20. Westmoreland’s Fear of an American Military Disaster
The Tet Offensive caught General Westmoreland with his attention focused elsewhere: the isolated US Marine garrison at Khe Sanh, near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam. On January 21st, 1968, nine days before Tet, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese launched an attack that besieged and, for a time, threatened to overrun Khe Sanh. The plight of the surrounded Marines immediately brought to mind the fate of a similarly isolated French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, during the First Indochina War.
In that conflict, as France sought to hold on to its Vietnamese colony, the French had superior firepower and technology. However, they were unable to bring the lightly armed Viet Minh to a pitched battle in which such superiority could prove decisive. So the French reasoned that if they could not take their superior firepower to the Viet Minh, then they would bring the Viet Minh to superior French firepower. A plan was concocted to entice the Vietnamese into massing for a pitched battle by offering them an irresistible lure: French paratroopers airdropped into an isolated base in Dien Bien Phu. It backfired spectacularly.