Battle of Khe Sanh

In early 1968, North Vietnamese forces surrounded and bombarded the U.S. combat base at Khe Sanh near the Laotian border. Roughly 6,000 Marines and supporting troops held the base while U.S. aircraft and artillery struck surrounding positions on a massive scale and supplies were delivered largely by air. The siege lasted 77 days before ground forces reopened the road in April. The base was later abandoned as U.S. strategy changed. Comparisons with Dien Bien Phu shaped American decision-making, but historians still debate whether North Vietnam intended to capture Khe Sanh or use it partly to divert attention and forces during the Tet Offensive.

The White House had a terrain model of the base built and Johnson asked the Joint Chiefs for written assurance that it would hold, an unusual document that survives as evidence of how far the fear of another Dien Bien Phu reached. The air campaign around the base, one of the heaviest concentrations of bombing in the war, has been studied since for what it did and did not accomplish. The argument over whether the siege was meant to take the base or to draw attention before the Tet offensive shifted when Vietnamese official histories became available in the 1990s, though they answered the question less cleanly than either side of the debate had hoped. The base was abandoned within months of being relieved, which several correspondents noted at the time and which shaped how the whole episode was later remembered.