On May 23, 1968, U.S. Marine Corps Colonel David E. Lownds was invited to the White House. There, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Lownds’ 26th Marine Regiment the Presidential Unit Citation, the nation’s highest unit decoration, for its bravery at Khe Sanh in 1968. The text noted that because of the unit’s actions, ‘enemy forces were denied the military and psychological victory they so desperately sought. An editorial in the Washington Star took the Marines’ accolades even further, claiming that One day, in fact, the victory over the siege may be judged a decisive turning point that finally convinced the enemy he could not win.

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Vietnamese Communists view Khe Sanh differently. For them, not only did the Americans not win a victory at Khe Sanh, they were forced to retreat in order to avoid destruction. The Communists claim Khe Sanh was a stinging defeat from both the military and political points of view.

The fighting at Khe Sanh during Tet 1968 was widely covered in the U.S. media. As the battle continued, American military commanders gave frequent explanations as to why the United States sought a confrontation with Communist forces.

Khe Sanh had been garrisoned by Americans since 1962. General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, felt maintaining a presence at Khe Sanh was critically important. It served as a patrol base for interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as the western terminus for the defensive line along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and as a barrier to Communist efforts to carry the fighting into the populated coastal regions of South Vietnam. By early 1968, 6,000 Marines at Khe Sanh were surrounded by 20,000 North Vietnamese troops. The siege began on January 21, 1968. In a report dated February 18, the New York Times explained the importance of Khe Sanh, noting that this area in northwest South Vietnam provided a base for allied operations against the infiltration by the Communists of men and supplies into the south. After the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) surrounded the Marine position at Khe Sanh, allied forces were unable to inhibit this infiltration; it became too dangerous for the Marines to leave their base in sufficient numbers to greatly affect the movement of enemy forces. Although that situation may have reduced the strategic value of Khe Sanh in any conventional sense of the word, American military commanders believed the United States would suffer a heavy psychological blow if they retreated from Khe Sanh.

Unlike the Americans, the North Vietnamese were unable to hold fixed positions due to the efficacy of allied firepower. As a result, the Communists concentrated on harassing and disrupting allied forces. The American military command concluded that the only way to stop the disruption was to destroy enemy forces in sufficient numbers. The American commanders hoped that at Khe Sanh they would be able to kill enemy troops in a ratio of 10 to 1, 20 to 1, or even 30 to 1. The Americans clung to their belief in the value of a positive kill ratio in face of compelling evidence showing they were mostly unable to achieve it.

Despite the fact that Khe Sanh was encircled by enemy troops, the U.S. Defense Department claimed that the fortress blocked five avenues of infiltration from Laos into South Vietnam. According to the official view of the situation in February 1968, if Khe Sanh were abandoned, entire North Vietnamese divisions could pour down Route 9 [the major east-west highway below the DMZ] and four other natural approaches through the valleys and could overrun a chain of Marine positions; the Rockpile, Con Thien, Dong Ha, and Phu Bai to the east. This would mean that the North Vietnamese could be in a good position to seize control of South Vietnam’s two northernmost provinces, Quang Tri and Thua Thien, with grave political and psychological consequences.

This strategic rationale was secondary to the primary reason for holding onto Khe Sanh: Washington was unwilling to give its enemy a psychological victory by giving ground. One official source explained the basis for this reasoning by recalling the first Battle of Khe Sanh, fought in 1967. We had to put our foot down, and for psychological and political reasons, we wouldn’t want to pull back, said the official. What would the newspapers have written if we had given up Khe Sanh afterward?

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