Lang Vei was a US Special Forces camp, which lay approximately 4.5 miles west of the Khe Sanh Combat Base in Quang Tri Province, in the northwestern corner of South Vietnam. On January 24, Captain Frank C. Willoughby, the camp commander, received information from Khe Sanh Combat Base that a communist force (the North Vietnamese 33rd Laotian Elephant Battalion) was moving towards Lang Vei. Then, a three-platoon patrol was dispatched from the camp and made contact with the enemy. After a brief firefight with North Vietnamese soldiers, the Mobile Strike Force came back to the camp, bringing with them four wounded men.

The Battle of Lang Vei began at 18:00 hours, on February 6, 1968, when the camp was attacked with intense mortar and artillery fire. The American troops immediately responded with counter fire from the camp and supporting fire from the Khe Sanh Combat Base. The North Vietnamese ground assault began just before 01:00 hours of February 7, supported by twelve Soviet-built PT-76 tanks of the NVA 202nd Armored Regiment. The first two to reach the protective wire fence around the camp perimeter were knocked out by recoiless rifle fire. Additional tanks maneuvered around the destroyed vehicles to overrun the defenders of the southern sector. However, another three communists tanks were destroyed with the camp’s 106mm and 57mm recoilless rifles.

As the remainder tanks closed in on the camp, the Special Forces troops and their men made a fighting withdrawal from the perimeter, but were soon surrounded in pockets of resistance. When dawn broke, the camp defenders called in air strikes against the North Vietnamese and requested the Marines at Khe Sanh to implement their contingency plan to reinforce the camp. Fearing that the attack was part of a larger North Vietnamese scheme to lure out the Marines where they could be ambushed, the commander at Khe Sanh, Colonel David Lownds, decided not to reinforce the camp.