This topic contains 484 replies, has 35 voices, and was last updated by 
madman1960 5 years, 7 months ago.
-
We had a great stream the other night – drawing a Vietnam map for Valor & Victory. The first half of the stream has now been edited and posted to YouTube on the Sitrep Podcast channel. Check it out! Also, we’ll be playing on this map later today live on Twitch, where @stvitusdancern will take a try with our new US Special Forces units.
Stream time: 8PM UK time / 3PM US East
Video for map design / drawing:
Even if you don’t do hex-and-counter games, would you consider a custom drawn map like this to perhaps have printed on a gaming mat?
So I’ve taken a brief break from Omaha to build and run a game with @stvitusdancern on the Sitrep Command Team. The game was Valor & Victory (Barry Doyle, Vietnam Expansion by @oriskany ) where we pitted a platoon of US Special Forces up against Vietnamese regulars (PAVN) near the Laotian border, Kon Tum Province, South Vietnamese Central Highlands, III Corps, mid-December 1967.
The general situation in this part of the war was dominated by a VC/NVA build-up for the Tet Offensive that would hit in January-February 1968. During this build-up, large contingents of NVA troops and weapons for the VC would come down the the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia – with branches leading off the trail at many points, leading into South Vietnam. American and ARVN ground forces were not allowed into Laos and Cambodia, but they could interdict these forces as they crossed into South Vietnam, hopefully stopping the buildup and perhaps using intelligence gained in these actions (prisoners / captured documents) to build a better picture about the Tet Offensive that was building up.
So here are the Special Forces units I put together in Valor & Victory to facilitate this game. We have Special Forces squads, half-squads, and medic teams. There are also leaders. They are named for American Revolutionary War Generals. The leader is Morgan, named for Daniel Morgan, leader of the 11th Virginia (the “Virginia Riflemen”) and founder of the Rangers. He is often recognized as the “father” of American Special Forces.
Vietnamese forces. These the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), often called in Western Press as the NVA (North Vietnamese Army). These are not South Vietnamese communist guerrillas like we see with the VC (National Liberation Front, or NLF). This is a hardened, trained, regular rifle company of the formal army of Hanoi.
The Special Forces platoon. They are carried in four UH-1 Iroquois transport helos (more typically called the “Huey”) – the “slick” configuration without significant guns. The last helo on the bottom is a full-on UH-1H Gunship, which has sacrificed half its troop carrying capacity for some small degree of armor plating and rockets and guns … LOTS of guns.
Here is the map I drew up for this game, live on Twitch, on Thursday. Seven objective hexes will be designated. Gianna must take at least four (the majority) to win the game by the end of Turn 6.
The battle begins. All NVA units begin “masked” – obscured as black counters until Gianna’s troops spot them, move adjacent to them, or they fire on Gianna’s units. During her initial movement phase (as helos entered the board), my NVA captain and a heavy machine gun crew on high ground (DShK 12.7mm) open fire on one of her birds, hitting and damaging it but JUST MISSING shooting it down. Instead it is “Pinned” (helos that are “pinned” have to withdraw from range of enemy gunfire and stay there until “rallied”.) But now that NVA gun position is revealed, and in comes Gianna’s gunship to release .50 cal, 7.62mm MG, and 2.75-inch rockets. BOOM! There goes the DShK (and my captain). However, the American commander (Captain Morgan) has landed on the ground to the east and headed north into those hooches, only to discover that those masked NVA units were “dummies” – “EMPTY JUNGLE.” Throughout the game Gianna will have to discern where my forces really are, and how they are deployed. The Vietnamese are always hidden in this war, after all.
Some more NVA units reveal themselves to the north, where I try to attack MSgt Herkimer’s Squad once it becomes a little too isolated wading across that stream. That’s three half-squads, one of them carrying an RPG-7. But those are Special Forces, and their opportunity fire more or less annihilates this force before they can mount the assault. So far we have one NVA officer and 16 men either killed, wounded, or driven off, with really no losses to the Americans other than a damaged UH-1 (and perhaps a wounded pilot or co-pilot or crew chief). But this game is just getting started!
Part One of the video recording of our Valor & Victory: Vietnam game played live ( @stvitusdancern vs. @oriskany ) on Saturday, June 22.
More to come! Enjoy!
Part Two of the video recording of our Valor & Victory: Vietnam game played live ( @stvitusdancern vs. @oriskany ) on Saturday, June 22.
Part Three will be the finale. Meanwhile, enjoy!
Great write-up, @yavasa ! 😀 I have not tried this game myself, but I’ve played other Decision Games titles and am a long-time subscriber to the Strategy & Tactics magazine series in which these games are initially rolled out, reviewed, and “published.”
We discussed Khe Sanh at length in our recent Tet Offensive article series. I realize some historians may not consider Khe Sanh strictly part of the Tet Offensive, which was mostly an NLF / Viet Cong effort rather than a PAVN / NVA offensive like Khe Sanh. But they were taking place at the same time and I feel were both part of the overall communist effort in the opening months of ’68.
26th Marine Regiment (along with a contingent of South Vietnamese Rangers and later 1st Bn / 9th Marines) were incredibly outnumbered by perhaps 40,000 NVA troops in all (three divisions, 304, 324, and 325C). So yes, the air power had to be extreme. I hope it didn’t make your game feel lopsided or “wonky,” but Khe Sanh is literally the heaviest use of tactical air power in the history of warfare. If there was EVER a time for airpower to be “OP,” it’s here. 😀
Let’s look at some numbers: 54,500 tons of napalm released by TacAir over NVA positions surrounding Khe Sanh. TacAir was very accurate, sometimes hitting NVA “creeping entrenchments” coming to within 300 yards of forward Marine Corps positions.
Moving to the strategic bombers, the B-52s conducting “ArcLite” missions as part of operation Niagara were originally restricted to targets 3400 yards away from the nearest Marine Corps positions (2 miles, already far more accurate). These “ArcLight” strikes were released from much higher altitudes than WW2 bombers (over 30,000 feet in some cases), and were partially guided by electronic ground sensors that had been dropped into the jungle around suspected NVA avenues of approach. As the Battle of Khe Sanh grew more desperate in the last days of February 1968, these B-52 strikes were pulled in to with 1200 yards of Marine positions (3/4 of a mile).
These particular missions landed right on top of NVA positions that had been “trenching” their way toward the Marine perimeter, and included 53,000 tons of bombs. Close-in bombing by B-52s, already a staple of TacAir with “Snake & Nape”, was henceforth a norm for B-52 strikes as well. At the height of the ArcLite bombing, three B-52s were unloading over Khe Sanh every 90 minutes for weeks on end.
In the few miles around Khe Sanh, the 77 days of the siege wound up being hit with about 111,000 tons of bombs. Even if only half of this bombing weight is actual high explosive (accounting for bomb casings, fuses, fins, etc), we’re still talking 55 kilotons of pure explosive, or over five times the explosive power released on Hiroshima. North Vietnamese positions around Khe Sanh are on record as being hit with more aerial bomb tonnage than any other spot in the history of warfare, and a lot of it was within a quarter mile of friendlies.
So when people debate over whether we should have used tactical nuclear weapons at Khe Sanh, and yes, President L B Johnson was considering it, realize that effectively … American airpower DID “nuke” the NVA at Khe Sanh, at least according to a certain interpretation of the numbers.
I especially like how your game wound up concluding when AirCav reinforced Khe Sanh. Historically, this was Operation Pegasus, when units of 1st AirCav Division re-opened Route 9 leading west past Khe Sanh toward the Laotian border. It’s a source of argument to this day between the US Army and US Marine Corps, who insist they “didn’t have to be rescued” – they’d already defeated the NVA divisions trying to take Khe Sanh (well, with plenty of help from USMC, US Navy, and especially US Air Force air power, we we’ve discussed).
I was also interested to see where the NVA tried to take the Rock Pile. In the months leading up to Tet Offensive and Khe Sanh, there is a campaign of battles here in the I Corps sector near the DMZ called “the Hill Fights” – where both sides really tried to take the high ground and set up fire bases like Camp Carrol, the Rock Pile. Artillery is the other crusher in Vietnam games like this, because as mighty as air power can be, artillery is more reliable. It bombards all day, all weather, all night, and is usually more accurate that airpower too.
Also, while the NVA has no real air support of their own (there was ONE fighter-bomber strike that came close to hitting Khe Sanh, I think), the NVA has PLENTY of artillery. at think at the height of the siege, Khe Sanh was hit by something like 1300 shells a day, some 122mm and 130mm shells fired all the way from Laos.
Great game, great blog post! This is EXACTLY the kind of wargame that needs more attention. Great job, I hope to see more!
Some pics from our previous 15mm miniature games at (or strictly speaking, near) Khe Sanh:
“Alpha” Company, 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment (“A”, 1/9 Marines) at Hill 64, an outpost just west of Khe Sanh and part of Khe Sanh’s perimeter defenses – vs. Rgt 101D, 325C Division, People’s Army of Vietnam
Great idea for a game @elessar2590 ! I LOVE it when people design and test out their own games (or modify existing games) on the site. We should try this one weekend on our weekend web games, I think it could adopted for web play very easily.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
