Marine Base at Khe Sanh Still Claiming Victims : Vietnam: Old mines and bombs kill and maim thousands in the area in 25 years since fierce battle.

As dark clouds glower overhead and a cold wind kicks up stinging red grit, Le Dai shuffles slowly down the path, carrying a simple hoe and scythe on one shoulder and dragging a left leg made of wood.

“I stepped on a mine,” he explains. “I was seeking the steel.”

Twenty-five years after one of the fiercest and most controversial battles in the Vietnam War, the former U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh is still claiming victims. Officials say at least 5,000 people have been killed or maimed here and at other battlegrounds near the former border with North Vietnam since the war ended in 1975. Mines, bombs and other deadly ordnance still litter the land.

Many of the victims are impoverished local farmers who search once-famous bases south of the DMZ, the so-called demilitarized zone, for whatever they can salvage and sell: American dog tags, helmets, flak jackets, medical equipment, rifles, bombs and more.

“We heard there was a hospital underground,” said Dai, 48, who digs at Khe Sanh when he’s not tending his rice. “But until now, we haven’t found it.”

Not for want of trying, however. The barren landscape at Khe Sanh is pocked with countless freshly dug holes, some as small as foxholes, others as gaping as bomb craters. As at most battlefields, there is a ghostly feel here, a silence broken only by wind rustling through dry brush and between the low hills and red hummocks.

And the debris of a distant war is everywhere.

Here is a small pile of rusting artillery shell casings, there a twist of barbed wire. Here an American combat boot sticks up, heel first, tangled in vines. There is a brown bottle marked “Shake Well.” Bits of webbing, torn ponchos, shredded sandbags, as well as rusted bullets and corroded shrapnel, are underfoot. The bigger booty is underground.

“Once we found a whole bulldozer five meters in the ground,” Dai said proudly.

Scrap prices are up these days--about 4 cents for a pound of steel, even more for aluminum or brass. That’s because supply is down. Pickings are slim after so many years.

“Buyers come from Saigon, but not so much now,” said Nguyen Thi Lan, a scrap dealer in nearby Khe Sanh village. Her current offerings, dumped in a rusting heap by the road, include defused 500-pound bombs, artillery shell casings, mortar rounds, tank treads, barbed wire and oil drums.

But a few treasures apparently remain. Coffee farmer Nguyen Viet and his friends unearthed an intact armored vehicle two years ago beside the former airstrip. “Inside were many papers belonging to the U.S. Army,” he said, pointing proudly to a deep hole at the end of the still-visible airstrip.

Le Hung, a 15-year-old wearing a denim jacket, rode up on his bicycle to offer other souvenirs. He jangled seven tarnished dog tags on a string, each stamped with a name, serial number, blood type, religion and “USMC”--U.S. Marine Corps. The asking price: 50 cents each.

“We find them in the soil,” he said.

The other end of the airstrip has a small concrete monument, erected by the Vietnamese government after the war. It chronicles the Communists’ version of what became the most famous siege of the Vietnam War.

Originally a small camp for U.S. Army Special Forces, Khe Sanh by 1967 had been built up as the westernmost fortified American outpost south of the de facto demarcation line between North and South Vietnam. The goal was to prevent infiltration to the south, intercepting Communist troops and supplies flowing down the nearby Ho Chi Minh Trail.

From the coast to the border of Laos, obscure hills and tiny outposts with names like Dong Ha, Con Thien, Cam Lo, Camp Carroll, Doc Mieu, the Rockpile and Hamburger Hill saw some of the bloodiest battles of the war. And the one at Khe Sanh Combat Base was the worst.

In late 1967, U.S. intelligence reports indicated that 40,000 North Vietnamese infantry, stiffened by artillery and armored units, were converging on Khe Sanh. The Americans moved 6,000 Marines onto the base, bolstered its defenses and launched a bombing cascade appropriately named Operation Niagara.

The actual siege began on Jan. 21, 1968, and lasted 75 days--much of it televised for U.S. viewers. Vietnamese artillery pounded the base day after day; fierce assaults were launched on the perimeter. As many as 500 Marines died.

But giant B-52s and other bombers, in turn, dropped more than 75,000 tons of high-explosive and napalm bombs on enemy positions in nearby mountains and hills, the most ever dropped on a single tactical target. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, considered using tactical nuclear weapons, but the proposal was rejected by Washington.

To President Lyndon B. Johnson, the siege was reminiscent of the 1954 French debacle at Dien Bien Phu, which ended the colonial era in Indochina. Johnson grew so obsessed with Khe Sanh that he had a sand-table model built in the White House to follow the battle. In an unprecedented step, he even ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sign a declaration of faith in Westmoreland’s ability to hold Khe Sanh.

In the end, the long-awaited full-scale ground attack never came. Instead, the North Vietnamese planned and launched the Tet Offensive, which saw coordinated attacks for the first time on scores of provincial and district capitals, as well as Saigon. The siege of Khe Sanh, most historians say, was just a diversion.

And in July, 1968, three months after the siege, the Marines burned, blew up or buried much of their gear and pulled out of Khe Sanh. The base where so many had died--and where some continue to die--was deemed unnecessary.