Site of Khe Sanh Combat Base (The Siege Of Khe-Sanh)

Khe Sanh is more than just a marine combat-base forever linked with the wearying and controversial seventy-seven day siege in 1968. It became the symbol of America's will to stand fast against a presumed, but never-proven major invasion of the North Vietnamese into the South.

In the Northwest corner of South Vietnam, Khe Sanh was below the DMZ and astride the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with led in and out of nearby Laos. In 1967 General William Westmoreland upgraded the base in the belief the marines at Khe Sanh would stop the flow of supplies and troops from the North. By early 1968 there were more than six thousand men on the base and in defensive outposts on the hills ringing Khe Sanh.

Covered by red dirt, and main combat-base and its air strip were on volcanic rock. The camp was either dusty and dry, or muddy and wet, depending on the time of the year. Rain and fog seeped into and rotted everything during the Siege, including clothing and the underground bunkers, reminiscent of World War I, where the marines lived. An estimated twenty-five thousand or more North Vietnamese troops in the high hills above Khe Sanh soon encircled the base.

The Seige started on January 21, 1968, when the north Vietnamese shelled the base with more than one thousand mortar rounds, rockets, ang heavy artillery. there was no place to hide. The marines started building underground bunkers, where they lived through the rumble of enemy artillery and the constant, merciless enemy shelling. Occasionally marines patrols went in search of the enemy end engaged their foe. Mostly, though, they stayed in place. They did not understand what they were doing there, but being good marines, they waited for orders to move out, wanting to do what marines did best: Attack. But the order never came.

The Shelling was ceaseless, making life miserable. The United States retaliated against the North's entrenched positions with massive B-52 tactical air strikes, and heavy artillery. Bombs sometimes landed as close as five hundred yards from the ring of barbed wire enclosing the base's perimeter. The rounds never stopped falling on the base. Ten days after the first shelling, the Tet Offensive started. With it, there was a growing belief that Khe Sanh was a diversion by the North, a way to keep six thousand highly traned marines out of the fight. That is something we will never know.

The seige officially ended on April 7, 1968, with the arrival of the U.S Army's Seventh Cavalry. Two hundred five marines died during the seige, and there were fewer than one thousand wounded. Some thought that was not a high price to pay, considering that estimates of enemy dead go as high as twenty thousand because of B-52 strikes and the heavy shelling of their mountain positions. U.S. troops departed from the base in mid-June 1968, but the base was reoccupied repeatedly by Americans until the end of the war. It was as if Khe Sanh had a mystical significance hidden somewhere beneath the dense mountain fog that covered the base from the beginning of time.