From: Gene_Ledbetter@internetqm.llnl.gov (Gene Ledbetter)
Newsgroups: soc.veterans
Subject: TET OFFENSIVE REVISITED
Date: 22 Jan 1993 12:42:47 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

         Regarding:               TET OFFENSIVE REVISITED
              
OLD VIETNAMESE SOLDIERS DEBATE TET OFFENSIVE

    By Kathleen Callo
    HANOI, Jan 21, Reuter - A quarter of a century after the 
Tet offensive, which helped destroy America's will to fight 
the Vietnam War, Vietnamese are taking a fresh look at the 
cost of the audacious military campaign.
    It was at the end of the Lunar New Year, on January 30, 
1968, that Viet  Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese 
soldiers attacked more than 100 towns and  cities in South 
Vietnam, catching the U.S. military and the allied Saigon  
government by surprise.
    Americans at home were shocked by televised images of 
Viet Cong commandos blasting their way into the U.S. embassy 
and attacking other strategic points  in Saigon.
    U.S. troops dealt a crushing blow with a big 
counterattack, but the Tet offensive had shattered America's 
resolve and marked the beginning of the end  of its 
involvement in Vietnam.
    Then-President Lyndon Johnson announced in March 1968 he 
would not run for re-election. By 1973 the U.S. combat role 
ended, and in 1975 Hanoi's forces overthrew the South 
Vietnamese government.
    The communist leaders who reunified the North and South 
when the war ended officially say the offensive was a 
victory.
    But some former soldiers are beginning to admit to a less 
glorious version of that bloody campaign.
    Army General Tran Cong Man, deputy head of the Vietnam 
Journalists' Association, said Hanoi failed to achieve main 
goals set for the Tet offensive -- to control towns and whole 
areas of the South, to reshape communist forces  in the South 
into larger, regular units and even to overthrow the Saigon 
government.
    "It was not totally a defeat...but as for our planned 
goal, we didn't reach that," he told Reuters.
    "It was an important psychological blow for the Americans 
to see us attacking everywhere, but as for military strategy 
-- you don't do it that  way," he said.
    One retired army officer who asked to be called Phong 
(not his real name) said the U.S. counterattack that ended in 
June 1968 left communist forces in  the South a shambles for 
three years.
    So many fighters were wiped out that many survivors 
defected to the South Vietnamese, Phong told Reuters.
    When the offensive began -- Hanoi started secretly 
planning it in October 1967 -- his unit was rushing down the 
Ho Chi Minh trail towards Hue, which communist forces held 
for 22 days.
    By the time the 24-year-old sergeant arrived, his 
comrades had been killed or chased from the old imperial 
city.
    "So many were killed in some units that there were not 
enough survivors to bury the dead," said Phong.
    He and his men spent months hiding in nearby mountain 
caves, living on a bowl of rice a day.
    "We were so weak from hunger, we trembled. The men 
couldn't shoot straight."
    He said North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters had high 
spirits in 1965 when U.S. marines first landed in Vietnam.
    "But in 1968 everything became dark and dim...there were 
so many wounded,  so many starving, so many people had died. 
The soldiers lost their confidence.  It wasn't until 1971 
that they regained their confidence," he told Reuters 
recently.
    Outside his home in Hanoi, children were setting off 
firecrackers to celebrate the Lunar New Year, blasting the 
night air with the same sound  Phong's comrades used in 1968 
to mask the launch of the offensive.
    A newspaper in Ho Chi Minh City (as Saigon was renamed 
after the war) said old army commanders only revealed at a 
seminar in 1986 the shocking extent of communist casualties 
during the offensive. Local historians have just begun the 
first objective assessment of that "heroic tragedy."
    Man said Hanoi didn't realise until it sat down to peace 
talks in Paris in May 1968 that its failed battles had been 
strategic victories.
    "The U.S. forces in the South were still strong, but they 
had lost their will. The American people no longer wanted the 
U.S. to be there and they forced President Johnson to 
withdraw. On a psychological level, it was a great victory 
for us," he said.
    But Man, like other senior officers, was reluctant to 
talk of Tet '68. He and other Vietnamese are hoping this year 
will bring a long-awaited normalisation of relations with the 
United States.
    "We don't talk about it any more. We leave it to the 
historians. Plus, we don't want to do anything to shock the 
Americans. We want to live in peace with them," Man said.