Khe San
If most of the former battle sites in the area require more imagination than many visitors can muster, the base at Khe San is worth the trip for its informative museum and some tangible evidence of American presence and the years of strife in the region. Khe San is where, in January 1968, Viet Cong forces launched a massive attack. It was a diversion to keep U.S. Gen. William Westmoreland comfortable in his illusion that the war was being fought on a single front, and only a few months later the real might of the Tet Offensive landed in the south after skirting the heavily guarded DMZ, but nobody told the two divisions of North Vietnamese troops that it was a diversion. The January 21 attack at Khe San left big numbers of casualties on both sides. The Tet Offensive nearly broke the back of Vietnam's fighting capability (they lost more than 10-to-1 in casualties), but it also broke the back of world and U.S. opinion about the conflict, and it was the beginning of the end for support of the war. After the offensive, U.S. forces pulled back to Camp Carol near Dong Ha town.
The large museum compound at Khe San is home to a collection of war detritus: an abandoned Huey helicopter, the remains of crashed recon planes, the hulking shell of an M41 tank, a massive CH47 helicopter, and disarmed bombs and shells arranged like a piece of modern art. Inside the museum, a concrete building on stilts, find a good collection of photos and effects that chronicle the events of U.S. buildup, conflict, and withdrawal from this Khe San base. Exhibits have good English descriptions, but captions are as didactic as they are informative. Under one photo of wounded U.S. troops struggling for cover, the caption reads, "What was Johnson thinking?" Exhibits make much of the cooperation of local ethnic hilltribe people, a general fabrication, really, as most hilltribe groups supported U.S. efforts to oust ethnic Vietnamese. Ho Chi Minh and later Vietnamese administrators worked hard to bring hilltribe minorities into line, but to this day there is general suspicion in Hanoi about these offshoot groups, many of whom know no borders and move freely from Laos and even as far as Burma or China. An entry ticket is included with most tours, but if not, entrance into the museum costs 25,000 VND.
If most of the former battle sites in the area require more imagination than many visitors can muster, the base at Khe San is worth the trip for its informative museum and some tangible evidence of American presence and the years of strife in the region. Khe San is where, in January 1968, Viet Cong forces launched a massive attack. It was a diversion to keep U.S. Gen. William Westmoreland comfortable in his illusion that the war was being fought on a single front, and only a few months later the real might of the Tet Offensive landed in the south after skirting the heavily guarded DMZ, but nobody told the two divisions of North Vietnamese troops that it was a diversion. The January 21 attack at Khe San left big numbers of casualties on both sides. The Tet Offensive nearly broke the back of Vietnam's fighting capability (they lost more than 10-to-1 in casualties), but it also broke the back of world and U.S. opinion about the conflict, and it was the beginning of the end for support of the war. After the offensive, U.S. forces pulled back to Camp Carol near Dong Ha town.
The large museum compound at Khe San is home to a collection of war detritus: an abandoned Huey helicopter, the remains of crashed recon planes, the hulking shell of an M41 tank, a massive CH47 helicopter, and disarmed bombs and shells arranged like a piece of modern art. Inside the museum, a concrete building on stilts, find a good collection of photos and effects that chronicle the events of U.S. buildup, conflict, and withdrawal from this Khe San base. Exhibits have good English descriptions, but captions are as didactic as they are informative. Under one photo of wounded U.S. troops struggling for cover, the caption reads, "What was Johnson thinking?" Exhibits make much of the cooperation of local ethnic hilltribe people, a general fabrication, really, as most hilltribe groups supported U.S. efforts to oust ethnic Vietnamese. Ho Chi Minh and later Vietnamese administrators worked hard to bring hilltribe minorities into line, but to this day there is general suspicion in Hanoi about these offshoot groups, many of whom know no borders and move freely from Laos and even as far as Burma or China. An entry ticket is included with most tours, but if not, entrance into the museum costs 25,000 VND.
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