Khe Sanh Today

DA NANG:  For five months and 18 days in the in the first half of 1968 the world watched as US forces held and defended the US Marine Base at Khe Sanh in northwestern South Viet Nam.  US Commanding General William Westmoreland’s strategy at the time was to draw enemy forces into that area and destroy them.  The plan from the Vietnamese side was to distract the American military at Khe Sanh so they could pull off the Tet Offensive of 1968, the largest battle of the Viet Nam War.  While large numbers of US forces were occupied at Khe Sanh the Vietnamese were able to more easily attack every major city in the South from Quang Tri to Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, including the major southern city Saigon.

Plattsburgh US Army veterans Neil Tallon, Corky Reinhart and Pete Conroy, accompanied by the well known writer and humanitarian Le Ly Hayslip , have traveled since morning from Hue to Quang Tri and from there on the major Vietnamese route into the mountains towards Laos.  The site of the old US Marine base at Khe Sanh is along this route, eight miles from the Laotian border.

Neil Tallon, Pete Conroy, Corky Reinhart, David Hansen in Khe Sanh.

Corky Reinhart, retired professor and army veteran of Germany during the Vietnam era has not been in this part of Viet Nam before.  “I’ve never seen such beautiful country” says Corky, “but I’d not want to be marching up and over these mountains with a rifle and a full pack.  No way”.

Neil Tallon and Pete Conroy being interviewed by a VN
Television news team.

Pete Conroy, Le Ly Hayslip, Neil Tallon and Mark Conroy.

Pete Conroy was a soldier in the US Army 1^st Cav. Div. during the Khe Sanh siege and part of ‘Operation Pegasus’.  The mission was to clear the area around Khe Sanh opf enemy sodiers, especially the neighboring Au Shau Valley, the largest NVA (North Vietnamese Army) sanctuary in South Vietnam.

”Well Corky,” replies Pete, “I was going up and down mountains like these between Khe San and the Au Shau , hacking my way through jungle all the way and getting shot at to boot.  It wasn’t any fun”.

A small but thorough military museum sits near the location of the old airstrip on the Khe Son site.  Not much remains from that earlier time other than a row a revetments where helicopters and other aircraft were parked. A well preserved US Army Huey and Chinook helicopter are parked where the ramp once was along with a US Air Force C-130.  An adequate system of trenches, tunnels and bunkers have been reconstructed to show how the site looked in 1968. 

The small museum building nearby houses a collection of military artifacts and photos from the siege.  Captions on the photos do not favor the US forces but do appear fairly accurate technically.  A television crew filming on site requests an interview with Pete Conroy the only veteran available who fought in this area during the siege in 1968.  They conducted a long interview for broadcast on their network.

American forces closed down and withdrew from Khe Sanh in early July 1968.  During the siege US aircraft dropped over 100,000 tons of bombs in the surrounding area, five tons for each of the twenty thousand NVA soldiers who fought there.

Pete Conroy looking over the Press Republican while
waiting for that last chopper out of Khe Sanh.

Le Ly Hayslip lived in Viet Nam during much of the war, and commented “when you drop bombs on people, nobody like you”.  A rather sensible conclusion.

On July 9 the National Liberation Front flag flew over the Khe Sanh airfield.

Not forever however, for a less known function of the Khe Sanh base and airstrip was it being the support base for Operation Lam Son 719, the invasion of Laos, in February and March 1971. Because the US Forces were forbidden by law from entering Laos they provided air support, artillery and logistics and the ARVN (Army Republic Viet Nam) provided the ground troops.

David Hansen, a US veteran of the Lan Som 719 Operation was at the Khe Sanh site having a coffee.  “I was a dust off (medical evacuation) pilot during that operation” he said.  “There was a medical unit set up here at Khe Sanh and we flew from here and back where ever calls for help were received from.  We were flying all the time so many choppers went down”.

In that operation the US had 168 destroyed and 618 damaged helicopters.  The re-organized Khe Sanh was abandoned once again on April 6, 1971.

David Hansen made a recent trip to Khe Sanh with some veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  “they were interested in coming here”, he said “to see how we dealt with our ‘after the fighting’ and how it might help them understanding their plight”.  

*A version of this article appeared in the Press Republican on April 1, 2014.