by Tom Bissell
The offensive's purpose was to trigger a spontaneous uprising in South Vietnam. The execution itself was brilliant: in Saigon the firecrackers that marked the Tet holiday were used to cover the first bursts of machine-gun fire. For North Vietnam and the NLF, however, brilliance of execution and fulfillment of execution turned out to be quite different. The South's NLF guerrilla force was practically annihilated in Tet's various battles, though its infrastructure survived, and PAVN troops suffered at least thirty times the 3,000 military casualties they inflicted. (The North Vietnamese initially claimed to have inflicted 43,000 U.S. casualties.) Such reckonings have caused many to accuse the American media of misrepresenting the true result of the Tet Offensive and demoralizing the American public after what was, in actual fact, an enemy rout.
For three years, the U.S. military had been announcing to the American people its constant progress in Vietnam, the improving military situation on the ground, the ever-growing “light at the end of the tunnel.” Tet proved that this whipped and weakening enemy was capable of a massive, powerful, and superbly planned surprise attack. Indeed, Tet was followed by a year of the bloodiest and most vicious fighting of the war. Although Tet inspired 61 percent of the American people, as one Gallup Poll indicated, to describe themselves as “hawks,” a few within the Johnson administration went from hawks to doves overnight. In the wake of Tet, General Westmoreland saw his request for 206,000 additional troops turned down by the White House for the first time (though only because his request was leaked and Johnson knew the public would not have stood for another escalation). Why did Westmoreland need more troops? Because, as Westmoreland explained, Tet was quite obviously “a diversionary effort to take attention away from … an attack on Khe Sanh.”
“Yes,” Hien agreed. “General Giap is very smart.”
“But,” my father said carefully, “I think he threw away the lives of too many North Vietnamese and VC.”
Hien stepped forward slightly. “We consider the VC to be the Revolutionary Force.”
“I'm sorry?”
“We don't distinguish between the North Vietnamese and the VC. We think of them together as the Revolutionary Force.”
“Oh.” My father turned to me, while behind him the Citadel's freely growing grass swayed like emerald corn. “Did you know that?”
I was sitting next to a rock mound swiss with bullet holes. I shrugged.
My father returned to Hien. “But they weren't really the same, were they?”
“We consider them the Revolutionary Force.”
“I understand that. But they weren't the same. We Marines, at least, never regarded them as the same. We had a lot of respect for the North Vietnamese Army.” My father made a demonstrative little fist and shook it. “Tough soldiers. Good fighters.”
Hien's entire bearing changed. This little man suddenly appeared twice as tall. He threw his long growth of mole hair over his shoulder and said, with grim finality, “We consider them the Revolutionary Force.”
My father, who now looked slightly frightened, turned to me for less dialectical conversation. “Did you do any reading about the battle for Hue? It was pretty much a Marine battle, you know.”
I had done some reading. The struggle that emptied the grassy field we now stood upon was one of those battles in which every side emerged looking little better than blood-drinking berserkers. Most of the 5,000 to 8,000 NLF guerrillas and PAVN regulars who attacked Hue sneaked into position, using as cover the crowds pouring into the city for the Tet holiday. There was scarcely any U.S. military presence in Hue—a handful of advisers in the city itself and a unit of noncombatant Army decoders in nearby Phu Bai—but a fair number of U.S. civilians. While one ARVN division was headquartered within the Citadel, its infantry did not operate near Hue, and, in any case, most of its personnel had already taken holiday leave. Despite warnings that three enemy battalions were apparently headed toward Hue, no one was put on high alert since the American officer transmitting the information was known as a worrywart. When the offensive began, the city of Hue was attacked from all sides. The Citadel, for psychological reasons, was the main target. Perhaps a dozen ARVN sentries were standing guard at the Citadel when the attack came, and those who survived the initial enfilade ran off. Shortly after the Citadel's breach, the NLF flag was snapping in the breeze above the King's Knight, where it would remain for the next three weeks.
The Communist liquidation of Hue's hostile class elements then commenced. As Don Oberdorfer writes, the captured text of the NLF/PAVN plan for taking Hue “suggests that the leadership did not expect to be able to hold Hue for very long, for it emphasized destruction of ‘the enemy’ over establishment and consolidation of the new order.” Like most such liquidations known to history, any logic intended to guide these deadly proceedings swiftly imploded; every foreign citizen in Hue but the French—whose “sympathy” the guerrillas were to try to “gain”—was targeted. Among the victims were two young U.S. foreign service officers, who were bound and executed; an American employee of NBC, who was cut down in the street while running from the NLF; a German pediatrician, his wife, and two other doctors, who were bound and executed; two French priests, who (apparently for their theism) were bound and executed. A popular Vietnamese Catholic priest named Father Dong, who prayed regularly for Ho Chi Minh because “he is our friend too,” was buried alive. Thousands of Vietnamese with real and imagined ties to the United States and the Saigon regime or non-Communist nationalist parties were machine-gunned and left in mass-grave lime pits outside the city.
It should be noted that NLF terrorism had grown less selective as the war dragged on and would become truly ugly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the NLF was reduced to assassinating altar boys. Nothing quite as awful as the Hue purge would be repeated by the Communists during the war. Early in the conflict, the NLF was usually careful not to antagonize the local population and in most cases behaved toward the Vietnamese peasantry with greater respect than the Saigon regime's police and soldiers typically cared to show. By 1968, Ho Chi Minh's old warning that reckless terrorism was a “bourgeois” device had been disregarded by many cells, and in 1969 the NLF was shooting rockets into Saigon with no concern for the civilian population. Between 1957 and 1972, the NLF assassinated 37,000 people. During the same period, the United States killed, at the very least, 365,000 noncombatant civilians. To argue that there was a moral difference between these twin splurges of slaughter would be difficult. The overall lack of discrimination on both sides, the historian James P. Harrison has argued, left the people of South Vietnam to choose between the “revolutionary terror” of the NLF and the “counter-revolutionary terror” of the U.S. military. Toward which side the hearts of most Vietnamese listed is not hard to imagine. At any rate, the final number of Hue's victims is still frequently debated—an apparent inevitability for any massacre that involves Communist aggressors. The most reasonable estimate of those killed during the purge is 3,000 to 4,000.
For the same psychological reasons that the Citadel was attacked by the insurgents, the U.S. command determined that it had to be recaptured by the South Vietnamese. The ARVN forces ordered to retake the Citadel did what ARVN forces usually did, which was to advance within half a mile of the enemy, find a tall thick wall, hide behind it, and wait for reinforcements, who then did the same. On February 10, three battalions of U.S. Marines were ordered to do what the ARVN refused to do. The little progress made during ARVN's nine-day nonassault was mostly erased upon news of the Marine reinforcement, which ARVN forces celebrated by instantly withdrawing from the Citadel.
The battle for Hue marked the first time U.S. Marines had engaged in close urban combat since the fight to retake Seoul from the North Koreans in September 1950. Often Hue's fighting was less house-to-house than room-to-room. Marines have spoken of their unwillingness to pass through any doorway without first rolling a hand grenade into the adjoining room, which goes some way toward explaining why 10,000 civilians died during
Hue's recapture. Even with this harsh caution, the Marines took approximately one casualty for every meter they were able to advance through the city. During the first days of combat, the Marines were under orders to preserve the Citadel's architecture— which must have been like staging a gunfight in the Louvre—but the tight streets, dense hedges, and courtyard walls made fighting effectively impossible. Tanks, for instance, could not fit through numerous Citadel streets unless many buildings were destroyed. Throughout the city NLF mortar shells descended with perfect silence and exploded in dirty flameless bursts. As casualties increased, patience fell. “We did our best to avoid malicious damage,” one Marine said at the time. “Yet, when we had to destroy a house, we destroyed it.” Some companies went lost in the Citadel's courtyards, and several Marines bled to death from treatable injuries simply because no one could find and evacuate them. From the beginning of the assault, the casualty rate was so high that if a Marine could walk he was ordered to keep fighting. “Although replacements routinely arrived during the battle,” Edward E Murphy writes in Semper Fi—Vietnam, a history of the Marine Corps in Vietnam, “too often they were chewed up by the killing machine of Hue before their squad leaders could even learn their names.” As Murphy notes, many replacements arrived so fresh from Camp Pendleton in California that “there were Marine KIAs found still wearing their stateside fatigues and boots.” There is a story of a Marine who in the bloody chaos was stuffed into a body bag while he was still alive, of a Marine with a blown-off arm weeping with childlike relief at being allowed to leave the fight.
After ten days of fighting, the United States’ concern for the Citadel's architecture had evaporated. The more of Hue the Marines destroyed by air and artillery, and the more parts of the city that were scorched black with napalm (one Marine described inhaling the air around the Citadel as “eating death,” and many walked around wearing surgical masks soaked in aftershave), the fewer places PAVN and the NLF had to hide. As the city was blown apart, desperation on all sides increased—and not only among combatants. This is from Michael Herr's Dispatches:
A little boy of about ten came up to a bunch of Marines from Charlie Company. He was laughing and moving his head from side to side in a funny way. The fierceness in his eyes should have told everyone what it was, but it had never occurred to most of the grunts that a Vietnamese child could be driven mad too, and by the time they understood it the boy had begun to go for their eyes and tear at their fatigues, spooking everyone, putting everyone really uptight, until a black grunt grabbed him from behind and held his arm. “C'mon, poor li'l baby, ‘fore one a these grunt mothers shoots you,” he said, and carried the boy to where the corps-men were.
Fittingly, the battle's end was empty of meaning and heroism. The PAVN soldiers and NLF guerrillas who had survived days of aerial and artillery bombardment slipped past snoozing ARVN guards the night before the Imperial Palace was finally retaken. When an ARVN unit charged inside the palace to capture it (the Marines had cleared the way up to the palace gate), it was discovered to be mostly empty. The Marines came in after the ARVN. One Marine found the body of a PAVN soldier and was photographed urinating into the corpse's mouth. On February 25, the battle for Hue was finished. Hue, too, was finished. Seventy percent of the city was rubble. Of Hue's 140,000 people, 90,000 had nowhere left to live. It is estimated that 7 percent of the city's civilian population was killed during the agonal three-week siege. Thousands of distended, broken-open bodies filled the Citadel's moat and lined Hue's streets. The Marines, Hue's liberators, lost almost 150. Only one U.S. Medal of Honor was awarded for conduct during the battle. It was posthumous.
“A lot of guys I went to basic with died in this place,” my father said. “A lot of guys. Guys who joined up again. Guys who kept volunteering. All died right around here.” He shook his head.
“Like who?” I asked.
“You don't know them.”
“Well, what were their names?”
He looked at me queerly. “What do you care?” This was said with a brusque sort of inquisitiveness, not anger.
I got to my feet. “I'm sorry. You're right. lust morbid curiosity.”
My father—the abrupt smile on his face false to anyone who knew him—turned to Hien. “What do you think?”
Hien regarded his shoes, which looked like small leather noses peeking out from beneath his blue slacks. “I think this is a special place for many people.”
My father said nothing and stood there in the wind, amid the grass. When he closed his eyes, it almost looked as though he were listening to someone.
Query: Why were the leaders of South Vietnam so corrupt and incompetent?
In the early 1960s, the magnitude of the political problems in South Vietnam was growing apparent. Nonetheless, the American strategy in Vietnam was to stay the course, back the South Vietnamese government, and, in Secretary of State Dean Rusk's words, “play for the breaks” militarily. What follows are passages from a number of books that together summarize the problem of playing for the breaks militarily alongside the South Vietnamese:
About this time Lieutenant Colonel Utter radioed for the ARVN airborne to close the growing gap on Lindauer's left flank. To his surprise the ARVN commander refused. Try as he might, Utter could not get the South Vietnamese to join the fight.
We hesitated to use ARVN interpreters because their methods of questioning people was to slap them upside the head with a revolver or shoot their foot off and say, “You VC?” The guy says no and BANG. “You VC?” Sooner or later, after losing enough pieces, the guy would say yes and then he'd be shot because now he's guilty.
He radioed the [U.S.] division advisor, who reported that “the [ARVN] 5th Division is asleep. The division commander consulted with his astrologer, who told him this was not the right day to go on an operation.”
He noticed that almost every time he heard the approach of what might be a bunch of Viet Cong walking down the trail and into the snare, one of the Saigon soldiers would give the ambush away by coughing, by snapping the bolt of a weapon, or making some other noise. This occurred too often to be accidental.
When his American adviser pointed out that across the stream seemed a better place to camp, the [ARVN] officer had said the area was already occupied by the VC. The adviser asked, “Why don't you go after them?”
“As long as we don't bother them,” the ARVN commander replied, “they won't bother us.”
Before the introduction of U.S. ground forces into South Vietnam, the ARVN was receiving tens of millions of dollars a year for training and equipment, and U.S. advisers were appalled to learn that many ARVN soldiers had no idea how to use a rifle sight. Some ARVN commanders repeatedly refused to answer calls of radio distress. One shot from a sniper was sometimes enough to bring an ARVN battalion to a halt. An American adviser calculated that, during one six-month period, ARVN's 7th Division spent 74 percent of its time “resting.” In 1966, it was discovered that only one ARVN officer had been wounded in action since 1954. While luckless ARVN conscripts and volunteers were killed by the thousand—the ARVN ultimately lost four times as many soldiers as the United States—in 1967 one particularly timid ARVN infantry division, the 25th, had more men killed in traffic accidents than combat. ARVN rolls routinely listed among their ranks what became known as “ghost soldiers”—that is, dead troops listed as still being on active duty and thus still being paid while their living commanders pocketed the wages. The wages were not much, which is surely one reason why the ARVN's morale was so awful. Many ARVN lieutenants earned as little as $18 a month.
There were honorable men within the South Vietnamese military, but they were a lonely minority. Many ARVN officers typically achieved their rank through bribery or nepotism. Not surprisingly, these men quailed during combat throughout the war. No matter how brave, strong, and physically tough the soldiers beneath them happened to be, loss of nerve on the part of a commanding officer can and did turn the tide of entire battles. While the ARVN contai
ned a few men who had fought alongside the Viet Minh against the French, most of its personnel were the local military leavings of imperial France. Others hailed from Bao Dai's short-lived collaborationist army, formed in 1948. Many from such implicated backgrounds took easily to feelings of disdain for the Vietnamese peasantry, whom they called nha que, “country bumpkins.” (These feelings linger in urban Vietnam today, as evidenced by the tendency of men to grow their fingernails long to prove they do not “work”) At their crudest, such men did not blink at mowing down the livestock of peasants suspected of colluding with the NLF or tossing a village girl to their soldiers for some sporting rape. Consider that South Vietnam's army fought a less well equipped enemy that in numbers of armed combatants rarely approached even a third of its troop force and yet rarely got the upper hand. Beneath President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963,250,000 ARVN soldiers were battling roughly 30,000 NLF guerrillas—and losing roundly.
Ngo Dinh Diem is arguably the one human being who did more than any other to befoul the South Vietnamese struggle against Communism. Diem was not an American creation by any means, but he was an American installation who began almost immediately to slash at the strings of the puppet master. He began in the minds of his U.S. handlers as a brilliant idea—a leader who would turn South Vietnam into a fortress of non-Communism similar to those that existed in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of Korea, and Nationalist China— and ended as an American migraine headache. Like Ho Chi Minh, Diem was a lifelong bachelor, a fluent speaker of numerous languages, a patriot who spent formative decades outside his native land, a man who understood (and rejected) Western systems of governance, and in most matters of temperament a tyrant. Unlike Ho Chi Minh, however, Diem was unloved, unwanted, and ultimately rejected by his own people; the day the man died, there were spontaneous parades. How and why this (in the words of the historian James Olson) “brilliant incompetent who beat the odds longer than anyone thought possible” came to be the linchpin of American aspiration in Vietnam is itself a story of incompetence.