As allied patrols scoured the scorched and battered moonscape around the liberated Marine garrison of Khe Sanh last week, they found North Vietnamese trenches and bunkers, tons of supplies and ammunition, some 1,300 bodies—and hardly a trace of opposition. Whether fled or dead, the formidable force of 20,000 North Vietnamese assault troops that had ringed 6,000 U.S. Marines and ARVN troops was gone. What once loomed as the largest, most decisive and most controversial battle of the Viet Nam war would now never be joined, and the forebodings of the armchair generals* who questioned the decision to defend Khe Sanh had proved unfounded. But a major battle did occur at Khe Sanh—one that prevented the bloody hand-to-hand battle on the ground that many military men had anticipated. It was a battle of the air might of the U.S. against every stratagem that the besieging enemy could muster. Bombing the North Vietnamese with such precision that they were destroyed before they could ever launch their attack, the U.S. could justly claim a considerable victory at Khe Sanh without ever having committed its ground forces to the fray. Khe Sanh was, in fact, a landmark in the use of airpower in warfare—the first time that aerial bombardment has denied an attacker the ability to assault his target. 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. In 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. During the early days of the six-week siege, they even had the weather—low clouds, fog and mist—in their favor. Looking at the situation, the U.S. decided that the only way to defend Khe Sanh was by a massive application of airpower. At Tan Son Nhut airport outside Saigon, General William W. Momyer set up a special command whose sole mission was to orchestrate an aerial operation around Khe Sanh. Working over a sandbox model of the Khe Sanh area, two of the U.S. Army's most gifted tacticians—General Creighton Abrams and Lieut. General William B. Rosson—figured out the most logical places for Giap to concentrate men and supplies, then designated those areas as prime targets for U.S. planes. Dozens of reconnaissance aircraft were sent out to crisscross the area around Khe Sanh; even the heat from a match was enough to warn their sensitive infra-red cameras of Communist presence below. Working on a round-the-clock basis, photo-intelligence analysts studied the pictures and selected promising targets. In addition,
