Because of air supply by the Military Airlift Command, Khe Sanh could be considered not a siege like Dien Bien Phu but a battle in which the Marines were at the most forward salient in the front lines. In 1982, Khe Sanh veteran Captain William Dabney said: ‘In my understanding of the term, we were certainly not cut off from the outside world. We could reinforce, we could withdraw, we could resupply and we could support. We were in a position where land reinforcements would have been quite difficult, but in all senses we were not besieged as such.’ The French dropped only 100 tons of supplies on average each day, but the Americans dropped 1,200 tons a day at the height of battle throughout all of February.

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After January 31, as the Tet Offensive got underway, Giap continued his operations at Khe Sanh. Many historians believe its main purpose was as a diversion, citing that Giap never intended to seize the base because he never seriously attacked the base. According to Giap, ‘We strictly followed this fundamental principle of the conduct of a revolutionary war: strike to win, strike only when success is certain; if it is not, then don’t strike.’ On January 22, the day after the first assault on Khe Sanh, a defector, Private Lai Van Minh, after surrendering to Marines at Khe Sanh, declared that his political officer had told the men that if the initial attack on Khe Sanh failed, North Vietnamese forces would pull back into Laos and then return to attack again around February 3. This did occur, but two more assaults failed. Between February 7 and 10, three regiments of the Route 9 Front slipped away and ended up fighting the 1st Cavalry outside Hue.

General Giap continued the assaults not because Khe Sanh was a diversion but because Phase II had stalled, except at Hue, and he hoped to jump-start it again. He also realized that with the firepower the Americans had assembled in defense of Khe Sanh he could not take the base. Thus he reverted back to his offensive doctrine and hoped to keep Phase II afloat. When it became apparent that Phase II was unsuccessful, he canceled the second wave of the phase. Westmoreland carried out the relief of Khe Sanh, called Operation Pegasus, but only after I Corps was stabilized and secured. In fact, Westmoreland also reverted to Khe Sanh’s pre-Tet purpose as a jump-off point for the Laos invasion, which as late as March 10 he believed would be approved.

War, as Karl von Clausewitz pointed out in 1832, is waged ‘against an animate object that reacts.’ A war is not a perfect series of cause-and-effect events. Nor is an offensive or battle a perfectly followed script. Opposing commanders are constantly changing, developing and reacting to each other. This state of flux makes the course of a war, an offensive or a battle dynamic and unpredictable. This happened in the Vietnam War between Giap and Westmoreland. Khe Sanh became the crossroads of the two generals. In a 1988 interview, Laura Palmer asked Westmoreland if he could sit down with any of the NVA commanders, who would it be and what would he ask them. The general replied, ‘Giap’ and said he wanted to ask him why he launched the Tet Offensive, and how he knew that the Americans were not going to cross the Laotian or Cambodian borders. But those questions now have been answered.

This article was written by James I. Marino and and was originally published in the December 1999 issue of Vietnam magazine.

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