Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Most residents of Saigon, however, were far more concerned about the lack of security and the random shooting in their streets. Worried American and Vietnamese officers and bureaucrats barricaded themselves in thousands of private residences and began firing at anyone suspicious.

  Few Vietnamese had any desire to turn on their own government, much less on the Americans, and the majority of the local population watched from the sidelines. Almost no one joined the communist “uprising.” Most were keen to monitor closely the degree of Vietcong success— weighing the odds that the communists and not the Americans might soon be in control of their lives. Like the Tlaxcalans who followed Cortés to slaughter other indigenous Mexicas, or the tribal irregulars who were attached to Chelmsford in Zululand, the South Vietnamese were ready to fight with the murderous Westerners against the hated communists—but only if the Americans could guarantee military success and bring permanent relief to Vietnam. Now their very embassy was under attack!

  By midmorning the Americans were cleaning up the mess on the grounds, as Ambassador Bunker arrived for work, accompanied by dozens of television cameras and reporters, many of whom sent back fantastic cables that the Vietcong had for a time taken over the American embassy and were in possession of the main chancery. The misinformation came not only from the press. Back home President Lyndon B. Johnson scurried to assure the nation that the raid was more like a riot in a Detroit ghetto than a major military operation. General William Westmoreland, in charge of the American command in Vietnam, would insist to the nation that the systematic attacks were mere diversionary probes to draw resources away from the ongoing siege at Khesanh far to the north. He nevertheless welcomed such enemy concentrations, since they made much easier targets for overwhelming American firepower; while politicians fretted over the offensive, Westmoreland saw a chance for decisive victory.

  The next month would prove wrong Westmoreland’s initial guess that Tet was some enormous ruse, but he was accurate in his belief that thousands of enemy Vietnamese were now more likely to be in the open, vulnerable, and shortly to be annihilated. The entire effort of Westmoreland’s previous three years in Vietnam had been to create the conditions of traditional Western decisive battle, in which the American military might draw on its wonderfully trained and disciplined shock infantry and enormous technological and material superiority to blast apart the enemy and then go home. The problem for the Americans in Vietnam, as for Westerners overseas in general, had always been the reluctance of the enemy to engage in set battle pieces, instead turning war into one of infiltration, jungle fighting, terror bombing, and house-to-house raiding. In retreat, not battle, Darius III had found safety from Alexander; Abd ar-Rahman had far more success looting Narbonne than meeting Charles Martel at Poitiers; the Aztecs sometimes won when they attacked the Spanish at night, in surprise, or in mountain passes. Cetshwayo would have been far better off ambushing wagons than charging British squares.

  Sixty million Americans back home during the next week of fighting saw a somewhat different picture of the first night’s attack. Cameras flashed back images of a few dead Americans on the compound grounds. Tanks and howitzers rushed through the streets of Saigon. Headlines flashed “War Hits Saigon.” An especially disturbing picture was shown for days on television: General Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing the brains out of a captured Vietcong infiltrator. That the prisoner had been part of infiltration units which just earlier had gunned down many of Loan’s security forces, including one officer at home with his wife and children, or that enemy agents out of uniform and in civilian dress were not accorded the same treatment as captured soldiers, was lost in the journalistic frenzy. Eddie Adams, the Associated Press photographer who snapped the picture for Life magazine, won the Pulitzer Prize for photography.

  The image of those scattered brains apparently summed up the entire mess of Tet—dying Americans unable to protect the nerve center of their massive expeditionary force while their corrupt South Vietnamese allies shot the unarmed and innocent—at a time when the public was assured that “the light is at the end of the tunnel.” As they watched their television sets, Americans wondered if victory really was at hand and were troubled over what and whom to believe:

  It says something about this war that the great picture of the Tet Offensive was Eddie Adam’s photograph of a South Vietnamese general shooting a man with his arms tied behind his back, that the most memorable quotation was Peter Arnett’s damning epigram from Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” and that the only Pulitzer Prize awarded specifically for reporting an event of the Tet offensive was given two years later to Seymour M. Hersh, who never set foot in Vietnam, for exposing the U.S. Army massacre of more than a hundred civilians at My Lai. (D. Oberdorfer, Tet!, 332)

  Outside the embassy a vicious battle erupted at the Phu Tho racetrack that the Vietcong had occupied as the main element of their attack, a traffic hub for several main boulevards with enough open spaces to coordinate an entire army. Homes surrounding the track were stuffed with hundreds of snipers. It took a week of house-to-house fighting for American army troops and ARVN forces to locate and expel the Vietcong, who rarely surrendered and had to be killed almost to the last man. Yet on television Americans were being blamed for blasting apart residences, as if no one noticed that urban snipers were shooting marines in the middle of a holiday truce.

  It took almost three weeks for the last organized infiltrators to be killed or expelled from Saigon. A company of marines from the 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Division, tried to storm the Phu Tho racetrack and locate a Vietcong battalion in brutal fighting typical of the urban firefight:

  Recoilless rifles blasted holes through walls, grenade launchers were fired through the jagged cavities, and then soldiers clambered into the smoking entrances. Hundreds of panic-stricken civilians fled past the armored carriers as the battle raged on. The column continued to contest the Viet Cong in fierce house-to-house fighting as it pressed closer to the racetrack. Gunships swooped down to blast apart structures with minigun and rocket salvos. By one o’clock that afternoon [January 31] the company had advanced two more city blocks. Then the Viet Cong withdrew to positions dug in behind the concrete park benches, backed up by heavy weapons located in concrete towers on the spectator stands inside the racetrack itself. (S. Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army, 225)

  Bloodbath at Hué

  Even worse city fighting was far to the north, near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), in the provincial capital of Hué—a picturesque former imperial city of the once-unified Vietnam, containing about 140,000 residents. Although it was South Vietnam’s third largest city, and near the North Vietnamese border, Hué was still relatively untouched by war. That was soon to change. At about the same time the American embassy was attacked, three columns of North Vietnamese forces, including two full regiments and two Vietcong battalions—their numbers eventually to rise to nearly 12,000 troops—stormed the city. They soon met up with infiltrators that had mixed in with the Tet holiday crowds, quickly brushed aside the small ARVN garrisons, and then occupied the “Citadel,” a massive fortress overlooking the old city amid ancient palaces and temples.

  Once the North Vietnamese were in control, agents systematically fanned out, searching for South Vietnamese soldiers, government officials, American sympathizers, and foreigners in general. Somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 were rounded up. Most of those were clubbed or shot to death. Doctors, priests, and teachers were especially targeted. Three thousand bodies were eventually found in mass graves. The others were written off as “missing.” Although Western reporters were soon ubiquitous in Hué, few commented on the executions; those who did often denied they even occurred.

  The American counterattack spearheaded by U.S. marines was ferocious, leading to twenty-six days of nonstop fighting, tank attacks, reinforcements, and air strikes to recapture the nearly demolished Citadel. As in Saigon, marines often had no idea where or who the enemy was until they were
fired upon from private houses:

  I finally began to understand why we had experienced such difficulty getting across the street. Many of these houses were one-story homes, but a couple were two-story affairs, providing excellent and advantageous firing positions for the waiting NVA [North Vietnamese Army]. From these positions, the NVA could shoot right down on us, point-blank as we tried to run across the street. This was obvious and we understood the situation clearly, so we had directed our return fire at the windows and doorways of the houses across the street, which were the likely enemy firing positions. What we had not realized was that the NVA were also shooting at us from well-connected, dug-in positions between the houses, at street level. (N. Warr, Phase Line Green, 159–60)

  The Americans had been trained to fight a war of maneuver and annihilation, in which they roamed wetlands and the jungle to engage in sharp but brief firefights before calling in artillery and air strikes and then heading back to fortified and relatively secure compounds. Like hoplite soldiers or Lord Chelmsford’s redcoats, the point of war was to find the enemy and then defeat him through greater Western firepower, itself the product of superior discipline, technology, and supply. But whereas General Westmoreland claimed that Tet was an enemy blunder in allowing his forces the rare opportunity to fight the North Vietnamese in the open, few of the enemy offensives during Tet resulted in traditional Western collisions of shock battle. More often, to gain advantage from the American edge in firepower meant to call in artillery and air strikes on urban residences that housed Vietcong snipers—and whose destruction only alienated their South Vietnamese owners and incited hostile media attention back in America.

  At Hué the Vietcong and North Vietnamese infiltrated in small independent units, at night, and often out of uniform. They fired automatic weapons, mortars, and grenade launchers from house windows, behind walls, and in crowds, forcing the marines to fight a counterattack reminiscent of Stalingrad, in which the enemy had to be expelled block by block, destroying hundreds of residences in the process. Often the Americans’ choice was either to be picked off at random by well-ensconced snipers or to blast apart entire—and often historic—buildings by using howitzers and aerial bombardment:

  They were unshaven, grimy, and covered with dust from the shattered brick and stone buildings. Sweat and bloodstains covered their fatigues. Elbows and knees stuck out of holes in their uniforms, the same ones they had worn for two weeks. . . . The Marines, who were trained to be a mobile, amphibious reaction force, had become moles. They had become a static, immobile collection of rats, hunkered down in a junk pile of crumbled houses, surrounded by shell-pocked courtyard walls, burned-out automobiles, and downed trees and power lines. Death was waiting to tap them on the shoulder at any time, and many would never know where it came from. (G. Smith, The Siege of Hue, 158)

  Yet in less than a month the enemy was expelled from Hué. The final tally of the dead was dramatically lopsided. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies—the Elite Black Panther company (Hac Bao) was given the privilege of storming the imperial palace and slaughtering the last enemy holdouts—had killed 5,113 of the enemy. Only 147 Americans were lost in action, with 857 wounded—fatality figures that in their own right would have signaled a landmark victory in both world wars. Yet reporters who freely roamed Hué ignored the respective sacrifices and were uninterested in the larger tactical situation. Instead, they mostly interviewed American soldiers in the midst of the dirty street fighting. Often they sent back mini-interviews like the following with a marine taking a minute’s break from firing:

  What’s the hardest part of it?

  Not knowing where they are—that’s the worst thing. Riding around, running in sewers, the gutter, anywhere. Could be anywhere. Just hope you can stay alive, day to day. Everybody just wants to go back home and go to school. That’s about it.

  Have you lost any friends?

  Quite a few. We lost one the other day. The whole thing stinks, really. (S. Karnow, Vietnam, 533)

  For the first time in the history of Western warfare—in fact, of any conflict anywhere at any time—soldiers in the heat of battle could be seen instantly by millions of their parents, siblings, and friends in the safety of their living rooms. Images of the wounded and dead were flashed home in gruesome detail—and in color—by reporters of any nation, who were mostly free to go, see, and send back what they wished, with the likelihood it would be heard, read, or seen by the American voting public within hours, if not minutes. When such technological breakthroughs in instant video communications, often in abbreviated snippets and without context, were married to the traditional Western emphasis on unlimited freedom, the result was soon a level of civilian vehemence against the war rarely seen in the past, even among the voices of dissent against the Athenian expedition to Sicily, the European conquest of the Americas, or the British conduct during the Zulu and Boer Wars.

  While Americans saw pictures of atrocious killing on television and interviews with disgusted marines, who found their South Vietnamese allies as reluctant to charge fixed positions alongside them as their North Vietnamese enemies were deadly, almost no reports were issued about the North Vietnamese massacres of the innocent. Much less was there any appreciation of the astounding ability of surprised and outnumbered U.S. marines to expel 10,000 from a fortified urban center in just over three weeks at the cost of fewer than 150 dead. Hué, brutal as it turned out to be, was yet another impressive American military victory, perhaps a feat of arms rivaling any bravery shown in either World War I or II. And the Americans were not done.

  Khesanh

  When the North Vietnamese and Vietcong broke the thirty-six-hour Tet truce on January 31, they systematically attacked the main cities of Saigon, Quangtri, Hué, Da Nang, Nha Trang, Quinhon, Kontum, Banmethuot, My Tho, Can Tho, and Ben Tre with more than 80,000 troops. Altogether thirty-six of forty-four provincial capitals were invaded at a time when 50 percent of the South Vietnamese army was on leave for the holidays. Yet in most places, except for Saigon and Hué, enemy infiltrators were expelled within a week. That counterattack was an amazing feat in and of itself, because the Americans were caught off guard—intelligence warnings of the size and date of the invasion were issued weeks prior, but largely ignored by the squabbling MACV high command.

  Even though relatively small numbers of troops had infiltrated key installations in the hearts of major cities like Saigon and Hué, the North Vietnamese initially achieved a psychological dividend far out of proportion to the actual damage inflicted on the Americans and their allies. They were learning quickly that they need not win the offensive, but only overrun for a few days purportedly secure areas in order to cause a firestorm of recrimination and unrest in America. Moreover, at first the American command was confused over enemy intent. General Westmoreland himself felt that the Tet offensives were diversionary tactics to draw American forces away from the siege at Khesanh. Yet the opposite was more likely true: the early siege at Khesanh was designed to divert attention from the urban attacks to come in the following week.

  At a little after 5:00 in the morning on January 21, ten days before the formal start of the Tet Offensive, thousands of North Vietnamese troops unleashed an artillery barrage as part of a general assault on an American base at Khesanh. The latter was a forward-area garrison near the DMZ that was intended to cut the supply of troops and matériel from North Vietnam. During the last week of January, news of the beleaguered base ran around the world. Many newspapers dubbed the siege another Dien Bien Phu, where a French garrison in 1954 was nearly annihilated before surrendering its 16,000 survivors.

  Yet at Khesanh daily air strikes, hourly resupply, relatively safe evacuation of Lao and Vietnamese refugees, and constant communications kept the besieged 6,000 troops in relatively good shape. Was there much strategic value in hanging on to the surrounded Khesanh? It was hard to ascertain any. The Americans chose to hold the isolated outpost as bait, apparently as a deliberate plan to draw whole North Viet
namese divisions into an open firefight, or they were worried that withdrawal would signal a critical weakness in an American election year, when antiwar protests were on the rise. Whatever the rationale for the decision to stay, far from being another Dien Bien Phu, Khesanh was yet another devastating American demonstration of firepower. While the French had been cut off, outnumbered, without much air support, and isolated in North Vietnam near the Chinese border, the Americans were supplied daily, reinforced, south of the DMZ, in constant and easy communications, and able to drop tons of ordnance on the enemy. Nonetheless, the surrounded marines were also in a sea of seasoned North Vietnamese troops and themselves somewhat unsure of their exact mission. What was the eventual American plan for Khesanh? Was it, as professed by Westmoreland, a key to the defense of the DMZ and possible future operations in Laos, or simply a killing zone to incur enemy body counts and thus to be abandoned once the siege was lifted?

  Veteran North Vietnamese troops had surprised and overrun the Lao and Vietnamese garrison at Lang Vei nearby, along with their American advisers, thus giving them full control of land routes into Khesanh. Soon the base was being shelled almost hourly—on some days as many as a thousand incoming artillery, rocket, and mortar rounds—in an effort to wear down the marines and destroy the airstrip. The North Vietnamese were equipped with some of the latest Soviet and Chinese weaponry, such as the 122mm heavy mortar, surface-to-surface missiles, flame-throwers,

  tanks, and 130mm heavy artillery, most of it adapted from basic designs dating back to World War II and based on original German, French, and American models. Thousands of Chinese and Soviet advisers worked stealthily but feverishly in the North to unload the artillery batteries and train the Vietnamese in their use.

  Despite the new lethal armament, the American counterresponse was frightening and constituted one of the most deadly artillery and air assaults in the history of infantry battle. During the nearly three-month-long siege—from January 20 to mid-April 1968—110,022 tons of bombs were dropped and 142,081 rounds of artillery fired. Some estimated that the true American total was in excess of 200,000 cannon shells. Such astonishing firepower demanded constant rearmament; and eventually more than 14,000 tons of supplies were flown into Khesanh, all under continuous fire. Thousands of North Vietnamese were incinerated in the jungle surrounding the camp. Most estimates put the enemy dead and severely wounded around 10,000—half the 20,000 believed to be involved in the original siege.