Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Date:         Fri, 22 Jan 1993 10:31:52 -0500
              USENET." <VIETNET@USCVM.BITNET>
From:         Nhan Tran <tran@PEORA.SDC.CCUR.COM>
Subject:      NEWS/VN: 68's Tet offensive debate

01/20

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.