The Withdrawal from Khe Sanh

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The decision to abandon Khe Sanh is better described as a tactical withdrawal rather than a forced retreat. The Marines on the ground were willing to maintain their positions at Khe Sanh if ordered to do so. I was at Khe Sanh from December 1967, before the fighting began, until April 1968, when the siege was officially declared ended. There was no sense that we were a defeated force, and I had no idea the base was scheduled for closing. My Marine unit was told that we would remain at Khe Sanh until another mortar battery could replace us. When that happened we relocated to the east and continued operations against the North Vietnamese.

The aggressive spirit of the encircled Marine garrison at Khe Sanh is exemplified by a comment made by a Marine commander who found his unit in a similar position during the Korean War. Told his regiment was surrounded by Communist forces near the Chosin Reservoir on November 28, 1950, General (then colonel) Chesty Puller said, that simplifies our problems of finding these people and killing them. Intelligence personnel of the 26th Marine Regiment at Khe Sanh were well aware of Communist tactics at Dien Bien Phu. Initially, the Marines at Khe Sanh had tried to keep the North Vietnamese from getting too close to the base. Massed artillery fired could have accomplished this. With the overland route to Khe Sanh closed, it proved impossible to deliver sufficient massed artillery fires from a logistics standpoint–aerial resupply simply could not deliver the volume of artillery rounds needed. When that became evident, the Marines decided to let the North Vietnamese move in close to the base in order to simplify the problem of locating and destroying them. The Marines did just that until they were ordered elsewhere.

Since the Communists did not share the American belief in favorable kill ratios, it is necessary to use different criteria to determine who achieved a favorable outcome at Khe Sanh. In the long run, who had use of the combat base? In March 1973, American officials in Saigon reported that North Vietnamese troops had rebuilt the old airstrip at Khe Sanh and were using it for courier flights into the south. That was the first time North Vietnamese airplanes had flown into South Vietnam.

A New York Times story dated May 7, 1973, noted that several thousand North Vietnamese laborers had been sent south to construct roads and airfields. The single most ambitious project was construction of an all-weather road from Khe Sanh, through the A Shau Valley, to the outskirts of Da Nang. The same report indicated Khe Sanh was being developed into a major logistical center by the Communists. This represented a complete reversal of the supply path of the Marine Corps garrison at Khe Sanh, whose supplies frequently arrived from their logistical center at Da Nang. The NVA installed at least a dozen surface-to-air missiles sites around Khe Sanh in addition to anti-aircraft guns. Those facts cast further doubt on the explanation of American military commanders that Khe Sanh no longer had strategic value in the context of the war in Vietnam.

Although conventional war was what America fought best, Vietnam is known as a war without fronts. Consequently, search and destroy operations were the means by which America would try to win the war of attrition. Even though General Westmoreland acknowledged that a commander…wins no battles by sitting back waiting for the enemy to come to him, this is precisely the role he assigned to the Marines at Khe Sanh.

As a percentage of North Vietnam’s prewar population, the number of NVA killed in the war against the Americans was equal to the percentages of those killed in several of the European nations laid waste during World War I. Westmoreland was unable to grasp why his adversaries found that rate tolerable. The answer is, of course, because the stakes were equivalent for the Europeans and the Vietnamese Communists. As military historian Ronald Spector has pointed out, during the first half of 1968 (the period of heavy fighting at Khe Sanh), the Marine casualty rate in Vietnam exceeded the rate of American casualties in either the European or Pacific theater of World War as well as during the Korean War. With nothing to be gained by the Marines at Khe Sanh beyond killing Communists, ordering their withdrawal and closing the base was a sensible political and military decision. Although many claim that the United States never lost a battle in Vietnam, it is impossible to reasonably put the fighting at Khe Sanh in the American win column.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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