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It was General William Westmoreland who decided that the base would have to be held. A withdrawal from North Vietnamese encirclement, difficult at best, would not only be a major political and psychological setback for the U.S., he reasoned, but would leave Quang Tri province and the cities of I Corps open to North Vietnamese attack. Before committing the U.S. fully to Khe Sanh's defense, however, President Johnson went to the extraordinary length of extracting a written pledge from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it could be held.
Sole Lifeline. In the event, it was.
The Marines stayed, holed up in flimsy bunkers that could not withstand a direct artillery hit, encircled by North Vietnamese who held most of the high ground, continuously dazed by rocket and 130-and 152-mm. artillery barrages that dumped up to 1,500 rounds a day into the base. North Vietnamese trenches fingered up to the camp's defensive wire. Rats infested the bunkers. Supply planes had to feel their way through rain and clouds and all-too-accurate antiaircraft fire; the hulks of downed aircraft lined the runwav.
Day after day, night after night, U.S. B-52s rumbled over the hills outside the Marine perimeter while the garrison fought off probes and small infantry assaults. By the end of the 77-day siege, the bombers had dropped more than 100,000 tons of explosives, about one-sixth the total used during all of the Korean War. The raids probably helped to prevent the big ground assault that everyone expected. The attack never came, and finally, in late March, the pressure eased. The bothersome question remained of whether Khe Sanh had been a massive diversion to pin down U.S. troops and make it easier for General Giap to attack Vietnamese cities at Tet, or whether—as General Westmoreland insisted —Tet was the diversion and Khe Sanh the main target.
Even after an allied task force of some 30,000 men eventually relieved Khe Sanh against little Communist resistance, the base continued to come under sporadic artillery fire. Route 9, its supply line to the coast, tied down two Marine battalions on anti-ambush duty. In short, Khe Sanh remained a costly place to defend. U.S. commanders now intend to move the western an chor of U.S. defenses south of the DMZ eleven miles northeastward to Landing Zone Stud, the site from which the relief of Khe Sanh, Operation Pegasus, was launched three months ago. Stud, fairly securely nestled in the Khe Sui Soi River valley and now being fortified by U.S. Seabees, has a good airstrip. Unlike Khe Sanh, it is outside the 17-mile reach of North Vietnamese artillery dug into the mountains across the Laotian border. Under the new plan, Marines equipped with borrowed helicopters will try to move fast and throw cordons around North Vietnamese in filtrating the area. They will also substitute aggressive reconnaissance patrols for the blocking role formerly held by Khe Sanh and the hill outposts that surrounded it, which are now also being abandoned. The technique has already had some success: Marine units south of Khe Sanh have interdicted a new infiltration road and killed hundreds of North Vietnamese.