Last Stand at Khe Sanh: The U.S. Marines' Finest Hour in Vietnam

by Gregg Jones

Overview

In the tradition of Black Hawk Down and Band of Brothers, the riveting story of two Marine regiments who were surrounded five-to-one by North Vietnamese troops and a heroic 12-week battle to defend the Khe Sanh complex, the last stronghold along a 100-mile defensive line—the last chance to stop the NVA from overwhelming South Vietnam

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306821400
Publisher:	Da Capo Press
Publication date:	04/22/2014
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	157,161
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Gregg Jones is the author of the highly acclaimed Honor in the Dust. He has been a newspaper foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for nearly thirty years, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald Loeb Awards. He has reported from twenty-eight countries, writing about everything from coups and revolutions to Indonesian shadow puppetry and Thai cinema. His reporting on military affairs has included coverage of the war in Afghanistan, civil wars in Sri Lanka and Cambodia, and insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. He has been a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Dallas Morning News. He has been interviewed many times by CNN television and BBC radio.

Editorial Reviews

04/21/2014
Journalist Jones (Honor in the Dust) examines one of the most iconic and controversial engagements of the Vietnam War, the 77-day (February–April 1968) siege of the 6,000-man U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh by some 20,000 North Vietnamese Army troops. This is not the first book to look at Khe Sanh, as a number of memoirs and military histories have chronicled the siege's brutal on-the ground-action and bigger picture strategic issues, and Jones gives cursory attention to the larger picture—who won, who lost, and why. "Definitive answers" to questions such as the NVA's true objectives at Khe Sanh, he says, "will likely remain elusive." Instead, Jones concentrates on sharing the personal stories of the American Marines in the trenches, leaning heavily on interviews he conducted with veterans and making them the core of a readable narrative that also includes facts and figures from secondary sources and official records. This informative account serves as a testament to those who "heeded the call of their duly constituted leaders" and "went to Vietnam with the best of intentions," earning "a place of honor in American history." (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Last Stand at Khe Sanh

"A powerful and moving reminder of incomparable courage and extreme heroism."—Alex Kershaw, author of The Bedford Boys and The Longest Winter

“The story about a long-abandoned fire base where too many died, which makes it a story worth remembering.”—Kirkus Reviews

"The long siege at Khe Sanh was one of the true horrors of the Vietnam War, and Gregg Jones gives it to us in all of its bloody, often hopeless, and heroic detail."—S.C. Gwynne, author of Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell

“Jones fuses the panoramic with the visceral boots-on-the-ground view, creating an unparalleled and highly readable narrative of Khe Sanh.”—Patrick K. O’Donnell, bestselling author of Dog Company

“Brings to life one of the greatest battles in modern American military history.… Vivid detail and powerful writing.”—Jonathan Eig, bestselling author of Luckiest Man

"[An] engrossing book"—Dallas Morning News

"Jones spins his tale so deftly and effectively that he draws you immediately into the battle.... A classic!"—Leatherneck

Winner of the Marine Corps Heritage Center's General Wallace M. Greene, Jr. Award

Vietnam, April 2015
“A book panoramic in scope yet heart-wrenchingly personal… Jones, drawing extensively on interviews conducted with veterans of the battle, poignantly re-creates the miserable, subterranean hell in which the Marines fought and died…. Last Stand at Khe Sahn is a tribute to those who served—and suffered—in the siege.”

Military Review, February 2015
“[The author] wanted to see the battle through the eyes of those young Americans who fought at Khe Sahn. The reader will quickly discover that it is the achievement of the latter goal that this book excels. Jones has done an incredible job gathering the firsthand accounts from those who served and weaving them into a seamless narrative that flows across both time and space.”

From the Publisher

2014-03-31
An acclaimed journalist recounts the hell that was the siege of Khe Sanh. In this history of one of the worst follies of Vietnam, Jones (Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dream, 2012) relies on a mix of well-reported historical detail for his combat narrative but rarely finds the depth of personal remembrance readers embrace in other works of Vietnam literature. Old soldiers remember that the siege was an absolute blood bath, an event whispered alongside names like Okinawa and Dien Bien Phu. Turning his focus to just four months at the beginning of 1968 allows the author to capture the worst of it. However, there is a larger context here. The question remains whether Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap was setting up the war's killing blow or distracting Gen. William Westmoreland from the onslaught of the Tet Offensive. Jones focuses on the brave Marines and other soldiers who maintained their defenses under impossible circumstances. Unfortunately, the book becomes in some ways a too-long list of faceless, if not nameless, casualties of war, cut down badly and far too young. To be fair, the author attempts to give personalities to all the soldiers, although some of the more colorful rise to the surface—e.g., fire support officer Harry Baig or chopper pilot David "Balls to the Wall" Althoff, who sometimes used up three war birds in a day. In other places, occasionally grim humor unlocks the story: the war-maddened soldiers doing their chicken dance to taunt the enemy or the surgeons who took out an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine reading, "Wanted, General Practitioner to assume a diversified medical and surgical practice in a small, quiet, mountain setting." An imperfectly told story about a long-abandoned fire base where too many died, which makes it a story worth remembering.

Kirkus Reviews