Just a Few Notes About Vietnam (Part 24)

Approaching Tet

It’s amazing how often miss-truths or someone’s personal opinion gets printed in newspapers. On Friday, General Patrick Brady, who received the MOH in Vietnam and whose service I honor, did an Op-Ed in the San Antonio Express-News. Most of his facts are, basically, correct; his conclusions are suspect.

General Brady writes The American soldier was never defeated on the battlefield in Vietnam; our defeat came from the elite in the courtrooms, the classroom, the cloakrooms and the newsrooms, from cowardly media-phobic politicians and irresponsible, dishonest media and professors from Berkeley to Harvard. This is old, hackneyed warmed-over crap. To start with, no, we did not win every battle in Vietnam. Several outposts were totally over-run by the NVA and/or the VC. Ipso facto: we did not win those battles.

Hamburger Hill? Yes, the enemy quit fighting and left. We left. Dak To? The enemy quit fighting and melted back across the borders into Cambodia and Laos. They came back. Khe Sanh? We won by enduring a shitload of rocket and mortar fire without getting all the Marines there killed? And then, the enemy stopped and left. Not exactly a victory at Khe Sanh, Not a loss, I guess, but certainly not a victory. You can't declare victory unless you know what the people attacking you want and that you kept them from achieving it.

But General Brady is right. The Americans and most of the ARVN fought well during the Tet Offensive and the North did not achieve any of the objectives it set for itself. A clear American victory. BUT…

Why did the media react the way they did? And let’s be clear about this, not many people in the media ever called TET an American loss. What seems to have happened back when Patrick Brady was a young man is that the MACV generals led by General William C. Westmoreland, only a short while before Tet 1968, had been boasting in news briefings that the VC were on the run and could not mount a credible offensive anywhere. The media duly repeated that on television and in newsprint. Is it any wonder that Walter Cronkite said “I thought we were winning this thing” when the VC rose up all over the country, attacked most of the cities, occupying many of them, and stayed in Hue for weeks after Tet?

If anyone caused the media reaction to Tet, it was General Westmoreland and his cadre of sycophantic, yesman generals.

And the assertion that history professors call Tet a military loss is patently absurd. They do, frequently, call it a public relations loss. That's absolutely correct.

Between Christmas and Tet at the 330th, we started translating message after message indicating that there was going to be an attack in Saigon, an attack in Tay Ninh, in Nha Trang, in Pleiku, in Kontum, in. . .well, every South Vietnamese city and town you can imagine. The messages even said when the attacks would take place: Tet, 1968. We were amazed: listening to MACV’s comments and reading messages from the NLF. There was a strange sort of disconnect here…someone was living in a fantasy world. We didn’t believe the first few translations we made, but as stuff poured in from all over the country, we became believers.

We sent reports and messages to MACV, to the White House, to every responsible official. Other intelligence units were sending similar messages. We were totally ignored because the generals followed their misguided beliefs of “VC on the RUN” instead of their intelligence units. In hindsight, the VC should not have attacked on Tet. They believed their own mythos, too: that the rest of the Vietnamese in the South would rise up and assist them. And so, they attacked. And they were killed in huge numbers. After Tet, what William Westmoreland had said before Tet was correct: they could no longer manage a credible offensive anywhere in the South. So, we won but not as decisively as we should have; we were not as well prepared as we should have been.

I sympathize with General Brady and appreciate his service. He’s obviously a true believer and speaks the truth "as he sees it," but true believers can't always see beyond their own preconceived notion of truth.

On the night of Tet, we retired to our palatial bunkers, but...that’s the subject for the next blog entry.