Battlefield Vietnam (1998) Discovery Channel

Siege at Khe Sanh

Review by Amazon.com

If you look up the word in any thesaurus, the definition of "siege" is everything from a simple attack to a naval blockade. What these references books won't tell you is that the true meaning of that ominous utterance is what happened at the United States Marine combat base at Khe Sanh on January 21, 1968. Beginning at sunrise, a massive North Vietnamese artillery barrage fell on the base, the support runways, and the main ammunition dump, sending soldiers scrambling for cover. After two days, when the smoke finally cleared, thousands lay dead and wounded. Battlefield Vietnam: Siege at Khe Sanh, the eighth episode in the PBS series Battlefield Vietnam, covers this historic incident. -- C. Dwayne Smith



This episode of "Battlefield Vietnam" is actually part 2 of a two-part subset of the series, the first being "War On The DMZ". In my opinion, this subset is the most interesting part of the entire series, which in itself, is one of the finest war documentaries series ever made. In short, the "Battlefield" series, which covers major campaigns of the Second World War and this "Battlefield Vietnam" series are excellent programs showing the military aspects of these conflicts as seen from the large-scale, strategic point of view. There are no interviews with participants nor descriptions of small-scale engagements, just the hard military facts as seen by the decision-makers at the top. Emphasis is placed on how the engagements which are the subject of each program fit into the overall picture of the war as a whole. These series are designed for someone who has more than a superficial interest in the subject.



Regarding this program about the famous siege at Khe Sanh, we see how General Westmoreland with the Marines who manned the area and with whom his relations were not the best, carried out a campaign to block North Vietnamese infiltration to South Vietnam by way of the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Vietnams in addition to building up a base area which would serve as a jumping off point for a proposed American advance (which was never authorized) into the panhandle region of Laos in order to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The North Vietnames built up forces in the area to confront the Americans and in order to tie them down while their Tet Offensive in 1968 was carried out throughout South Vietnam in their vain attempt to win the war with one knock-out blow. President Johnson and his adivors lived for weeks with the nightmare that the siege of Khe Sanh would be the prelude to a full-scale assault on the Marine Combat Base at Khe Sanh on the order of General Giap's 1954 Viet Minh victory over the French at a similar base at Dien Bien Phu. While the feared full-scale assault never materialized, largely due to the extremely intensive American bombing of the NVA positions around Khe Sanh and its satellite bases, American casualties were high, the subsidiary base at Lang Vei was overrun (one of the few times American forces were forced to withdraw from a position during the entire war) and aeriel resupply of the Combat Base was endangered by intense shelling which forced the Air Force to devise methods of dropping pallets with supplies from the cargo aircraft which were skimming the runway without landing. The program describes in detail the tactics each side used and what was particularly interesting was the description of how the Marines developed a method of helicopter resupply of the satellite positions around Khe Sanh that eliminated the losses the helicopters were suffering.



In the end, the NVA was forced to withdraw, Khe Sanh was relieved by a US Army force advancing from the coast along route 9 (much to the embarassment of the Marines!) and the siege ended. The North Vietnamese suffered tens of thousands of casualties and in a military sense, their campaign there was a failure. Yet, shortly afterwards, General Westermoreland was replaced by General Creighton Abrams who radically changed the American tactics in the war, and that summer, he decided to evacuate and dismantle the Khe Sanh combat base that so much American blood had been lost in trying to defend. This seems a fitting example of the frustrating nature of this war for the Americans who won every battle yet saw their South Vietnames allies defeated in the end.

Features twelve episodes exploring the events of the Vietnam conflict from a military perspective. Twelve Classic One-Hour Episodes From The Acclaimed TV Series Devoted To Vietnam's Key Battles. Judgement of the Vietnam war has been clouded by issues which occurred away from Vietnam: the campus protests, the controversial presidencies of Johnson and Nixon, the agonised arguments over MIAs and POWs and the tormented veterans of that war. For so many people, the Vietnam War brings to mind events in America, not in Vietnam. When thoughts turn to Vietnam, attention focuses on a young girl burned by the napalm, piles of bodies at My Lai and the summary execution of a Viet Cong insurgent on the streets of Saigon. Those events are important, but they do not shed a great deal of light on the military realities of the conflict. Battlefield Series Three: Vietnam was the first definitive documentary of the Vietnam War as a war. It will intentionally avoid the subsidiary issues which cloud judgement of the war, so that a clearer picture of what actually happened on the ground and in the air will emerge.