by Max Hastings
An American prisoner being escorted up the Ho Chi Minh Trail encountered NVA units moving down to join the offensive, attired in new green uniforms and tennis shoes rather than the usual tyre-rubber sandals: ‘They appeared fresh, healthy, poised and confident.’ One of them, carrying the wheels of a 75mm howitzer, claimed to be a veteran of Dienbienphu – he admitted that he found hills a trifle steeper than they had seemed back in 1954. He nonetheless pointed out with pride that some younger men were carrying burdens of over a hundred pounds, which he said was more than Vietminh porters could have managed in the campaign against the French. The American enquired what the NVA thought of his own countrymen as enemies. The soldier answered that US soldiers seemed keen enough when they started something, but lacked staying power. He thought the Marines impressive, but believed that no Americans could match the NVA’s motivation and experience. As the prisoner was hustled onwards, he was impressed by the absence of hostility towards himself. He reflected that a B-52 strike might change that.
When a contingent of US Marines arrived to reinforce the garrison of the big American firebase close to the Lao border, coffee beans hung heavy on the bushes of a plantation that fringed one side of its perimeter. The newcomers hailed a rifleman walking beside the pierced-plank runway. ‘Hey, man, what’s the name of this place?’ The Marine responded, ‘This is Khe Sanh, and you’ll never forget it.’ The first significant event of 1968 was a communist build-up around that red-earth clearing ‘raw as a wound in the jungle’, garrisoned on the personal orders of Westmoreland, against the strong advice of Marine commanders whose territory this was.
Although the war had been going on for a long time, when the NVA’s 304th Division moved south in November 1967, bound for a shared destiny with those Americans, few of its officers and men had much combat experience. On the night of 2 January, the 9th Regiment’s command group attempted an extraordinarily perilous reconnaissance: wearing American fatigues, they advanced towards outposts of Khe Sanh sited on the old French lateral Route 9 from Laos to the coast. They chattered noisily, and one comrade sang. Their weapons were slung. Near the Tchepone River Americans challenged them in English. Receiving no reply, they opened fire, killing an NVA regimental chief of staff and the deputy commander of a sapper battalion. The regimental CO vanished without trace, and was later found badly wounded in a clump of bushes, having trodden on a mine.
Further east, Route 9 witnessed frequent clashes as the communists ambushed American and ARVN convoys or harassed the string of firebases along it: Khe Sanh became dependent on air supply. The two NVA divisions dispatched to the area were intended to draw US forces from the east, and especially to reduce their strength around Hue, a key objective of the looming offensive, because a symbol of Vietnamese nationhood. Two more Northern divisions were deployed in the Cua Viet sector near the coast. For the first time in the war, Dragon Court committed some tanks in support of these formations. The plan originally scheduled attacks towards the end of February. Communist commanders were discomfited to be ordered to move a month earlier: they had stockpiled nothing like sufficient ammunition and rice.
The two NVA divisions around Khe Sanh subjected its Marine garrison – eventually six thousand strong – to an intermittent bombardment, rendering the landing strip hazardous. In the course of January and February, harassment of the base became a huge worldwide news story. Westmoreland suggested that Giap intended to make this a new Dienbienphu, a comparison that caught the imagination of the media, though the general added that the communists would assuredly fail to match the Vietminh’s triumph. Day after day, the camp was pounded by fire. TV news films showed reporters talking to camera as they crouched in flak jackets while Marines offloaded aircraft amid shellbursts. Before, during and after Tet, B-52s directed by Combat Skyspot radar flew 2,548 sorties and dropped sixty thousand tons of bombs, some within a thousand yards of Marine positions. The base became the scene of repeated dramas, such as that which took place when Chief Warrant Officer Henry Wildfang landed a C-130 crippled by communist fire, its wings ablaze, successfully swerving to avoid parked planes on the strip. Wildfang’s feat was rewarded with his fifth Distinguished Flying Cross, and there were many comparable displays of grit.
MACV forged an obsession with Khe Sanh, and Lyndon Johnson famously had a photomural of it installed in the White House. Yet although there were fierce contests around American positions on the surrounding hills – named for their elevations 950, 881, 861 and 558 – the main perimeter was never seriously attacked. This caused some commentators to conclude that Westmoreland allowed himself to become the victim of a brilliant enemy feint. Although the communists as usual paid a far higher price in lives than did the Americans, James Wirtz argues that at Khe Sanh they were able ‘to generate enough noise to overwhelm the signals leaked by the preparations for the impending urban offensive’. A Southern colonel wrote: ‘The probability of Khe Sanh becoming a decisive contest objective like Dienbienphu was foremost in the minds of our intelligence analysts. Little attention, if any, was given to the cities as probable objectives … [Our experts] were all convinced, out of prejudice and pride, that the enemy did not possess the capability.’
Westmoreland endowed Khe Sanh with an importance that it did not deserve: like Dienbienphu, the place should probably never have been garrisoned. Worse, he allowed the world to see where his gaze was fixed, which made him appear foolish – indeed, helped to destroy his reputation – when the enemy struck elsewhere. Nonetheless, it seems mistaken to imagine that the North Vietnamese deployed two divisions solely as a deception. It is overwhelmingly likely that they would have attempted its capture if American artillery and above all air power had not made this impossible. Communist officers later lamented the fact that the two formations had not instead been committed further east, preferably at Hue.
MACV’s men were not the only ones who made comparisons with Dienbienphu. Northern veterans discussed the 1954 battle, and observed ruefully that the Americans had not reprised the French mistake of failing to occupy surrounding high ground. US defences were also far more impressive, air resources almost unlimited. The communists’ concentration on the Lao border hurt their strategy even more than Westmoreland’s response injured the American cause, but Hanoi’s misjudgements did not make headlines, while MACV’s did. Westmoreland and his staff, convinced that this was an American war, discounted the notion that the communists might make South Vietnamese forces their principal targets.
Meanwhile Washington bore its own share of responsibility for the poor decision – given the flood of intelligence about enemy activity – not to cancel the Tet truce. The embattled Johnson administration swallowed hints that Hanoi was close to opening negotiations. It thus insisted that the truce should be honoured, allowing many ARVN soldiers to go home for leave. Moreover, even though Westmoreland recognised the likelihood of a big communist play, he refused to cancel his own offensive plans and chafed at Washington’s refusal to sanction drives into Laos and Cambodia. His staff ignored the discovery of caches of brand-new enemy weapons, including a big one near Saigon, together with evidence that VC sappers had been reconnoitring Tan Son Nhut.
Lt. Gen. Fred Weyand, the slow-spoken Californian commanding II Field Force, is often hailed as the only senior officer who prepared for trouble, moving units into Saigon and cancelling his own planned operations. It was certainly thanks to Weyand, a former army intelligence officer, that twenty-seven US manoeuvre battalions were deployed within reach of Saigon when the communists struck. His fears nonetheless focused on that area: he did not anticipate countrywide attacks. Westmoreland and his senior subordinates were justified in asserting after Tet that they had foreseen trouble; but they showed no grasp of its scale. Moreover, since the previous summer many units had been on maximum alert at least half the time. They were told nothing special now to suggest a looming cataclysm. US commanders committed the oldest error in the military playbook: they discounted the interpretation of Le Duan’s intentions
made by Joseph Hovey and his kin, because it failed to conform to MACV logic.
2 FUGUE
The suicide bomber is often supposed to be a twenty-first-century phenomenon. Yet Le Duan’s offensive brilliantly achieved his purposes because Vietcong guerrillas reinforced by regular Northern troops proved willing to face almost inevitable death to fulfil their Tet assignments. The communists unleashed some sixty-seven thousand fighters in attacks on thirty-six of the country’s forty-four provincial capitals and sixty-four of 245 district capitals, while continuing the wilderness battles at Khe Sanh and elsewhere. By demonstrating the power to coordinate operations on such a scale, to motivate so many men and women to pursue objectives that even most North Vietnamese commanders deemed unattainable, they blinded the world to the brutality of a leadership that could unleash such horrors, for which the civilians of South Vietnam paid most of the price.
On the morning of 27 January ARVN troops captured audio tapes prepared by the NLF for broadcast through radio stations they intended to target, announcing the capture of Saigon, Danang and Hue. The communists thus lost a significant element of surprise, while their attacks proved ill-prepared and poorly coordinated, because of the priority accorded to secrecy in delaying the issue of orders to their own fighters. On the 28th some of the South’s top cadres were at ‘the Red Office’, a refuge in the midst of a huge swamp adjoining the Plain of Reeds, which they called ‘the Atlantic Ocean’. They were living relatively comfortably, enjoying cigarettes and liquor sent down from Saigon, eating a newly-caught fish. Joint VC commanders Vo Van Kiet and Tran Bach Dang were squatting on a mattress, chopsticks in hand, when a motorcycle courier arrived. He handed them a letter marked ‘MOST URGENT AND TOP SECRET’, which read: ‘A7 to A404: D-Day. Start the battle between the first and second days of the Tet Lunar New Year. H-Hour: 1200 midnight. This is the decision of Uncle Huong’ – code name of the politburo.
They were astonished and dismayed, because they had expected an H-Hour five days later. Now, instead, they had just three days and nights to reach start-lines outside Saigon. Dang, a forty-two-year-old veteran born in the delta, recalled grimly: ‘Nobody felt like eating and drinking any more.’ They immediately broke camp and set forth, wearing uniforms but carrying civilian clothes, cash, and ID cards forged for them in Saigon by police sympathisers. Some fighters burned their own huts, a symbolic gesture designed to emphasise a commitment to victory or death. Soon a thousand men were following Kiet and Dang in one among dozens of similar columns converging on their urban objectives: ‘The entire north part of the Plain of Reeds was filled with moving groups of people.’ Because this was the dry season, the delta contingent was often obliged to portage boats laden with weapons and ammunition.
Their command group was to rendezvous with local guerrillas outside Saigon. In the fierce heat they made slow progress, astonished by their good fortune not to be spotted by the aircraft they often heard in the distance. At night the column moved even more slowly, while Dang and Kiet held muttered flashlight consultations over a map. The mood was one of fierce excitement, extending from their leaders to greybeards and raw recruits: most of these men and women were true believers. Before dawn on the 29th they halted and hid themselves in the huts of a Party district headquarters, where they ate Tet cakes. Then there was a bad time: helicopters and aircraft rocketed and strafed the area. Kiet and Dang, watching Hueys circling so low they could distinguish the door-gunners’ faces, insisted that no one should fire back. By noon, quiet was restored: the Americans had seen movement, correctly identified enemies, but failed to grasp their numbers. For all the sound and fury, the air strikes merely holed several sampans.
That night of the 29th–30th, the first attacks of the offensive were launched, ahead of time because of the confusion about dates. Danang, the coastal town of Nha Trang and other northern centres, became scenes of bitter fighting. Southern VC units still marching towards Saigon were bewildered to hear of a government radio announcement at 9.45 a.m. on Tuesday the 30th, cancelling the Tet truce following the night’s attacks. A senior cadre for Long An province described their bafflement: ‘No one could understand how this could have happened. Was it possible that all our preparations had only been an elaborate deception? Could there be any possible military advantage to starting the offensive in this fashion?’ They waited expectantly for radio messages that would answer these questions, yet none was forthcoming. Early that morning Kiet and Dang arrived unannounced at the rendezvous near Saigon, at the head of their own column. They abruptly informed assembled comrades: ‘The situation is extremely critical. Saigon must be attacked tonight!’
One cadre moaned in near-despair, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ His staff set about using a bare twenty hours to arrange the deployments of ten battalions dispersed across the countryside, with tenuous communications and some officers absent on Tet leave. Rations and ammunition had to be issued, guides allocated. Dang gave them a rousing eve-of-battle speech, concluding by raising a clenched fist and shouting the watchwords, ‘Resolution! Attack! Attack!’ He himself later asserted that three thousand voices shouted back in joyful unison. This was the most inspiring moment of their war, he said, when hopes were sky-high. But another officer was exasperated by Dang’s exuberance, which he deemed a poor substitute for realistic planning.
The last day’s march was an agony of delays and seething impatience. They waded canals, hastened across rice fields, listened to Saigon radio reports about the fighting further north, bemused that passing aircraft still seemed oblivious of them. As darkness fell, local civilians stood outside their homes, watching the files of armed men pad by. Some said, ‘Why not celebrate the holiday here?’ They were given Tet cakes, pickled cabbage, meat to munch as they advanced to battle.
At 2100 they came upon a bivouacked VC battalion. To Dang’s disgust, he found its senior cadre prostrate on a plank, drunk. The man pulled himself to his feet, stood at attention and saluted, saying, ‘Sir! I am the deputy commander!’ Dang demanded furiously: where were his CO and political officer? ‘Sir! The battalion commander has gone to get married, and the commissar is a guest at the wedding.’ ‘Haven’t you received your orders?’ ‘Not yet, sir.’ The battalion was hastily assigned to attack Saigon’s national police headquarters. Yet by that night, some of the northern attacks had already been crushed: in Nha Trang, 377 Vietcong lay dead and a further seventy-seven were prisoners. Eighty-eight government troops had perished defending the city, along with thirty-two civilians. Six hundred homes were destroyed, a foretaste of destruction that would soon sweep the country.
Gen. Tran Do, who exercised political command of the Vietcong’s Tet operations, said later that the curse of their war effort was an excess of ideological theorising, and insufficient hard-headed military planning. A senior officer in the principal northern operation of the offensive recalled years later the dismay among the leadership at the terse order from Hanoi: ‘Mount a general offensive and uprising to liberate Hue.’ He said that he was vividly reminded of Lenin’s line, ‘One should not play at revolution.’ To have a chance of success, said this cadre, the local Vietcong would need the support of two Northern regiments, two artillery battalions, supplied with four hundred tons of ammunition. Though the guerrillas were indeed reinforced by some NVA, they mustered nothing like this order of battle when they marched upon Hue.
Vietnam’s third largest city, with a population of 140,000, offered one notable advantage as an objective: it was only an overnight march for guerrillas sent forth from local sanctuaries to reconnoitre. They had dug observation bunkers and stockpiled a thousand tons of rice within easy reach. On the afternoon of 30 January, columns began to move towards the city. The communist narrative asserts that a man swept away during a river crossing shouted no appeal for help, to avoid distracting his comrades from their mission; cynics will prefer to believe that his mouth was full of water. But then another column was spotted at the Duong Hoa River by ARVN who called down artillery fire which inf
licted thirty-two casualties. Some VC units became lost, causing them to arrive late at their start-lines.
US military communications were saturated, so that priority messages were slow to reach recipients. That day, 30 January, Phu Bai interceptors picked up North Vietnamese signals about the imminent attack on Hue, but by the time these had travelled up the command chain, the American compound in the city was already taking fire, and its four hundred occupants were fighting for their lives. Despite later MACV claims that US commanders were not surprised – citing the alert Fred Weyand had called in his own area at 2037 on the 29th – the behaviour of many Americans does not convey consciousness of imminent crisis. On the night of the 30th, Westmoreland’s intelligence chief, Brig. Phil Davidson, retired to his quarters. A humble soldier named Louis Pumphrey from Panesville, Ohio, was in his bunk at Di An, near Tay Ninh. A tape-recorder geek, before falling sleep he made a cassette for his family which included squeaking noises made by Charlie, his spider-monkey: ‘I’m going to bed pretty soon after I’ve put in the nightly report. They’re expecting an attack because of Tet. Nothing’s happening. Probably nothing will.’ Then rockets started thumping into the base.