When the American soldier leapt from his helicopter, he was also confronted by a fighting man as well or perhaps better armed than he was. The Vietnamese infantryman wielded the finest of assault rifles — the AK-47. The weapon was the work of a brilliant Soviet firearms designer — Mikhail Kalashnikov. It was fully automatic and rarely jammed, in contrast to the American M-16 rifle, which required constant cleaning to prevent a stoppage. The gallows humor about the AK-47 was that if you dropped it in the mud, you could pick it up, bang it against a tree to clear it, and it would start firing again.

The B-40 rocket-propelled grenade was another product of the Soviet arsenal that the Vietnamese infantryman possessed. Its pineapple shaped warhead at the end of the launcher had formidable blast and fragmentation effect. Nor did the Vietnamese want for any lack of heavier, crew-served machine guns.

It typically took three days of air and artillery bombardment to expose the bunkers by blasting away the trees and other overhead cover. By then the Vietnamese survivors would be gone, carrying most of their dead and wounded with them. Despite all the protection the bunker complexes provided them, the Vietnamese suffered severe casualties. They mitigated their losses to some extent by seizing and holding the initiative. Studies showed that 80 to 90 percent of the time it was the Vietnamese and not the Americans who initiated combat or decided to fight another day. But no one could endure all the violence the Americans could hurl at them and not get hurt. The Vietnamese were, however, prepared to accept these casualties. They were fighting for the reunification and independence of their motherland, while the American soldier served in a half-conscript, half-volunteer army fighting a war of empire thousands of miles from home.

The “hill fights,” as they were called, unfolded through 1967 as General Giap lured General Westmoreland into one battle after another. The most gruesome occurred in late November 1967 near the outpost of Dak To in northern Kontum Province in the Central Highlands. It became known as “Hill 875” after the military practice of naming a battleground for its height in meters. Colonel Jonathan Ladd, known as Fred, the Special Forces commander in Vietnam in 1967 and a friend from earlier years when he had been an adviser to a South Vietnamese infantry division in the Mekong Delta, told me what had happened.

Fred had a camp at Dak To. It suddenly came under mortar fire. The Special Forces were composed then of mountain tribal mercenaries led by experienced and canny Army noncommissioned officers. Fred flew up to Dak To from his headquarters at Nha Trang on the coast and sent out patrols to ascertain the source of the mortar fire. They discovered that the Vietnamese had built another of these man traps on Hill 875 and adjoining ridges. The mortars were a macabre invitation to a fight for the bunker complex. General Westmoreland was in Washington, called home by a nervous Lyndon Johnson to shore up public support for the war that was being eroded by the high casualties. The general urged patience. He was winning. “The end begins to come into view,” he assured the nation in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

General Westmoreland’s subordinates knew what he wanted. The 173rd Airborne Brigade was dispatched to Dak To, along with battalions of the Fourth Infantry Division under Maj. Gen. William R. Peers, a respected officer. As soon as Fred briefed him, General Peers announced that he was going to unleash a heliborne assault on the bunker complex. Fred pleaded with him not to do so. “For God’s sake, General, don’t send our people in there,” Fred said. “That’s what the bastards want us to do. They’ll butcher our people. If they want to fight us, let them come down here where we can kill them.”

General Peers refused to listen, imbued as he was with the Westmoreland doctrine of “Find ’em, fix ’em, fight ’em, and destroy ’em.” The paratroops shouted “Airborne all the way,” as they fought their way up the slopes. Two hundred and eighty-seven of these troopers and infantrymen from the Fourth Division died. More than 1,000 were wounded. And as always, when the fight was over, the Vietnamese disappeared.