- A comprehensive experience of events of the longest battle of the Vietnam war, Khe Sanh, as seen through the eyes and words of the men who lived through it. It is a testament to those who served and those who never came home.
- The documentary film, 77 Days in Hell, tells the story of the battle for Khe Sanh, South Vietnam in 1968, one that pitted tens of thousands of well-trained forces in the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), mightily equipped with tanks and artillery, against a single regiment of American Marines in what would become the most significant battle-and a major turning point-in the Vietnam War. Artillery hit the base and surrounding hills every hour of every day and night for 77 days. The men putting their lives on the line to defend the base, recount their days in hell, as we honor and remember their buddies who paid the ultimate price.
Fourteen years earlier, under the charismatic leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese people won their war for independence against France. The crucial blow came at an isolated French Colonial Army base called Dien Bien Phu. There, after nearly two months of encirclement and constant artillery shelling, the remaining 12,000 defenders surrendered. France immediately sued for peace. The world was shocked that a peasant army had been able to defeat the forces of a modern industrial nation, thus changing the course of 20th-century history by encouraging other Third World oppressed populations to rise up.
Under terms of the agreement, North and South Vietnam were temporarily partitioned, pending a national election. However, Cold War tensions between the US and the Soviet Union intervened in this reunification process, and the fighting in Vietnam became a proxy war orchestrated by two superpowers for strategic influence in that area.
Soon thousands of troops and supplies were pouring in from the north to support the National Liberation Front fighting the South Vietnamese government and Americans. The primary route for these supplies was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that snaked past the Khe Sanh Combat Base. Effective forays sent from that base to interdict this flow of supplies soon became intolerable; forcing a decision in Hanoi to remove the American presence at Khe Sanh. Because of the similarities to Dien Bien Phu, the PAVN had no doubt that the same strategy would work again just as successfully; their vision of thousands of captured Americans being led away would stun the American public, as it did the French people in 1954, into demanding negotiations for ending the war.
By spring of 1967, nearly three thousand PAVN troops were poised a few miles west of the Khe Sanh Combat Base. But, just before the attack was triggered, their presence was accidentally discovered, resulting in several weeks of brutal engagements against Marines trying to dislodge them from the high ground. By June, the fighting had tapered off, and the costly fight would later become known as The Hill Fights.
Six months later, in January 1968, the PAVN returned, this time not with three thousand troops-but with thirty thousand! They quickly surrounded Khe Sanh and its outposts, digging trenches close to the Marine defenders and, with the scores of big guns they brought to the battlefield, began pounding the Americans with near-constant artillery fire.
No other siege in modern American military history asked defenders to endure such a lengthy threat of death, injury, or capture at the hands of a numerically superior enemy force and a relentless artillery bombardment. Cut off from the rest of the country by land; barely resupplied by parachute drops; hunkered down in deplorable, rat-infested bunkers and trenches, with limited water and rations; knowing each moment could be their last, these young Americans withstood terrible carnage, with over 40 percent of them killed or wounded.
Relief forces finally arrived in April 1968. But the PAVN would return a few weeks later to try again to take the combat base and its hill outposts. After two more months of vicious fighting, and with no end to it in sight, the Pentagon decided to abandon Khe Sanh in July 1968.
The battle for Khe Sanh had been the top news story coming out of the Vietnam War throughout early 1968 and so, in the end, the north eventually achieved what they had hoped to when they set out to duplicate Dien Bien Phu: Taking possession of the fortification, but most importantly, helping sway American public opinion in what would be a momentous presidential election year.
77 Days in Hell follows these events, from the bitter Hill Fights, through the buildup and costly siege of Khe Sanh, and finally the bloody last days; fusing film footage and still photographs of these desperate days with an abundance of personal interviews by Khe Sanh survivors.
It is here that the film gets its heart and unique style. The main characters in this film are not, as in most other such accounts of war, political leaders or strategizing generals; rather, they are the largely forgotten lower-ranking troops, who experienced, first-hand, unimaginable depredation. These candid and free-flowing interviews, recorded years later, capture intimate and authentic glimpses of everyday life under these extraordinary conditions. While some reflect the horror, fear, and havoc of such circumstances, others recall the sublime camaraderie and darkly ironic humor they used to distract themselves from the perpetual specter of death. These men provided each other support during the harshest of times, leaving behind a legacy of loyalty, depth of connection, and commitment to the men they served with and the country they love.
Emotional and cathartic, we begin to understand how this divisive war created scars, internal and external, and how these men were able to move forward. This documentary is both, a way to document history from the eyes and mouths of the men who lived the experience; and a moment for us all to heal, as we hear their memories and empathize with their struggles. By the final scenes of 77 Days in Hell, viewers will not only know more vivid details about this unparalleled trial-by-fire in the remote mountains of South Vietnam but will have made an emotional connection with those who endured and survived, one they will not soon forget.
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