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The Khe Sanh Siege On January 21, 1968, North Vietnamese forces surrounded U.S. Marines at Khe Sanh in 1968, beginning a 77-day siege that became one of the Vietnam War’s most controversial battles. Around midnight, January 21, 1968, Company K of the 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines, was digging in on Hill 861 when the first mortar rounds fell. The Marines dropped into fighting positions as explosions tore through the northwest perimeter. Within minutes, roughly 300 North Vietnamese soldiers emerged from the darkness and crashed through the wire. What followed was savage, close-quarters fighting in the trenches as artillery from Khe Sanh Combat Base pounded the hillside. By dawn on January 21, 1968, the attackers had been driven back, leaving 47 North Vietnamese dead scattered across the slope. The siege of Khe Sanh had begun. Colonel David Lownds had taken command of the 26th Marine Regiment at Khe Sanh five months earlier. A 46-year-old veteran of World War II’s Pacific campaigns at Roi-Namur, Saipan, and Iwo Jima, he now commanded roughly 6,000 Marines and South Vietnamese troops defending a remote plateau in northwestern Quang Tri Province, 14 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone and six miles from the Laotian border. The base sat astride Route 9, anchoring a defensive line intended to block North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam’s northern provinces. Intelligence reports in December 1967 and early January painted an ominous picture. Acoustic sensors detected large troop movements, and reconnaissance patrols spotted elements of several North Vietnamese divisions converging on the area. On January 2, a Marine patrol killed six men near the perimeter, including a regimental commander and his operations officer conducting reconnaissance. The discovery confirmed what General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, already believed: Khe Sanh was being prepared for a major assault. He reinforced the base and welcomed the prospect, intent on using overwhelming firepower against a concentrated enemy. That expectation was confirmed hours later. At 5:30 AM on January 21, North Vietnamese artillery opened fire on the main combat base. Hundreds of mortar rounds and 122mm rockets slammed into the compound, and a direct hit on the main ammunition dump, holding more than 1,500 tons of explosives, triggered massive secondary explosions that burned for hours. By the time the fires died out, nearly all of the base’s stored ammunition had been destroyed. Fourteen Marines were killed and 43 were wounded. At the same time, North Vietnamese forces overran the village of Khe Sanh, forcing American advisers and South Vietnamese troops to withdraw under fire. Lownds now faced a desperate situation. Ammunition reserves had been devastated on the first day of the siege, and Route 9 had been cut by enemy ambushes months earlier, making overland resupply impossible. The base would have to be sustained entirely by air, requiring an estimated 185 tons of supplies each day. Enemy artillery in the surrounding hills and across the Laotian border commanded the airstrip, subjecting every incoming aircraft to intense fire. North Vietnamese units held key high ground, including Hill 881 North, abandoned by the Marines the previous summer, allowing observers to direct accurate fire onto the runway and defenses. The Marines had fortified four key hilltop outposts around the base, Hills 881 South, 861, 558, and 861A. These positions formed the outer defensive ring, each manned by a rifle company living in bunkers and trenches. Holding the hills was essential. If the North Vietnamese seized them, they could place artillery observers close enough to direct devastating fire onto the base itself. Lownds committed to an active defense, ordering patrols to probe enemy positions, disrupt preparations, and prevent siege trenches from creeping too close to the wire. These patrols moved through hostile terrain under constant threat of ambush. The North Vietnamese soon settled into a rhythm of relentless bombardment punctuated by infantry assaults. On February 5, enemy forces struck Hill 861A with a four-hour artillery barrage followed by a ground assault that penetrated the northern perimeter. Marines counterattacked and drove the attackers back, leaving more than 100 North Vietnamese dead on the slopes. Three days later, North Vietnamese units supported by Soviet-made PT-76 tanks overran the Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, just southwest of the base. It marked the first large-scale use of enemy armor in the war. Survivors broke through enemy lines and reached Khe Sanh’s perimeter. The fall of Lang Vei tightened the noose around the main base. As the siege dragged on, Khe Sanh drew the attention of the highest levels of government. President Lyndon Johnson became fixated on the battle, studying a tabletop model of the base in the White House situation room and demanding frequent updates. The specter of Dien Bien Phu haunted American commanders. In 1954, North Vietnamese forces had surrounded and destroyed a French garrison in a similarly isolated valley, effectively ending French colonial rule in Indochina. Determined that history would not repeat itself, Westmoreland unleashed Operation Niagara, a massive aerial bombardment campaign. B-52 bombers flew around-the-clock missions while tactical aircraft delivered napalm, rockets, and bombs in direct support of the Marines. Over the course of the siege, American and allied aircraft dropped more than 100,000 tons of munitions around Khe Sanh. For 77 days, Marines lived in bunkers and trenches under constant shelling. Morning fog often blanketed the base, grounding aircraft and leaving the defenders exposed. Resupply became a deadly gamble. Transport planes landed under fire, unloaded in minutes, and took off as enemy shells exploded nearby. Other supplies were delivered by parachute or by low-altitude extraction, pallets dragged from cargo planes flying just above the runway. By the end of February, roughly one Marine in ten at Khe Sanh had been killed or wounded. In early April, the 1st Cavalry Division launched Operation Pegasus, an overland relief effort supported by South Vietnamese troops. Helicopters inserted soldiers onto key terrain along Route 9 while engineers repaired the battered road. On April 6, cavalry units linked up with the 9th Marines south of the Khe Sanh airstrip, officially lifting the siege. A week later, Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines assaulted Hill 881 North and drove the enemy from its positions. Westmoreland declared Khe Sanh a victory, arguing that North Vietnamese forces had suffered catastrophic losses. Critics countered that the battle had been a costly diversion, possibly intended to draw American attention away from the Tet Offensive, which erupted across South Vietnam just days after the siege began. In July, American commanders chose to abandon Khe Sanh rather than risk defending it again. Marines destroyed what they could not evacuate, and North Vietnamese troops occupied the base within hours of the withdrawal. The siege left hundreds of Americans dead and thousands wounded, and far more North Vietnamese casualties whose true number was never known. The 26th Marines were later awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, their defense praised as extraordinary heroism under sustained attack. Yet within months, the base they had bled to hold was dismantled and abandoned, leaving Khe Sanh remembered less as a clear victory than as a measure of what the war demanded, and how quickly it moved on. Historical Context By January 1968, the Vietnam War had become the defining test of American Cold War strategy. Nearly 500,000 U.S. troops were deployed in South Vietnam under the logic of the domino theory, the belief that the fall of one nation to communism would trigger the collapse of others across Southeast Asia. General William Westmoreland had assured Congress and the public throughout 1967 that his war of attrition was succeeding, that North Vietnamese forces were being steadily degraded, and that victory was within reach. The Johnson administration staked its credibility on those claims. Yet intelligence reports late that year told a different story, revealing large-scale North Vietnamese troop movements toward key targets and signaling preparations for a major offensive. The siege at Khe Sanh began just nine days before the Tet Offensive erupted across more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam, directly contradicting official assurances and shattering public confidence in military and political leadership. At home, the war had already begun to fracture American society. Television carried combat into living rooms each night as casualty figures mounted without visible strategic gains. Anti-war protests expanded from scattered campus demonstrations into mass movements drawing hundreds of thousands, while public support for the war declined steadily. The credibility gap between official optimism and battlefield reality widened, and opposition increasingly centered on the belief that Vietnam was a political and nationalist struggle rather than a conflict that military force alone could resolve. The generational divide deepened as young Americans faced the draft while questioning the war’s legitimacy. When Walter Cronkite concluded after visiting Vietnam in February 1968 that the war appeared unwinnable, his assessment resonated with a nation already beginning to suspect it had been misled.