Word: dienbienphu
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...have been more startling. For months, the American people had been told that the base was indispensable to U.S. strategy and prestige. When its 6,200-man garrison came under siege and heavy artillery bombardment from the North Vietnamese in mid-January, some observers saw an ominous similarity to Dienbienphu. The French base had been overrun in 1954 by another North Vietnamese army under the same commander besieging Khe Sanh, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Khe Sanh thus became a symbol -justifiably or not-of U.S. determination to stick it out under heavy pressure...
From the beginning of the North Vietnamese buildup around the Marine base, the U.S. command was convinced that North Viet Nam's Defense Minister, General Vo Nguyen Giap, intended to try to overrun Khe Sanh as he had stormed Dienbienphu 14 years earlier. As he had done against the French garrison, Giap assembled large numbers of his best-trained assault troops around Khe Sanh, together with huge quantities of weaponry...
...addition, deep in the Laotian hillsides Giap placed Russian-made 152-mm. cannons, their long tubes zeroed in on besieged Marines. Altogether, Hanoi's gunners poured more explosives into Khe Sanh than they had into Dienbienphu, reaching a peak on Feb. 23, when 1,300 rounds slammed into the U.S. base. And, as in 1954, the North Vietnamese by night tunneled ever closer to the Marine perimeter, drawing the net of fortified attack positions ever tighter. In terms of firepower and supplies, the Communists were better prepared to strike at Khe Sanh than they ever had been at Dienbienphu...
Some time around March 12, the day before the 14th anniversary of his victory at Dienbienphu, General Giap seems to have come to the conclusion that he would not be able to repeat his earlier feat, and he stopped sending replacements to Khe Sanh. Then, on March 22, he ordered one of his two battered divisions around Khe Sanh to withdraw...
...were accompanied by heliborne troopers, who were the first to reach the camp, landing on Khe Sanh's pocked runway. Thus, after 76 harrowing days, the siege of Khe Sanh last week came to an ironic end. What had loomed as the great set-piece battle, a la Dienbienphu, of the entire war-the ultimate test of Hanoi's military menace and the grand symbol of U.S. determination-dissolved at last almost without a shot being fired...