KHE SANH: Siege in the Clouds

by Eric Hammel ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 1989

A harrowing, gut-level record of the Vietnam War's Khe Sanh campaign--which, more than 20 years after the fact, remains a controversial episode in a bitterly debated conflict. Hammel, author of Munda Trail, a trilogy on Guadalcanal, and other well-regarded works of military history, largely ignores big-picture strategies and implications. Providing just enough detail to keep the siege--one of the war's few set-piece battles between American and North Vietnamese forces--in the context of contemporary events (including the Tet offensive), the author allows the nearly 1013 US Marine and Navy veterans he tracked down to speak for themselves. The survivors' firsthand accounts of the combat base's defense against the NVA divisions that surrounded and shelled it during the early months of 1968 afford a vivid, day-by-day log of the ordeals routinely endured by frontline troops. Interspersing eyewitness recollections with letters home, citations for valor, and unit diaries, Hammel conveys the ironies as well as the horrors of the protracted engagement. Marines who rotated out to rear-echelon areas, for example, were bemused (or appalled) to learn that the American media were likening the Khe Sanh confrontation to Dien Bien Phu (where the French suffered a crushing defeat in 1954). In truth, superior firepower gave outnumbered American forces a substantive, even decisive victory--though the subsequent abandonment of the base after it had served its purpose (along with geopolitical realities) clouded this perception. Hammel's oral history goes a long way toward redressing the balance, in large measure by imparting human-scale significance to the blood sacrifices that were made in the remote outpost of Khe Sanh so many years ago.

Pub Date: June 5, 1989

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1989

Categories: NONFICTION