From: 74150.2253@CompuServe.COM (Tuan Tu)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: [NEWS] Tet 68
Date: 21 Jan 93 22:53:30 GMT
Organization: Saigon.COM Public Access BBS; Data Line: (408)730-1092

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.
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