by Max Hastings
The hero of the defence was twenty-year-old Marine Sgt. Ron Harper, the guard who closed and barred the heavy teak doors of the chancery just before the VC addressed themselves to it. During the long shoot-out that followed, scores of TV and press reporters gathered nearby to describe an irresistible drama unfolding a few hundred yards from their hotels. Brig. John Chaisson, director of Westmoreland’s Combat Operations Center, found himself standing beside the sentry outside his quarters a block away, watching the sights and listening to the sounds: ‘There is something weird about street-fighting. Everything seems to be going in all directions and the big booms are accentuated by bouncing off the buildings.’
At first light, Hueys belatedly airlifted a platoon of the 502nd Airborne to the embassy’s relief. Capt. Jack Speedy wrote: ‘The morning was spectacularly beautiful as the sun rose higher in the sky. Mists rose from the Saigon River. Smoke from cooking fires was in evidence in many of the dwellings below. Green, shimmering vegetation emerged from the golden reflection of the rising sun.’ The streets were deserted as they peered down towards the embassy; then they began to take fire from invisible enemies – the VC commandos – which wounded a door-gunner, who slumped back streaming blood. With astonishing pusillanimity the pilot, rather than land on the embassy roof, swung away towards Long Binh, where as they approached at 0630 part of its ammunition dump exploded – another success for suicidal communist sappers. Steve Howard, an eyewitness, said, ‘It was like somebody’s introduced nuclear weapons into Vietnam.’ The paratroopers landed in the midst of conspicuous panic: ‘This Tet thing was clearly having a widespread effect.’
While the wounded gunner was taken away the paratroopers ran to another Huey, flew back to the embassy, and landed on the roof more than six hours after the first attacker had entered the compound. As they jumped down, a Marine guard and an army communications man seized the opportunity to climb aboard and vanish. The newcomers raced downstairs, meeting a civilian staffer – probably Wendt – ‘with a look that said we were the greatest people on the face of the earth’. Follow-on ‘slicks’ dropped more paratroopers. Two wounded attackers taken prisoner were handed over to the South Vietnamese.
Col. George Jacobson was a retired officer who occupied a villa in the compound, and held the post of mission coordinator – civilian adviser to the ambassador. Jacobson had held a Tet firework party in his garden the previous evening, then spent the ensuing hours lying low and clutching a grenade, his only weapon: living within the compound of the fortified embassy, it would have seemed ridiculous to keep a gun under the pillow. First light brought the colonel a drama worthy of a Hollywood western: he heard a VC – the last commando at liberty – downstairs, and called softly out of the window to a Marine he glimpsed outside, demanding a weapon. The man tossed up a pistol, which a few moments later, at 0645, Jacobson emptied into the enemy fighter who charged into the bedroom firing an AK-47.
At 0915 the embassy was declared secure. Tom Speedy said: ‘The bodies of the Communist dead were not even cold when a Mongolian horde of the press burst into the compound … My most pressing problem became newsmen.’ A paratrooper told the newcomers that attackers had penetrated the chancery building. These sensational, though false, tidings were broadcast around the world, making a bad story worse. Somebody observed that the weapons the communists had employed to inflict this stunning blow upon US prestige had cost a tiny fraction of the $4,000 minimum charge for access to the Pacific satellite by which the story was televised to the world, with an impact greater than that of any bullet.
Gen. William Westmoreland had been alerted to the first attacks at 0300, but did not leave his quarters until driven direct to the embassy just after it was secured. What he then said inflicted lasting injury upon his reputation. First he upset his own soldiers, snapping at Speedy and his unshaven men, who were told to disappear and smarten themselves up, ‘then he spun away and inflicted himself on some other poor souls … There were enough Westmorelands and his kind to make many of us hate some of our own side.’ Allan Wendt, the diplomat who had endured a night of terror, was even less impressed. There were no apologies for the six-hour delay before the US Cavalry arrived, figuratively speaking. Instead, after viewing the debris and corpses outside, the general expressed disgust at the unseemly mess. ‘I suggest you get this place cleaned up,’ he told the duty officer, ‘and get these people back to work by noon.’
Westmoreland told newsmen that the enemy had suffered a great defeat. Speaking like a preacher shocked that the collection plate has been raided, he said: ‘The enemy, very deceitfully, has taken advantage of the Tet truce to cause maximum consternation.’ He later suggested that the attack on the capital was ‘diversionary’ to the communists’ ‘main effort’ in Quang Tri province. Peter Braestrup of the Washington Post demanded scornfully, ‘How could any effort against … downtown Saigon, be a diversion?’
19
The Giant Reels
1 FIGHTING BACK
The assault on the US embassy was only the most conspicuous among hundreds of violent clashes that erupted in the early hours of 31 January. Tran Tan was a high school student, living with his parents and their nine other children in a little thatched house on the outskirts of Saigon, where he was shaken awake by his mother. ‘There’s a lot of noise outside that doesn’t sound like firecrackers,’ she said. Tan dressed hastily, while his father, a former soldier for the French, went to investigate. He came back and said, ‘The VC are everywhere – you’d better get out.’ Tan took his younger brother on the back of the family Honda and fled by back alleys to an uncle’s house – the two boys were the only ones of an age to be of dangerous interest to the communists. Their parents and neighbours took refuge in a nearby school which became home for the next six months, until they were moved to a refugee camp. During the destruction of most of the area in the Tet fighting, the Trans’ little home was incinerated, leaving them destitute.
Down in the delta, a student invited into his home for tea a cadre who entered the town of Cai Lay with VC guerrillas. The communist said there was no time for that: ‘For now, let’s be happy in welcoming peace. I hope you will contribute to bringing it about.’ The young man was invited to write down the names and addresses of every government, police or army man he knew, and duly did so, omitting only close friends. Two weeks of fierce fighting followed, in which the civilian population cowered in their homes. The attackers were eventually repulsed from the main government compound.
In Saigon, VC commander Huynh Cong Than wrote: ‘Events during the first day of fighting were completely different from what we had expected. The spearhead battalions were unable to make rapid progress because they had only small arms and little ammunition, while enemy forces were numerous and exploited the tangle of streets and alleys to mount fierce resistance. Civilians gave our men a warm welcome, but we were not … supporting a popular uprising.’ Communications broke down between the battalions thrusting into the city and their headquarters outside, which was obliged to rely for information on Saigon radio, soon transmitting again. Thirty-five VC battalions were committed in the region, eleven of them within the city. Poor intelligence frustrated the purpose of an assault on the South Vietnamese armoured centre by fighters accompanied by drivers trained to use captured heavy weapons: they found the tanks gone, breech-blocks removed from 105mm howitzers. A major thrust was launched against the military headquarters at Tan Son Nhut. Vice-president Ky, who was inside the base, armed his wife and three older children with rifles and pistols. Lt. Col. Glen Otis became one of the American heroes of the battle for the manner in which he directed his 3/5th Cavalry in a night-relief thrust from Cu Chi, hitting the communist attackers in the rear. His own unit was considerably mauled as he flew ahead of them in a Huey, pinpointing ambushes and ordering diversions, but the Cav contributed importantly to blunting the Tan Son Nhut assault.
In a nearby house, teenage student Tran Van De peered cautiously through a slit in the gate and saw a sold
ier in an unmistakable Vietcong pith helmet shouting down the street, ‘Come on out, everybody. The revolutionary army is here to liberate you.’ De and his family stayed put, however, because as good Catholics they had been reared since the cradle to hate and fear communists. Soon afterwards he heard shooting close at hand, and crept back to where his mother and four younger siblings were huddled apprehensively. He put his finger to his lips, and motioned all of them under the big bed. Terrifying hours followed: bullets zipped through their front door; they heard helicopters firing rockets, one of which set the neighbouring house on fire. Eventually the whole family fled to a patch of wilderness a few hundred yards distant, and crouched in a ditch through the ensuing three days. Each dawn De returned to check their house, which survived. On the third morning he found himself confronting the raised rifle of a huge American soldier. ‘I am a student,’ said De, in English. The man lowered his weapon, but the Vietnamese could see the doubt, the suspicion, lingering in his eyes.
Generals feel most comfortable handling large forces in coherent battles. Fred Weyand prided himself on having ensured resilient communications, which enabled him quickly to feed units of his II Field Force into the struggles around Saigon. The rest of MACV’s brass, however, seemed unmanned by the chaos that overtook the country. Liaison between Americans and South Vietnamese was poor. Many local commanders were thrown back on their own initiative. During the first hours in Saigon, American military police took significant casualties because they were understandably ill-prepared to fight as infantry. Sixteen MPs were killed and twenty-one wounded, many of them aboard a blown-up truck. In Cholon, heavy fighting persisted for weeks. A handful of Australians fought off a VC attack on their billet in which one enemy rocketeer was killed by a cook, Pte. ‘Pop’ Clement. He spoke later in terms characteristic of his nation: ‘I knew when I saw him lift up that drainpipe he wasn’t coming round to fix the plumbing.’ The big picture was of government forces holding most of their ground, and inflicting far higher casualties than they received, but those on the streets saw only bloodshed and mayhem.
Much of the accustomed daily business of the US 3rd Field Hospital in a Saigon suburb was to address civilians’ terrible teeth, and issue them with the multi-coloured placebos they loved. Now, suddenly, the facility was plunged into a maelstrom. American surgeons were working on a wounded Vietcong when a male nurse put his head around the door and said, ‘They’ve just hit the embassy.’ Disbelieving voices muttered, ‘Yeah, right.’ Then the nurse said earnestly, ‘Forget this case. We have plenty more to go.’ Medical aide William Drummond said, ‘The marathon started at that point … We worked continuously for like forty hours.’
There were harsh decisions to abandon some bad cases, because resources had to be prioritised. Walking wounded were loaded aboard buses and driven to Tan Son Nhut for evacuation to Hawaii. A few staff succumbed: Drummond described the collapse of the head of surgery: ‘He was overwhelmed. He just seemed like an inadequate person who couldn’t deal with it.’ He himself stepped outside to be confronted by a 2½-ton truck carrying American corpses, maybe a dozen of them. Junior ranks’ quarters were commandeered as a morgue, which at one time was occupied by six hundred bodies, Vietnamese and American. The hospital had 150 beds, and at its Tet peak held five hundred patients. Inside the windowless facility ‘you were in a tomb’: sometimes medics stepped briefly outside, merely to discover whether it was daylight or dark.
Drummond found his job toughest among ‘expectants’ – doomed men: ‘It was real hard to see somebody that could have been my brother, same age, that was talking to me and we knew was going to die.’ The hospital’s chief nurse and her assistant were motherly women in their fifties. One of them saw a Marine descend from a truck with an elbow bone protruding, everything gone below. The nurse said, ‘Poor boy, you lost your arm.’ He responded, ‘That ain’t nothing, honey, they shot me in the balls, too!’ The pace slowed only on the third day, when the hospital’s sterile supplies were exhausted.
Back home, the American people were stunned, and often misinformed. NBC anchor Chet Huntley told viewers that Vietcong snipers had penetrated the US embassy building and fired down from its rooftop on rescuers in the courtyard. Sarah McClendon said on DC news programme Capital Tieline: ‘The situation is very, very bad, and I think people should realize this.’ More temperately, Tom Buckley of the New York Times expressed awe that ‘after years of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties, the Viet Cong can still find thousands of men who are ready not only to strike at night and slip away, but also to undertake missions in which death is the only possible outcome’. CBS’s Mike Wallace said the attacks ‘demolish the myth that the allies are in military control of South Vietnam’. Senator John Stennis of Mississippi told reporters that even if the attacks cost the enemy heavy casualties, they represented a personal humiliation for Lyndon Johnson. The president was indeed deeply shocked: his faith in the military, explicitly in Westmoreland, never recovered.
And the battle raged on. In Saigon at 0600 on 1 February, VC commander Dang and his staff boarded big sampans flying NLF flags, motored upriver and docked in the city. Then they walked under intermittent gunfire to the Ba Tang bridge through streets in which many houses were displaying their flags. Dang was a Vietminh veteran who had known Saigon back in 1945–46. He stopped by the house of a certain Mrs Chin, where the Party committee had its headquarters in those faraway days. One guerrilla said he found it so wonderful to be in the capital that he took off his sandals, the better to feel its streets.
That afternoon at MACV, Brig. John Chaisson wrote with reluctant admiration: ‘This is really a fantastic effort. The enemy has hit nearly every airfield and province capital in the country simultaneously. So far he has caused us considerable damage, not too many casualties, but he has paid a stupendous price. If we can stay on top of this (and we will) I don’t think he will have too much left in reserve. He either is going to make it on this one, or he has shortened the war for us.’
At the insurgents’ field headquarters, spirits were already sagging. Cadres reported that all VC commandos in the city centre had been killed. Dang set up a new command post in a pagoda near the Binh Tien bridge, and dispatched ‘occupation teams’ through the streets, calling on every citizen to join the uprising – largely in vain. He heard that a bomb had fallen on the house of his friend Mrs Chin, killing its occupants. In the nights and days that followed there was no sleep and an unbroken diet of ill tidings, mostly borne by women couriers who braved the shot-torn streets. Advancing allied forces, committing ever more firepower, were shrinking communist perimeters. Helicopters circled continuously, dropping flares in the hours of darkness. American direction-finders pinpointed Dang’s radio transmissions, so that shells began to bracket his location. A steady stream of casualties were carried in, for whom little could be done. The guerrillas subsisted on a diet of duck and duck eggs, sickening of both. Dang pleaded desperately and in vain for reinforcements.
Meanwhile, across the country, almost every American combat unit found itself engaged somewhere, somehow. Capt. Myron Harrington was a thirty-year-old from Augusta, Georgia, who took over a company of the 1/5th Marines five days before Tet, feeling embarrassed that he had hitherto served eight years without seeing action: ‘I was very conscious of being green.’ A few hours after the offensive began, he and his men were dispatched on a sweep south of Hue along the old coastal rail line, where they promptly collided with some NVA, and had a messy firefight in an abandoned village. After a night in which their positions were intermittently mortared, at dawn Harrington was ordered to lead two platoons across country to join up with the rest of the battalion – eleven miles away. Here was a classic instance of the confusion and fumbling leadership: it was absurd to dispatch a small force on such a hazardous march. Harrington asked battalion, ‘What’s between thee and me?’ Nothing, they said. Yet his Delta Company moved only a few hundred yards before meeting enemy fire. They took four hours to disengage and
evacuate eight wounded, covered by naval gunfire. Harrington could see NVA gathering in force, their movements directed by hand-signals and whistle-blowing: ‘I realised this was getting serious.’ Only after another thirty-six hours were they able to redeploy under cover of darkness, reaching the battalion at midnight on 2 February.
Lt. John Harrison’s Airborne company outside Nha Trang was committed to advance across open paddies towards two houses and a graveyard where they were told the Vietcong were waiting. Harrison said: ‘Suddenly a lot of them were behind us, firing rockets and mortars thump-thump-thump.’ He and three men sought refuge in a hooch, only to find bullets zipping through its walls. They fought all day, the rest of his company pinned down a thousand yards back. ‘It became a slugfest – who was better than whom. In most contacts if you were going to lose guys it happened in the first thirty seconds, but this went on and on.’ His point man was killed on the porch of the adjoining hut. Harrison called in air strikes so close that blast blew the roof off his own hooch, and set him bleeding through nose and ears. At one stage six F-4s were stacked overhead, diving in succession.
Yet still the VC kept firing. A child ran out of a hut, grabbed a gun lying on the ground and darted inside again. The officer told his M-60 gunner, ‘If she does that again, shoot her.’ Though just before nightfall another company arrived to relieve them, they lost a further three men in the course of extracting a casualty. It had been a rough, tough day. Harrison said: ‘It was the first time in Vietnam that I could not establish fire superiority. We were shooting massed M-60s yet we couldn’t make them slow their fire. We scarcely saw the enemy, only glimpses of the flashes from their AKs.’ The paratroopers retreated just before dusk, then later the lieutenant led a patrol back to the battlefield to recover their own dead. They got lost on the way home, and had to radio the Airborne perimeter to fire tracer into the air as a guide.