by Max Hastings
As a VNAF pilot, Tran Hoi was a privileged person. The principal burden of the war, however, was borne by soldiers, most of whom were overwhelmingly preoccupied with survival. Their officers responded to US advisers’ proposals for aggressive action: ‘No, cannot do. Much danger.’ Sgt. Mike Sutton found himself on a night operation with an RF group whose men carried squawking live chickens and pots that clanked at every step. When he urged them to leave the kitchenware behind, their officer insisted that they must have rations and means to cook them: ‘Of course it was really that they wanted to make enough noise to be sure the VC would stay away.’ Preston Boyd, Sutton’s medic, was a Sioux who carried a Swedish K sub-machine-gun, and enjoyed using it. After a couple of night clashes in which the RF men simply dropped their weapons and ran away, Boyd told them, ‘You do that again tonight and I’ll shoot you myself.’
Yet who could be surprised by their conduct? A theme of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is that whenever a flier thinks he is close to completing the appointed tour of combat missions, his mad commanding officer increases the quota. South Vietnamese conscripts faced a worse variant: there was no quota; they must fight on and on, alongside Americans who were excused boots after a year. The Saigon training machine processed 159,138 new recruits in 1966, 503,740 four years later. Desertion was endemic, and as in all wars, most of the quitters were those who faced most danger – infantrymen. Recaptured deserters gave as their reasons, in descending order: homesickness, unwillingness to fight, personal antipathy to a superior, inability to support their family. All ranks were pitifully paid – a private earned half the wages of a civilian labourer; a single 105mm shell cost more than a major’s monthly pay. Between 1964 and 1972 consumer prices rose ninefold and the cost of rice twelvefold, but army pay only doubled. A lieutenant said: ‘I never thought about getting married because I never knew when I was going to die, and I didn’t want to inflict suffering upon loved ones. For the same reason, no girl who had a choice wanted to marry a soldier.’
Rich Vietnamese might dine off crab or meat-noodle soup, fried fish, spiced steak, stewed duck and rice, followed by lotus fruit stuffed with nuts. Their less privileged compatriots seldom starved, but the skinniest were those who served their country in uniform. Soldiers were hungry even in barracks, because officers stole much of their rice ration. Many enlisted men moonlighted as taxi-drivers, teachers, construction workers. An American adviser discovered that whenever he was absent in the field, his ARVN driver rented out their jeep. Officers as well as soldiers said, ‘How can we fight on empty stomachs? … To be able to practise the “Correct Way”’ – to be honest men – ‘one must first have enough to eat.’ A US combat ration for one meal contained 3,800 calories, almost twice the daily calorie allocation for a Southern soldier, even in the unlikely event that he received this.
A general described lieutenants taking home most of the issued rations to feed their families: ‘I saw infantry school instructors pack a piece of plain bread or a ball of sticky rice in their rucksacks at the start of a long field exercise. That was all they could afford for breakfast and lunch … Many [officers] fell heavily into debt just to keep their families fed.’ At the top of the tree there were richer pickings: some generals sold typewriters, cigarettes, Hondas, even Claymore mines and grenades, to the enemy. In the words of an NLF cadre: ‘More than a few American soldiers were killed with mines bought from their ARVN comrades.’ The communists had no appetite for M-16 rifles, sharing the American view that AK-47s were better, but they purchased all the PRC-25 radios they could lay hands on.
As for Saigon soldiers’ health, a man was more likely to contract cholera or malaria than to die in battle. Nurse Phyllis Breen, one day fitting a catheter to a South Vietnamese soldier, was appalled to see a huge tapeworm emerge. In 1966 the country had only a thousand doctors, seven hundred of whom were conscripted into the armed forces. Yet many wounded soldiers staggered home rather than endure the ghastly conditions prevailing in military hospitals. Conversely, at the army’s paraplegic centre at Vung Tau, beds were filled by a semi-permanent population of five hundred disabled soldiers who lingered because they had nowhere else to go. The bereaved faced sorrows beyond even the deaths of loved ones. When Ngo Thi Bong travelled to retrieve the body of her elder son Van, killed in action with the ARVN, she found that he had been blown apart by a mortar bomb, and was obliged herself to gather his body fragments in a dustbin bag. Try as she would, she could not locate his left arm. Thus, according to Buddhist teaching, young Van’s spirit would roam restless for eternity, mourning his lost limb.
British journalist Richard West wrote in 1967: ‘When you listen to briefs given by the Americans, Koreans or Australians, then listen to the Vietnamese, you are struck by one supreme difference. The outsiders are eager and energetic. The Vietnamese do not care very much any more. Foreigners of every hue have lorded it over them for so long that the Vietnamese are tired of them all.’ This was unquestionably true – of the Southerners. Yet in the Northern ranks there were also such committed revolutionaries as Dr Dang Thuy Tram. She found herself one evening sitting in a desolate hamlet recently destroyed by the Americans. The villagers with whom she bivouacked lacked sufficient fuel to boil their rice. Yet Tram wrote doggedly: ‘We are not defeated; the enemy has burned this house, but we will build another. It’s not hard. A few palm leaves are enough. One needs very little to live at war, when life is solely about fighting and working. We need only a pot of rice with pickled fish; a sheet of plastic to lay out in a bomb shelter; clothes and salt, ready in a pair of baskets to carry off on our shoulders when the enemy descends.’
Dang Thuy Tram seemed to exult in the hardships she endured, her emotions heightened, like those of many young people in all wars, by the shared experience of hardship, sacrifice, comradeship, peril. Who could dispute the romance of her predicament? She had also been politically conditioned from the cradle, so that this credulous young woman questioned nothing about ‘her’ revolution. Yet the most disquieting aspect of Tram’s diary, had it been read by Lyndon Johnson or William Westmoreland, was that it would have been hard to imagine any South Vietnamese compiling a record remotely as assured in its conviction.
18
Tet
1 PRELUDE
It became the Chinese New Year never forgotten by any Vietnamese or American who was there: the question ‘Where were you at Tet?’ could refer only to 30 January 1968 and the weeks that followed. Le Duan was personally responsible for launching an offensive in South Vietnam that ended in defeat, with catastrophic losses. The Northern leader anticipated a general uprising in support of the communist cause, yet only a few hundred Southerners answered the call. In an open society, the outcome of such a fiasco would have been the fall of its architect, the ruin of his credibility and reputation. Instead, it precipitated the collapse of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, and of the American people’s will to win in Vietnam. Tet became a stunning manifestation of an important truth about modern wars: success or failure cannot be judged solely, or even principally, by military criteria. Perception is critical, and the events of February 1968 became a perceptional disaster for American arms. The communists were deemed to have secured a triumph, merely by displaying the power to engulf South Vietnam in destruction and death, even if most of the latter fell upon their own fighters and hapless bystanders.
The Tet story began in the early summer of 1967, with fierce wrangling among members of Hanoi’s central military committee. Since the previous year there had been agreement that a ‘general insurrection-uprising’ should be launched in the South when conditions were right. Le Duan, Le Duc Tho and Nguyen Chi Thanh – COSVN’s chief – believed this hour had now come: they emerged as vociferous advocates for a decisive throw. Meanwhile Giap, together with another senior general and the enfeebled Ho Chi Minh, favoured sustaining the tempo of the insurgency, while opening negotiations with the Americans. Ho’s caution was rooted in fears of heavy losses, weakening the communists’ strategi
c position in the protracted struggle that he was convinced still lay ahead. There were now 492,000 US troops in Vietnam, together with another sixty-one thousand members of allied contingents, 342,000 ARVN and 284,000 RF and PF militias – the latter took more than half the war’s military casualties. All these were supported by 2,600 fixed-wing aircraft, three thousand helicopters and 3,500 armoured vehicles.
Yet the North’s ‘big battle’ advocates were encouraged by a report from the foreign minister highlighting the rising clamour of American domestic opposition: communist propoganda leaflets featured anti-war cartoons lifted from the US press. He too supported a twin-track ‘talk-fight’ strategy. Le Duan did not dismiss negotiation; he merely argued that such a process should start only after a spectacular demonstration of communist means and will. A member of the NLF mission in Hanoi told a Russian diplomat: ‘Talks will begin when the Americans have inflicted a defeat on us or when we have inflicted a defeat on them. Everything will be resolved on the battlefield.’ Gen. Van Tien Dung, for fifteen years Giap’s deputy, was a barely literate soldier of peasant origins who had spent his youth working in a textile mill. Weary of subjection to his high-handed boss, he now defied Giap by embracing Le Duan’s Tet project, and thereafter did most of the planning – which was shambolic.
In June the ‘forward faction’ prevailed, with agreement on ‘Plan 67–68’. The military committee’s Resolution 13 decreed ‘an all-out effort … to win a decisive victory’. Both the Russians and the Chinese cautioned against such action, but an NVA officer said later: ‘If you wanted victory, guerrilla struggle had to evolve into large-scale conventional war.’ Le Duan predicted ‘half a million people will take up arms for us’. On 6 July, COSVN’s chief Thanh collapsed and died at Hanoi’s Military Hospital 108, almost certainly of heart failure following an exuberant farewell dinner before his return to the South. Giap departed shortly afterwards for Hungary to receive medical treatment for kidney stones, and on 5 September the ailing Ho Chi Minh flew to Beijing for ‘rest’. There is no reason to suppose that these absences were part of a deception plan; they merely emphasised the dominance of Le Duan. By the time Ho came home on 21 December, detailed planning for the ‘Quang Trung’ offensive was almost complete.
During the winter of 1967 the Vietcong launched significant attacks, to sharpen their own spearheads and test the enemy in advance of the ‘big push’. On 29 October there was a sustained assault on Loc Ninh, and another soon afterwards against Dak To. On the night of 4 November, two battalions supported by mortars raided the provincial centre of Cai Lay, an action that cost the lives of fifty-six defending soldiers and civilians, and thirty-six communists. Defectors told government interrogators that the communists were recruiting hard, in advance of an offensive in which ‘glory will smile on the NLF’. Ba Me, an illiterate fighter in his forties, told a delta peasant that 1968 was to be a decisive year. Me was a disreputable figure, always in trouble with his chiefs for embezzling funds and forcing himself on village women, for which he escaped retribution only because of his prowess as a warrior. Intelligence officers who heard of his boasting may be forgiven for shrugging that VC windbags made such vainglorious promises every year.
Giap’s associates carried to their graves a belief that the general continued to linger in Hungary because of fears for his own freedom if he returned home: the latter months of 1967 saw upheavals in Hanoi which removed from influence some of his principal subordinates. A senior colonel, Giap’s personal chief of staff, was detained; the director of military operations and director of intelligence were sacked along with thirty other significant figures, including Ho Chi Minh’s former personal secretary and the deputy minister of defence, who were accused of such crimes as ‘revisionism’ and ‘plotting against the politburo’. Three waves of 1967 purges, successively in July, October and December, appear to have had more to do with ideological strife rooted in the Sino–Soviet split than with arguments about Tet, but their outcome was that most of Giap’s allies were displaced. The general himself retained a seat on the politburo, but with much-diminished influence.
The same was true of Ho Chi Minh, now seventy-seven. On 28 December there was a special Uprising briefing in a building adjoining Ho’s cottage. An eyewitness who watched the old man totter home afterwards said that he looked both frail and unhappy. Three days later he returned to Beijing for further medical treatment, absenting himself from the summit meeting before the offensive, held in January thirty miles outside Hanoi, at which Le Duan expounded the plan. Only on the 15th was a final decision made to attack at Tet, contemptuously breaching the NLF’s commitment to a seasonal truce. With remarkable carelessness, Dragon Court failed to notice that under the latest revolutionary dispensation there was a twenty-four-hour difference between the onset of the New Year in the North – 29 January – and in the South – the 30th. Resultant confusion caused the Tet attacks to forfeit synchronisation: some began early, others late.
On 25 January 1968 Giap travelled from Budapest to Beijing to consult with Ho, though what was said remains unknown. The general finally flew home five days later, to be briefed by the new director of military operations. He acquiesced in the plan, but retained lasting bitterness about his eclipse. New NLF currency was printed and shipped south, code-named ‘68 goods’. Le Duc Tho was dispatched to act as COSVN deputy Party secretary, a post that he retained until May. Two generals were sent to brief Vietcong units.
The principal objective of the ‘Tet General Offensive-General Insurrection’ was to destroy three or four ARVN divisions, and with them the credibility of the Saigon regime. The plan, more fantastic than any created by the Pentagon or MACV, called for the ‘annihilation’ of 300,000 ‘puppet troops’ and 150,000 Americans, together with ‘liberation’ of five to eight million people in the South’s urban areas. There were to be energetic pre-Tet attacks in the countryside, to lure ARVN and US forces away from cities. Four NVA divisions were assigned to the northern sector, from Khe Sanh in the west to near the coast, tasked to ‘annihilate’ twenty to thirty thousand enemy troops, including five to seven American infantry battalions. Some officers insistently urged the difficulty of confronting massed firepower. Gen. Tran Van Tra said afterwards: ‘The strategic goals we set … were unrealistic: they underestimated the U.S. reaction and capabilities.’ Yet Le Duan was implacable, and professed indifference to the risk that the attacks would fail to precipitate a popular uprising. The experience would justify itself, he said: ‘Comrade Fidel Castro’s armed forces attacked the cities [of Cuba] three times before they finally triumphed.’ Even if the insurgents failed to capture South Vietnam’s cities, ‘the entire countryside and mountain jungles belong to us’.
William Westmoreland entered 1968 thoroughly aware that the communists intended something big, but uncertain about its nature. A MACV cable warned of the enemy exhibiting ‘a very unusual sense of energy’ and apparently planning ‘a coordinated offensive’. Yet the problem was always the same: to distinguish between a familiar flood of revolutionary rhetoric and Hanoi’s real intention: the Americans remained ignorant of Giap’s marginalisation. Yet back in November the CIA’s Joseph Hovey, a veteran of almost three years as an analyst in Saigon, produced a brilliantly prescient assessment. He studied the evidence from PoW interrogations, increased enemy supply movements, the drafting of Northern children as young as fourteen. There were signs of increased communist intelligence interest in the ARVN, highlighted by exposure of a seven-man VC cell which had infiltrated a Regional Forces unit. The Americans knew that there had been big Chinese arms deliveries – this time gifts, rather than purchases – and a new aid agreement with Moscow, signed on 23 September.
Hovey pulled together these strands and concluded that the communists would sustain pressure in the border areas to tie down allied forces and to ‘relieve the pressure on the VC/NVN activities in the populated areas’. The real objective however, wrote the CIA man, was to launch ‘the long-promised “general uprising”. To acco
mplish this the VC/NVN have set themselves the task of occupying and holding some urban centers in South Vietnam and of isolating many others … this will break the “aggressive will” of the Americans and force them to agree to withdraw from South Vietnam.’ Hovey said he accepted that the communists’ objectives were unrealistic, but that did not mean they would not attempt them. He suggested that even if it failed militarily, such an offensive in a US election year could inflict crippling political damage on the allied war effort.
On 17 November the NLF proposed a seven-day Tet truce, which Saigon assumed was intended to provide a breathing space to organise Vietcong logistics before making another big play. In December truck sightings on the northern Ho Chi Minh Trail doubled over the previous month, to six thousand. A cadre later claimed that in December and January the communist ‘campaign to kill tyrants and spies took out three hundred persons’ – officials or supporters of South Vietnam’s government. On the 19th, MACV analyst James Meacham wrote: ‘The word is out that the VC are going to make an all-out terrorist effort against Saigon Americans from now on through Tet. Our ARVN counterparts are really concerned – the first time in living memory that they have been. This is a bad sign, because they know the VC infinitely better than we.’ South Vietnamese alarm was increased by the capture of a document that revealed detailed Vietcong knowledge not merely of Saigon’s intelligence department, but of the interior layout of its headquarters – since the previous August communist agents, many of them women, had been labouring to garner information about major installations.
On 1 January 1968 Hanoi Radio broadcast a poem by Ho Chi Minh: ‘This spring far outshines previous springs/Of triumphs throughout the land come happy tidings/Forward! Total victory shall be ours.’ On the 5th, MACV released a document captured in November which stated: ‘The time has come for a general offensive and the opportunity for a general uprising is within reach … Use very strong military attacks in coordination with uprisings by the local population to take over towns and cities.’ That same day American troops captured orders for the Tet attack on Pleiku province. On 22 January Westmoreland warned the White House that the communists might try a show of strength before Tet. Next day the North Koreans seized the crew of the US Navy’s electronic surveillance ship Pueblo off their own coast, precipitating a crisis which distracted the attention of the US government. Speculation persists that the communist camp deliberately orchestrated this diversion, which is plausible: Beijing certainly incited Pyongyang to provoke Washington.
