West Dickens Avenue: A Marine at Khe Sanh

In January 1968, John Corbett and his fellow leathernecks of the 26th Marine Regiment fortified a remote outpost at a place in South Vietnam called Khe Sanh. Within days of their arrival, twenty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded the base. What followed over the next seventy-seven days became one of the deadliest fights of the Vietnam War—and one of the greatest battles in military history.

Private First Class Corbett made do with little or no sleep for days on end. The enemy bombarded the base incessantly. Extremes of heat, cold, and fog added to the misery, as did all manner of wounds and injuries too minor to justify evacuation from frontline positions. The emotional toll was tremendous as the Marines saw their friends suffer and die every day of the siege. Corbett relates these experiences through the eyes of a twenty-year-old but with the mind and maturity of a man now in his fifties. His story of life, death, and growing up on the front lines at Khe Sanh speaks for all of the Marines caught up in the epic siege of the Vietnam War.

A Marine survivor of the 1968 Siege of Khe Sanh describes the efforts of the 26th Marine Regiment to fend off a force of twenty thousand North Vietnamese soldiers who surrounded and cut off the base at Khe Sanh, detailing the conflict they endured over the course of seventy-seven days. Reprint.

John Corbett returned home to Nyack, New York, following his service in Vietnam. He now lives in Key Largo, Florida. West Dickens Avenue is his first book.