The Tet offensive: The turning point in Vietnam's war with America

The Tet Offensive or officially called The General Offensive and Uprising of Tet Mau Than 1968 by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong (VC), was one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, launched on January 30, 1968 by forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) against the forces of the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the United States Armed Forces and their allies.

It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam.The name of the offensive comes from the Tet holiday, the Vietnamese New Year, when the first major attacks took place.

In fact, Tet is the Turning Point in Vietnam. Many Americans remember the Communist Tet Offensive of 1968 as an unmitigated disaster for the U.S. armed forces. They have images of dead GIs and Viet Cong sappers scattered around the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; of bandaged and bloody Marines clinging on top of a tank in the devastated old Imperial Capital of Hue; of aircraft burning on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut air base; and Navy river patrol boats firing into their own overrun bases ashore in the Mekong Delta.

One can visualize Walter Kronkite, "Uncle Walty," suggesting in his deep, sonorous voice on the CBS Evening News that the war is lost; and a sad-faced, exhausted American President Lyndon Johnson announcing to the American people that he was halting the bombing in most of North Vietnam and that he would not seek reelection in November 1968.

This was a clear admission that his war leadership and his strategy for Southeast Asia, such as it was, had failed. Shocked by this turn of events and pessimistic about the future, after Tet an increasing number of Americans pressed for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.

What was the real impact of Tet and the enemy's post-Tet offensives on American arms? Were American forces bloodied and beaten in the field, compelled to withdraw to more secure enclaves, to avoid casualties, to surrender the countryside to the Communists, and to cease bombing enemy supply lines in North Vietnam? That may be the image that many Americans have, but as we will learn today the reality was quite different.

The US military developed new strategies and tactics for fighting the war that were anything but retrenchments or retirements. US Army, US Marine, and ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops aggressively attacked North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces the length and breadth of the country; the Navy pushed its units right up to the border with Cambodia and into the deepest reaches of the Mekong Delta; and Air Force and Navy aircraft squadrons redoubled their interdiction efforts in southern North Vietnam and Laos.

For the American military that offensive was a grand paradox. At the battlefield tactical level, the enemy was defeated and turned back at every turn without achieving any territorial gain.

At the theater-of-war operational level, their Tong Cong Kich/Tong Khoi Ngia (General Offensive/General Uprising) campaign was an absolute failure. Not only did the South Vietnamese people fail to flock to their banners, the South Vietnamese military stood firm and their own Viet Cong guerrilla forces were so decimated that they ceased to be an effective fighting force for the remaining seven years of the war.

But at the strategic level, the Tet Offensive was an unmitigated disaster for the United States. The American people saw it as a defeat and were confirmed in their beliefthat sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. Many believed that the media was responsible for turning a tactical and operational military victory into a strategic political defeat.

But as the late Peter Braestrup argued in his classic account of media reporting on the 'Tet Offensive', that blame was misplaced. While some of the media reporting was distorted, the real reason for the debacle was the void created by President Lyndon Johnson's "psychological defeat." His two months of inaction after Tet allowed critics to define the terms of this perceived disaster.

A major reason for President Johnson's psychological defeat was that hiswas wrong war in Vietnam. That command places an enormous demand on his will and his strength of character. As the great military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz emphasized in 1832, anyone can lead when all is going well.

But when disaster strikes, everything "comes to rest on the will of the commander alone." It is his spirit that "must rekindle the flame of purpose in all others." If he cannot, "the mass will drag him down to the brutish world where danger is shirked and shame is unknown." As Clausewitz concludes, "the higher the position, the greater the strength of character he needs to bear the mounting load."

But McNamara proved to be a man of no character whatsoever. Although President Johnson had charged him with winning the war, McNamara betrayed him and the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines under his command from the outset. During his testimony in the 1984 CBS-Westmoreland libel trial, McNamara said that he had come to the belief as early as 1965 or 1966 that the war "could not be won militarily."

That belief, however, did not prevent him from sending thousands of American men and women included-into harm's way in Vietnam and getting many of them killed in a war that he did not believe was winnable. To add insult to injury, in an August 3, 1992 Newsweek article he bragged that while he was sending the troops into battle, he was schmoozing with the leaders of the anti-war movement to show what a sensitive and politically correct guy he had been.

The magnitude of McNamara's failings is revealed by comparing him with his counterpart, North Vietnam's Defense Secretary Vo Nguyen Giap. Where McNamara admits that his will to win was broken before the war even started, Giap's long-range strategy "was to continue to bleed the Americans until they agreed to a settlement that satisfied the Hanoi regime. . . For him, "the Tet Offensive was not intended to be a decisive operation but one episode in a protracted war that might last 'five, ten, or twenty years'."While the United States was far superior to North Vietnam in the quantifiable physical dimensions of war so beloved by McNamara and his number-crunching "whiz kids," because of his lack of will Americans were outclassed completely in war's more important moral dimension that was not susceptible to their computer analysis.

In his 1995 apologia, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of the Vietnam War, McNamara made what former Senator Eugene McCarthy called a "Presbyterian confession" (i.e., absolving himself while blaming everyone else) for his sins in Vietnam. But this time his schmoozing fell on deaf ears.

"His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for the American dead soldiers," editorialized the New York Times on April 12, 1995. "The ghosts of those unlived lives circle around Mr. McNamara. Surely, he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades later."

A month after the Tet Offensive began, McNamara resigned as secretary of defense. Unfortunately, his successor, Washington lobbyist Clark Clifford, was no improvement. Although a longtime Johnson crony, he too betrayed the president. In his 1991 memoir, Counsel to the President, Clifford admits that he was brought in because Johnson wanted "a secretary of defense who supported his policy."

As retired Colonel Lewis Sorely noted in his review of Clifford's book in the September 1991 issue of Army, "Clifford set about ensuring that . . . American involvement in the war and American support for the South Vietnamese would be progressively and inexorably eroded. What is more significant he did this not in furtherance of his president's policy and direction but in defiance of it, forcing the president into one untenable position after another and ultimately usurping the role of commander-in-chief."

As Sorely concludes, "It is one thing to seek to influence the formulation of policy, quite another to faithlessly undermine that policy once formulated. Clifford represents himself as being very proud in doing the latter."

As then Army Vice Chief of Staff General Bruce Palmer wrote, "The JCS seemed to be unable to articulate an effective military strategy that they could persuade the commander-in-chief and secretary of defense to adopt." As he goes on to say, "There was one glaring omission in the advice the JCS provided. Not once during the war did the JCS advise . . . that the strategy being pursued most probably would fail and the United States would be unable to achieve its objectives.

The only explanation of this failure," Palmer concludes, "is that the chiefs were imbued with the 'can do' spirit and could not bring themselves to make such a negative statement or to appear to be disloyal." Indeed, the Tet offensive is the turning point in Vietnam's war with America. The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular foreign war in U.S. history and cost 58,000 American lives.


The writer is an independent political observer who writes on politics, political and human-centered figures, current
and international affairs