The Assault on Khe Sanh: An Oral History

New York: Warner Books, 1990. Warner Books Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Mass market paperback. Very good. [20], 265, [3] pages. Guide to Terms and Abbreviations. Phonetic Alphabet. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Eric Hammel is a professional military historian with forty books and nearly seventy magazine articles to his credit. He has been writing about U.S. Marines at war since the early 1960s and has spoken to large assemblages of Marines and former Marines over the course of three decades. He often has been invited to lead professional military education seminars at the Marine Corps University as well as at Marine Corps commands on the West Coast. For many years he was a contributing editor and West Coast stringer for Leatherneck magazine. He has appeared in numerous television documentaries on Marine Corps operations in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Beirut. Hammel has also worked as a freelance acquisitions and line editor, and for ten years operated his own military history publishing firm (Pacifica Press). Derived from a Kirkus review: 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 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, 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 endured by frontline troops. Interspersing eyewitness recollections with letters home, citations for valor, and unit diaries, Hammel's oral history goes a long way toward imparting human-scale significance to the blood sacrifices that were made in the remote outpost of Khe Sanh so many years ago.