Rare Combat Footage From The 77 Day Vietnam Siege Of Khe Sanh

At about 5:00 in the morning on the 21st of January, 1968, Colonel David Louns had three separate battles running at once, and no clear idea which of them was the real one. The first was the base itself. Mortar rounds, rocket fire, and artillery came down on the Kesan combat base almost simultaneously.

Not the harassing fire the Marines had grown used to, but a coordinated barrage. The second was 2 and a half miles to the northwest. Hill 861, one of the high points Louns Marines held above the valley, came underground assault by what appeared to be a North Vietnamese battalion. That fight in fact had started slightly earlier.

The third was down in Kesan village where a combined action unit, Marines living and operating alongside local militia, was being attacked by roughly a battalion of its own. Three attacks, one regiment, and around all of it in the ravines and under the triple canopy foliage on the surrounding slopes, an enemy force whose exact size and exact intentions the Americans could only estimate.

Louns had commanded at Kesan since August. He had spent months watching intelligence reports thicken. He knew what an encirclement looked like, and as the reports came in that morning, his concern was simple and immediate. That the North Vietnamese were closing the base. Then a few minutes into it, the situation got considerably worse.

The main ammunition dump went up. In Loun’s own recollection, the whole thing was already boiling in the pot when the dump detonated and sent rounds flying across the plateau in every direction. The garrison stockpile, the ammunition that was supposed to see it through exactly this kind of fight, burned and exploded in front of the men who were going to need it.

Everything that made the next 70 odd days possible would have to come from somewhere else, and it would have to come by air. The siege of Kesan had begun with the defenders losing the one thing a besieged garrison cannot replace on its own. And 14 years earlier, almost to the season, a French garrison in a similar valley in the same country had begun losing in almost exactly the same way.

That comparison was on the mind of every senior officer in Vietnam that morning. It was on the mind of the president of the United States. And it is the reason this obscure plateau near the Le Oceanian border became for 2 and 1/2 months the most closely watched piece of ground on Earth. The question that hung over Kesan was never really whether the Marines would fight well.

It was whether history was about to repeat itself. Kessan sits in the northwest corner of what was then South Vietnam in a small valley set among mountains rising to 4,000 ft, cut by steep ravines and covered in heavy jungle. Look at it today and it is quiet farmland and hill country.

There is nothing about it that announces its importance. Its importance came from three things and all three were about movement. First, the border. The base lay roughly 8 to 10 miles from the Zeon River, the boundary between Laos and South Vietnam, and just south of the demilitarized zone that separated North from South.

It sat, in other words, on the shoulder of the two routes by which North Vietnamese regular forces entered the northern provinces. Second, the road route 9 was essentially the only road in that country. It ran from the Le Oceanian border eastward past Kesan and on toward the coast. Whoever held the plateau had a hand on the throat of that road. Third, the hills.

Around the base stood a series of hill masses that overlooked the infiltration routes below and just as importantly overlooked the base itself. The Americans had learned that lesson the hard way. In the spring of 1967, a Marine battalion operating in the high ground north of the base ran into an enemy force it had not expected.

The fighting that followed became known as the Hill Fights, and by the time it ended, the Marines had taken Hill 861, Hill 881 south, and Hill 881 north. Afterward, a small unit was placed on Hill 950 as well. So when Colonel Louns took over the base in August of 1967, he inherited not a single position but a system, the plateau in the center, and Marines dug in on the peaks around it.

That arrangement would matter more than almost anything else in the months to come, though not for the reason it was originally created. The Hills had been taken to deny the enemy observation. What they actually did in 1968 was deny him his mortar and recoilless rifle positions, his assembly areas, and his approach routes.

Every hill the Marines held was a hill from which the North Vietnamese could not launch their attack. But holding them meant dividing an already small force across isolated peaks that could only be supported by helicopter and only when the weather allowed. That was the trade. And through the summer of 1967, it did not look like much of a problem because almost nothing was happening.

Navy CBS worked on the airirstrip that would eventually be the base’s only reliable link to the outside world. Marines dug trenches and built bunkers. Patrols went out and came back with very little to report. Then in December, the reports changed. Intelligence began to indicate an enemy buildup. Not infiltration, not transit assembly.

Two North Vietnamese divisions were identified moving into the areas around Kan. Regular troops, not local guerrillas, concentrated in the hill country and the jungle within striking distance of a base held at that point by a single reinforced marine element. There were only two conclusions available. Either the North Vietnamese intended to bypass Kesan and drive east down Route 9, or they intended to take it.

Either way, the base as it stood could not survive, which raised the obvious question, and it was asked at the time loudly, why hold it at all? Why leave several thousand Marines at the end of a single road in a bowl surrounded by high ground, dependent on an air strip that the weather closed for days at a stretch? The American command had a clear answer and West Morland gave it plainly.

Kesan was an important outpost. If the enemy took it, Kuangtree province and the area below the demilitarized zone would be in jeopardy. Route 9 would become an avenue into the populated areas and the cities of the south. And if the North Vietnamese could seize the plateau, they could bring rockets, ammunition, logistics, even conventional artillery up onto it and make American installations further east untenable.

Kesan was not valuable because of what was on it. It was valuable because of what could be done from it. So the decision was made and it was made at the top. West Morland, supported by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, determined that the Marines would stay and fight. That decision immediately created a second problem, and it was not a military one. It was historical.

In the late winter and spring of 1954, French paratroops had established themselves in a valley in northern Vietnam called Dian Bienfu, deep inside Vietman controlled country. They brought in artillery. They brought in armor. They intended to draw the communists into a setpiece battle and destroy them. Instead, the Vietmin commander, General Vu Nuin [ __ ] brought heavy guns into the surrounding heights.

Guns the French had been assured could not be moved there. He cut the garrison off from resupply and reinforcement. He outgunned it. French air power proved unable to save it. The perimeter shrank week by week until the position was overrun and the survivors surrendered. The consequences went far beyond one valley. The defeat ended the Indochina war.

Two months later, the Geneva agreements partitioned Vietnam, neutralized Laos and Cambodia, and effectively ended French influence in Southeast Asia. Ho Chi Min and General Gop received the congratulations of the communist world. 14 years later, the same general was still in command, and by every visible sign, he was setting up the same battle.

The parallel was not lost on Hanoi, which made deliberate use of it. On the 10th of February 1968, the North Vietnamese Party newspaper announced that the United States faced a defeat as disastrous as the one the French had suffered at DNBF. The American press picked up the same comparison and by midFebruary it had become the frame through which the entire country watched the battle.

The spectre of DNBN Fu as one contemporary account put it had been revived. That was the real stake at Kesan and it is why the fight matters more than its size suggests. What was on the table was not just a plateau. It was a communist victory large enough and public enough to force the United States into negotiations on terms set in Hanoi.

The Marines were about to fight a battle in which the enemy’s objective was measured in American casualties and American headlines. Once the decision to hold was made, the next question was how many men to leave there. And that question was harder than it sounds. The instinct in a siege is to reinforce heavily.

West Morland resisted that instinct and his reasoning went to the heart of what had killed the French. He wanted enough troops at Kesan to hold it against a ground attack. He did not want more troops there than he could supply. Every additional battalion was another few tons of food, water, and ammunition that would have to be flown into a valley the enemy was preparing to seal.

So the buildup was measured. In October, there was one battalion at Kesan. In November, two, December held at two. In January, with the enemy divisions closing, two more marine battalions went in along with a battalion of South Vietnamese Rangers. By the time the siege opened, the position inside the perimeter, a rough rectangle about one mile by half a mile, held roughly 6,000 men, five marine battalions, the Arvin Rangers, and a scattering of Air Force and CB support personnel.

Beyond the wire, dug into bunkers and hidden beneath the canopy on the surrounding slopes, was the largest and best equipped force the enemy had ever assembled in the war. an estimated 20,000 North Vietnamese Army troops. On the 29th of January, American intelligence reported a fourth NVA division in the Kesan area, bringing total estimated enemy strength in the region to something on the order of 40,000 regulars with perhaps half of those positioned for the assault on the garrison.

West Morland moved his reserve accordingly. roughly 15,000 army troops plus a marine regiment staged at Fuai, some 60 mi away. The odds inside the perimeter were therefore something in the neighborhood of 3:1. And that was before considering that the enemy chose the time and place of every engagement, held the ground in all directions, and had artillery the Americans could not easily reach.

Those guns were the second half of the DNB Fu problem. North Vietnamese artillery believed to include 130 mm pieces was dug into cave positions across the Le Oceanian border roughly 10 miles away. Guns in caves are extraordinarily difficult to destroy from the air. They fire, they withdraw, and the crews are underground before the aircraft arrive.

The Americans had counter battery of their own. 175 mm guns at Camp Carroll and the rockpile to the east, firing into the Kesan area at extreme range. Inside the wire, the garrison had a handful of tanks, anti-tank weapons, 4.2 in mortars, and around 20 artillery pieces, 105 and 155 mm howitzers against four divisions. That was not decisive.

Everyone involved understood that, which is why the plan for defending Kesan was never really about what was inside the perimeter. West Morland’s answer to the arithmetic was to change the terms of the problem entirely. If the enemy was massing four divisions in a confined area of jungle and hill country, then for the first time in the war, he had done exactly what American commanders had spent three years failing to make him do. He had concentrated.

He had committed. He had in effect stopped hiding. West Morland’s instruction to the garrison followed from that. The Marines were told to button up. Louns confined his patrols to close in security work. He did not want men pushing far a field and getting killed, wounded, or lost in the very ground where he intended to put his firepower because he knew where the enemy was, and he could not use that knowledge if his own people were in the way.

Having cleared the ground, the Americans began to pour it on. West Morland gave the campaign a name that described exactly what he had in mind. He called it Operation Niagara. What followed was an aerial bombardment of a scale and duration without precedent. Fighter bombers from the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force flew in relays capable at peak of mounting on the order of 600 sorties a day.

Above them, B-52s ran the strikes code named Ark Light, releasing 500 and 750lb bombs from around 20,000 ft, high enough that the men on the ground below often had no warning at all until the ground itself came apart. The effect on the besieging force was not simply casualties, though those were severe. It was paralysis.

An infantry division preparing a deliberate assault has to do certain things. It has to move regiments into assembly areas. It has to stockpile ammunition forward. It has to bring engineers up to breach wire and minefields. It has to concentrate men in a small space above ground for a period of hours.

Every one of those actions requires being visible and stationary. And under Niagara, being visible and stationary was lethal. So the North Vietnamese did what any competent force would do. They dug. They kept their heads down. They spread out. They concentrated on not being burned by napalm or pulverized by bombs. And in doing so, they postponed the very attack they had come to make.

Then the weather intervened. The monsoon over the northern provinces produced low clouds and mist that could sit on the Kesan plateau for days. Enemy gunners learned the pattern quickly and timed their fire to coincide with it. Shooting when the mist closed the airfield and hampered strike aircraft. The weather, in short, was on the side of the besieures.

It was the one factor no amount of American industrial capacity could overcome. The response was technical and it was decisive. Strikes were run by radar. When bad weather came, targets were fixed and bombs released on ground directed control. Aircraft bombing on instruments through clouds they could not see through onto coordinates they could not visually confirm.

It was crude by later standards. It was also the difference between a bombardment that stopped every time the mist rolled in and one that never stopped at all. But air power, however overwhelming, could not do everything. And in early February, the enemy demonstrated exactly where its limits lay. Having failed against Hill 861 in January, the North Vietnamese came at the same complex again, this time against its neighboring height, Hill 861A.

That assault was pressed home at close quarters, and it was broken not by bombers, but by the men on the hill. Supporting arms, artillery, and air played their part, as they did in every attack on the hill positions. But the fight was settled by the organic weapons of an infantry battalion. 81 mm mortars, 3.

5 in rockets, M79 grenade launchers, machine guns, mines, and everything else the defenders could bring to bear at short range. This is worth pausing on because it corrects the simplest version of the Kesan story. The bombing kept the enemy from massing, but the hills were held by riflemen in the dark at 50 yards with the wire already breached.

If any one of those peaks had fallen, the North Vietnamese would have gained an observation post and a mortar position, looking directly down into the base, and the entire defensive scheme would have begun to unravel. The Marines still controlled the high ground guarding the approaches. 881 south, 861, 950, and 558.

Through the whole siege, the enemy took none of them. Everything else depended on that. Which brings us back to the problem created in the first hour of the first morning. The ammunition dump was gone. The road was cut. 6,000 men in a valley needed to be fed, supplied, and rearmed indefinitely through skies laced with shrapnel onto a runway.

The enemy had ranged with artillery. This was the precise point at which Dian Benfu had been lost. The French had been strangled, cut off from supply and reinforcement, their airlift steadily destroyed. The Americans had, by their own account, prepared for this exact contingency long before it arose. West Morland described requiring commanders some 18 months earlier to rely from time to time on aerial resupply purely as practice to accustom units to receiving everything they needed by air in all weather conditions before anyone’s life depended on it. The

Kesan airirstrip had been built up to take C130s. Radar controlled approach equipment was installed so that transports could come in when the pilots could not see the ground. And into that valley day after day came the transports C130s and C123s carrying ammunition, medical supplies, building material and mail.

The mail is not a sentimental detail. For men living in trench lines under daily shelling, with no prospect of relief and no way out, the arrival of letters was one of the few pieces of evidence that the outside world still existed and still intended to come for them. But the runway was the most dangerous piece of real estate in Southeast Asia.

A 4engine transport on the ground at Kessan was a stationary target in the open on a strip. The North Vietnamese had pre-registered. Aircraft were hit. C130s were lost. At that point, the calculation changed. The cargo was worth more than the risk of landing, but the aircraft were not. So, the Americans stopped landing.

Supplies were dropped by parachute. And for loads that could not be scattered across a defended perimeter, the transports came in low and fast without touching down at all, extracting palletized cargo out of the rear ramp by parachute so that it slid onto the strip while the aircraft was already climbing away. It was an ugly, brutal, low margin technique, and it worked.

As West Morland summarized it afterward with characteristic understatement, the result of course was that they survived. There is a measure of how well it worked that has nothing to do with tonnage. Because of the resupply, the garrison never ran out of rations. You could walk the trench lines and the bunkers and find men cooking improvised meals with names the units had invented for them.

One was the Kesan special beef and chicken cooked together. Another everything in the pot was called the hippie delight. A third, a threemeat stew built up with hot sauce, went by mulligan, and its author was proud enough of it to still be describing the recipe years later. Men under siege do not name their casserles if they believe they are about to be overrun.

That more than any statistic is what separates Kessan from DNBN Fu. If you’re finding this account worth your time, subscribing helps us keep producing military history at this length and level of detail. Now, back to the valley. By the middle of February, the battle had settled into a shape that was in its way harder on the defenders than an assault would have been.

The artillery, rockets, and mortars never stopped. The men lived in sandbagged bunkers and trenches behind coils of wire studded with explosive charges and claymore mines. Casualties accumulated in ones and twos day after day from shell fire that could not be answered and could not be avoided. Movement outside the wire was punished.

On the 13th of February, a Marine platoon was ambushed 800 yardds beyond the perimeter. a reminder that the enemy was not merely bombarding the base, but holding the ground right up against it. And through late February and March, the North Vietnamese did what siege armies have always done. They came closer. They dug tunnels.

They pushed trench lines forward until their approach works were within yards of the American wire so that the final assault, when it came, would cross open ground for only seconds. Five times they probed the defenses. Five times they were thrown back. Meanwhile, the pressure from outside the valley grew unbearable in a different sense.

Kesan had become a national story. Newspapers spoke of the agony of Kesan. Watch teams in Saigon and Honolulu sat in war rooms waiting for the message that the assault had begun. The men inside the perimeter had a somewhat different view of it, and one of them recorded a moment that captures it better than any analysis.

An Italian journalist came into the base, spent time walking around, and talked to a good many people. Then he came back and said, “In effect, everyone talks about the agony of Kesan. The agony, yes, you have it, but I don’t see any ecstasy.” Colonel Louns, who was standing there, thought that summed it up. There was certainly no joy in the place, but there was no agony either. Morale held.

Everybody had a job and did it. West Morland, for his part, later said he had never had any real concern about Kesan, that he had a few restless nights, but full confidence because he had the means. Both statements are true in their own terms. And both are the statements of men who had reason to defend their decisions afterward.

What is not in dispute is the arithmetic that was building up around the base through February and March. And that arithmetic was about to be tested. By the 22nd of February, troop movements indicated the enemy was massing for the assault everyone had been waiting on for a month. The indicators sharpened over the following week.

American intelligence concluded that the all-out attack should come early on Monday morning at the beginning of March. From the communist point of view, the conditions were as good as they were going to get. The weather was ideal for concealment and poor for aviation. In the war rooms, the weekend of the 3rd of March passed with staff waiting for the report.

It did not come. The attack did not develop. Not that Monday, not that week. Nothing about that failure was accidental. The North Vietnamese were unable to mass their troops for the assault because of the air strikes and the bombardment. Every attempt to bring the necessary weight of infantry into position in the necessary time was broken up before it could be completed.

And the peaks were still American. 881 south, 861, 950, 558. The enemy had taken none of them, which meant that any assault on the base would have to be launched from lower ground across ground. The Marines could observe. Then came the date that the North Vietnamese themselves must have marked. The 13th of March, 1968 was the 14th anniversary of the opening of General Gop’s attack at DNB Fu.

If there was ever a moment engineered for symbolism, it was that one. The Marines spent a relatively quiet day waiting and watching. Time by then was running against the besieggers rather than the besieged. Every additional week under Niagara cost them formations they could not easily replace, and the monsoon, which had been their ally, would not last forever.

On the 26th of March, the enemy was still working forward, tunneling, extending trenches, probing. On the 27th, the picture changed completely. One of the two North Vietnamese divisions around the base had withdrawn. Substantial elements of the second had gone with it. The siege was ending, and it was ending without the battle it had been built for.

American assessments of why are consistent, if unavoidably one-sided. The bombing had made the area intolerable. Captured documents indicated that desertion had become a serious problem in the besieging force. In some companies by those documents on the order of 20 to 25% of the men had simply left. Whether those figures are representative of the whole force or of particular hardhit units is impossible to establish with confidence from the American side of the record.

But the operational fact is not in doubt. Four divisions had come to take Kesan, and they left without ever launching their main attack. As the monsoon lifted and the weather cleared, the Marines came out of their trenches and bunkers and went looking for an enemy who was in most places no longer there. On the 1st of April, the contingency plan went into effect.

The first cavalry division, reinforced by a Marine regiment and accompanied by South Vietnamese units, around 30,000 men in all began driving along Route 9 to make physical contact with the base. They called it Operation Pegasus, and it was less a rescue than an occupation of ground the enemy had abandoned.

The relief force saw little of the two divisions that had surrounded Kesan. What it found instead was landscape, hillsides scarred and churned by three months of bombing, bridges destroyed, and mines that had to be located and blown before the convoys could pass. Marine engineers reopened Route 9 behind them.

Helicopters lifted men and artillery into the hills on the flanks. On the 7th of April, the lead elements of the relief force walked into the Kesan combat base. The long siege was over. What the Marines found in the surrounding terrain in the days that followed answered in part the question of what the bombing had actually done. Moving out beyond the old perimeter, they discovered hundreds of North Vietnamese dead in shallow graves.

The numbers from Kesan are extraordinary and they need context to mean anything. Between the 19th of January and the 31st of March, something on the order of 103,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the besieging force. Navy, Air Force, and Marine crews flew more than 24,000 sorties, including roughly 2500 by B-52s.

The enemy was additionally struck by more than 100,000 rounds of artillery and mortar fire. To put the tonnage in perspective, that is a weight of high explosive comparable to a strategic bombing campaign against a major industrial region concentrated instead into a patch of jungle and hill country a few miles across over about 10 weeks. It remains by contemporary assessment the most intense aerial bombardment in the history of warfare to that point.

Enemy casualties for the period were estimated at more than 15,000. West Morland’s own conservative estimate was that 15,000 men had been knocked out of action and his conclusion was blunt. The enemy’s back had been broken in that area and he had not regained his strength since. That estimate should be treated with care.

It was produced by the command that had made the decision to hold Kesan from bomb damage assessment and captured documents in the middle of a war in which American body counts were frequently inflated. Historians have argued over the figure ever since. What is not seriously disputed is that the losses were very heavy.

Marine losses inside the garrison were reported as 204 killed and 1,622 wounded and evacuated. set against 15,000. Those numbers look almost impossible. That ratio is the entire argument for how the battle was fought. And it is also the reason the battle has never stopped being argued about because there is a second reading of Kesan and it has been made by serious people since 1968.

In that reading, GOP never intended to take the base at all. The buildup around Kesan drew American attention, American reserves, and American air power to the far northwest corner of the country in the weeks immediately before the Ted offensive of 30 January, the countrywide assault on the cities that followed.

In that view, Kesan was the faint and Tet was the blow. The evidence does not settle it cleanly. West Morland’s command believed the enemy planned to take Kesan as part of the Ted offensive along with the coastal cities and Hui and to roll up the defenses south of the demilitarized zone. The scale and cost of the effort, four divisions, months of preparation and casualties on the order described is difficult to reconcile with a pure diversion.

But the diversion argument has never been disproved either. and honest history has to leave that question partly open. What can be said with more confidence is what those divisions were not doing while they sat in the hills around Kesan. Hugh was fought over for most of February in the bitterest urban battle of the war.

Kuang Tree was fought for as well. The North Vietnamese formations pinned outside Kessan and steadily destroyed there were not available for either fight. That was the argument made from the White House in May of 1968 when the 26th Marine Regiment and its reinforcing units were cited by the president for the defense of Kesan that by pinning down and decimating two North Vietnamese divisions, a few thousand Marines and their South Vietnamese allies had kept those divisions out of the other battles of that winter and had demonstrated to

Hanoi the futility of trying to win a military victory in the South. On the same day at Utapau in Thailand, West Morland went to thank the B-52 crews directly, telling them their contribution had been of the utmost importance and that the American position would not be what it was without it.

Colonel David Louns, who had commanded the base from August through the siege, received the Navy Cross. Sergeant Major Agria Smith, the senior enlisted marine at Kesan, received the Bronze Star. So return to the question this story began with. 14 years apart in the same country against western armies. The same commander attempted the same operation.

Isolate a garrison in a valley, cut its supply, surround it with artillery it could not reach and grind it down until it broke. The first time it worked completely. The second time it failed without a final assault ever being made. The difference was not courage. The French at DNBFU fought hard and lost anyway.

Nor was it simply the quantity of firepower, though the quantity was staggering. It was that the Americans identified the two mechanisms by which a siege actually kills a garrison and defeated both of them before they could operate. The first mechanism is strangulation. The French were starved of supply because their airlink was destroyed.

The Americans made resupply survivable by building a runway that could take heavy transports, by putting radar on it so aircraft could come in blind, and when the runway became too lethal to use, by developing techniques to deliver cargo without landing at all. The preparation for that had begun a year and a half before anyone knew it would be needed.

The second mechanism is concentration. A siege ends when the attacker massages enough infantry to overwhelm the perimeter. Operation Niagara existed to make that impossible. Every time the North Vietnamese gathered the troops and stockpiles required for a general assault, they became a target, and the assault dissolved before it could be launched.

Holding the surrounding hills denied them the last positions from which they might have done it quickly enough to matter. Everything else followed from those two facts. The garrison ate. The garrison shot back. The besieggers dug deeper, lost men to bombs they never saw, and eventually walked away. West Morland’s claim afterward was that this was the first time in history a siege of that magnitude had been broken by air power, that the enemy’s back was broken from the air, and only then exploited by a ground operation.

It is a claim made by an interested party and it flattens a great deal of hard close quarters fighting done by riflemen on the hills. But in its essentials, it is difficult to argue with. There is a final irony in the story and it is one the men who held the plateau earned the right to be bitter about.

Later in 1968, with the strategic situation changed, the Kson base was dismantled and abandoned. The bunkers were destroyed. The strip was given up. And the ground that had been worth 200 American lives and 77 days of siege was simply left. The air strip is deserted now. The trenches and bunkers went back to the earth long ago. As the contemporary account put it, “The changing nature of a changing war imposed new requirements, and the battle fought there took its place in history, with the question of how large a place still unsettled. That is perhaps the

honest conclusion. Kesan was not a battle won by taking ground or by holding it permanently. It was won by refusing to fight the battle the enemy had designed and by turning his own encirclement into the reason he was destroyed. The men in those trenches spent 77 days doing very little that looked like victory. They dug.

They endured shellfire they could not answer. They cooked stew in a hole in the ground and waited for an attack that never came. What they were actually doing was holding the bait steady while everything around them burned.