Siege of Khe Sanh Begins

In late 1967 the North Vietnamese Army begins a carefully prepared operation against the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh, in the northwest corner of I Corps. By January 1968, between 15,000 and 30,000 Communist troops converge on the area around the base.

The base, with a small airfield for resupply, guards a primary infiltration route into South Vietnam from Laos. It is the westernmost outpost of the McNamara Line, with some 6,000 Marine defenders, roughly 3,000 garrisoned at Khe Sanh itself. On January 20, North Vietnamese troops attack a U.S. patrol. Early the next morning, a main assault follows. The U.S. reinforces Khe Sanh with artillery and air support, including the massive air campaign, Operation NIAGARA. Intense fighting and artillery barrages last into April.

Throughout the siege, there is some discord between General Westmoreland’s MACV headquarters and Marine Corps leadership. Complex and ill-defined command structures between MACV and III MAF lead General Westmoreland to create MACV Forward at Phu Bai, a new headquarters to oversee the battle for I Corps and bring the Marine fixed-wing aircraft under Air Force control.¹

North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap claimed that the attacks on Khe Sanh were part of a ploy designed to draw American forces away from urban areas in South Vietnam, making Communist attacks on cities and towns easier during the Tet Offensive. Some American historians, particularly those who hold negative views of General William Westmoreland’s conduct of the war, concur with this explanation and believe Westmoreland fell for the trap. These scholars claim that, although the Tet Offensive failed on the battlefield, it nonetheless resulted in a Communist strategic victory, as images of the fighting on the streets of Saigon and Hue convinced many members of the American press and public that the war could not be won by conventional means. This decline in popular support ultimately led to the United States’ slow withdrawal from Vietnam.

Other historians have argued that General Giap’s insistence on the attack at Khe Sanh being a ruse is not entirely truthful, and that the North Vietnamese plans for the Tet Offensive actually hinged on successfully overrunning the Marine garrison at Khe Sanh. These writers believe that the Tet Offensive was planned to consist of a two-pronged assault, in which insurgent attacks in South Vietnam’s towns would incite a popular uprising against the government in Saigon, and then North Vietnamese conventional forces would invade the country across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). With South Vietnam overrun by Viet Cong insurgents and the northernmost provinces under Communist occupation, the United States would have to negotiate an end to the war on Hanoi’s terms, as the French had after Dien Bien Phu. For these scholars, the Tet Offensive never achieved its objectives because the Americans and South Vietnamese stalled the Communist invasion at Khe Sanh, while B-52 strikes decimated General Giap’s besieging forces caught in the open. Additionally, Communist insurgent attacks across South Vietnam failed everywhere because reinforcements from the North never materialized. Some authors go further to argue that the United States erred by not exploiting the victory at Khe Sanh and invading North Vietnam in the summer of 1968.

Davidson, Phillip B. Vietnam At War: The History, 1946-1975. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Ford, Ronnie E. Tet 1968: Understanding the Surprise. Portland, OR: F. Cass, 1995.

Lewy, Guenter. America in Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

Summers, Harold G. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1982.

Willbanks, James H. The Tet Offensive: A Concise History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.