THE U.S. last week began to abandon Khe Sanh, the once idyllic valley in South Viet Nam's northwest corner that early this year became the scene of the war's biggest and bitterest siege. The news could hardly have been more startling. For months, the American people had been told that the base was indispensable to U.S. strategy and prestige. When its 6,200-man garrison came under siege and heavy artillery bombardment from the North Vietnamese in mid-January, some observers saw an ominous similarity to Dienbienphu. The French base had been overrun in 1954 by another North Vietnamese army under the same commander besieging Khe Sanh, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Khe Sanh thus became a symbol —justifiably or not—of U.S. determination to stick it out under heavy pressure.
And yet, scarcely half a year later, the U.S. Marines were out of the base.* Amid occasional incoming shellbursts, bulldozers clattered across the base last week, filling the red clay scars that trenches had cut into the once verdant plateau, burying the hulks of crippled aircraft, Jeeps and trucks. Dust-caked Marines stacked up the aluminum matting that had formed Khe Sanh's 4,000-ft. runway, during the siege, its only link to the outside. Demolition men destroyed bunker after bunker, the single bit of protection against the rain of North Vietnamese steel that had lashed the base for almost half a year and cost its U.S. Marine defenders 199 dead and 1,600 wounded.
Highly Mobile. Why the change of heart about Khe Sanh? The U.S. command in Saigon explained that the tactical situation in northernmost I Corps had been altered dramatically. Whereas the North Vietnamese had the equivalent of only six divisions below the Demilitarized Zone last January, they now had eight. To counter that increased threat, U.S. commanders reasoned, the 271,000 allied forces in the area would have to be highly mobile. A fixed and exposed base like Khe Sanh would no longer make sense. That argument was sensible enough, but it came a little late. Many critics felt from the beginning that mobile tactics were called for in the Khe Sanh area, and that it was a costly mistake to have so many U.S. troops pinned down in a stationary position—even though the siege also pinned down many enemy troops and cost the North Vietnamese an estimated 10,000 casualties.
The argument about the Khe Sanh strategy will probably continue as long as the Vietnamese war is remembered. Khe Sanh had been a U.S. Special Forces camp, with the task of blocking and monitoring infiltration routes from the North. When the enemy started to besiege the camp, that function was rendered impossible. The U.S. nonetheless poured in troops, building up to some 5,700 U.S. Marines and a 500-man South Vietnamese Ranger battalion. The Marines were not anxious to make a stand there: they sat at the end of a 27-mile supply line on Communist-interdicted Highway 9, the weather was turning bad with the onset of the Northeast monsoon, and they had done little in the way of fortifying the isolated defense complex.