Khe Sahn and away from Hue – perhaps the most practical use of armored assets to help a battle that they were in the wrong position to aid directly.

Battle of Lang Vei chapter-author John A. Cash writes in a style that mixes thriller action prose with official-report documentarian style. His colorful descriptions are even accompanied by exclamation points, to punctuate paragraphs that otherwise consist of lists of names and ranks. As I said, Lang Vei’s greatest notoriety as a battle may derive from it being the first appearance of Soviet-made tanks facing an American/native force, an appearance that their enemies were ill-prepared to deal with.

Seeing as I had two game engines to sample from, this time around I started with the Squad Battles: Tour of Duty version of the battle. I did this mostly because I usually start with Steel Panthers and I wanted to mix it up. What also helped me make the decision that the Squad Battles version does specifies play from the U.S. side. So as to mesh with my reading of Seven Firefights, I wanted to experience the fight from the American perspective.

– A not-particularly bone-like defensive position

When reading the narrative in Seven Firefights, I imagined myself playing Squad Battles. The book describes individual soldiers collecting LAW rocket launchers from wherever they might be stashed away ( plus anything else that might have gone “boom”) in a desperate attempt to halt the approaching enemy tanks. Outside of the FPS genre, Squad Battles is one of the few games that gets down to the individual soldier and his carried weaponry.

The problem is the nature of those stories. For the most part, the weapons did not work. LAWs were often duds, recoilless rifles failed to penetrate, and improvised explosives generally did not do the job. Despite an energetic and heroic defense (note – the Seven Firefights focused almost entirely on the Americans, even while the bulk of the soldiers were Vietnamese irregulars and Laotians), it was mostly ineffective.

In fact, the Squad Battles depiction looked wrong from the moment I started. Seven Firefights describes the Special Forces camp and its defenses as being shaped like a dog bone. It describes a central base camp and various fortified defenses, each occupied by a different force. Indeed, there is a two-page drawing of the defensive positions. The Squad Battles version, above, looks nothing like that. It is merely a claymore-defended perimeter stuffed to bursting with (admittedly) historically-accurate units.

Moreover, these units are incredibly effective. I won the scenario decisively, being forced to give up almost no ground. The one victory location I briefly lost I was quickly able to recapture. Furthermore, I made short work of all of the NVA tanks. The claymores themselves were very effective, as were the recoilless rifles and bazookas. One, maybe two, tanks were eliminated with 50 caliber machine gun fire and least one tank was dispatched with a 30 cal. This is in stark contrast to the actual events where, despite the use of everything that might have possibly been effective in stopping the tanks, the armor kept coming.

– Ah yes. This looks more like the diagrams from the book

Moving on to the Steel Panthers version, I found myself considerably more satisfied, particularly from the setup perspective.

To start, the configuration of the American base looks much, much more like what I would expect based upon the book. Note again that this version is designed to be played from the NVA side only, explaining why the map you see is empty. This only makes sense. Any computer opponent’s performance is best when assigned the role of static defense.

– Playing as the attacker, I begin to breach the base defenses. Granted, this is not the historically-accurate defense which bore the initial assault, but no matter.

Perhaps part of the experience is that, playing as the side who likes to use human wave attacks, watching my soldiers being slaughtered seemed to be simply par for the course, as opposed to the human tragedy that it really was. Lang Vei is also a little more interesting than most Steel Panthers “assault” scenarios, the ones I’ve played as the Americans, because the American defensive position here is obvious. One doesn’t have to move his little men through the jungle, tripping over hidden anti-tank teams. I can see the American defense plainly on the map. See those fortified positions? That’s from where your enemy will be defending.

Once engaged, the performance of the equipment is a lot closer to that described in Seven Firefights. I still think the tanks are too brittle, a complaint I’ve made in most of my scenarios. I also found the CIDG riflemen to exhibit incredible marksmanship at extreme range. But the results aren’t totally out of whack with reality in the way the Squad Battles seemed to be.

– Air strikes were barely mentioned in Seven Firefights. Here they decapitate my entire command.

Although I enjoyed the scenario, especially at the beginning, I didn’t necessarily do any better than I usually do. I scored a draw and by the end of the time limit had pretty much lost all momentum in my attack. I managed to breach the inner defenses of the Base Camp but just barely. I’d say I underperformed history… unless I should be expecting a second wave of attackers to be arriving shortly.

Lang Vei also was a little less annoying than most Steel Panthers scenarios with regard to the interminable turn resolution sequences. I think the nature of the defense, where each position is NOT supporting the others, makes the defensive fire sequences go by much more quickly. It is impossible for the Americans to fire all of their guns at once.

I still wish someone would remake this tactical-level, cold war sandbox to do everything Steel Panthers gets right, but better.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or continue on for a rare scenario featuring a naval engagement off the coast of Vietnam.