Remembering Tet, 50 years later

Fifty years ago, more or less -- not sure of the day -- my family got a telegram and, later that day, a visit from a Marine officer to let us know that my father, who was in Khe Sanh at the time, had been wounded. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart in that action and claimed forever after that he put a band-aid on it. The Tet Offensive was in full swing in early 1968, and the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were trying to deliver a knockout blow.

We didn't go to school that day. My mother shut herself in her room, and when I asked my brother -- the oldest child, four years older than me -- why we weren't going to the bus stop, he told me, "Shut up. Dad got shot." I was seven, and I will never forget it.

The other thing I will never forget is Walter Cronkite telling me we had lost the war. As it turned out, he was right, but mostly, I think, because of Cronkite and similarly situated people saying that. Lyndon Johnson was the consummate politician and didn't want to piss anybody off who might vote for him. Once his party went anti-war, we were done. Thousands of our best lost their lives because the media convinced Johnson and the public that we were losing the war while Johnson, simultaneously, thought it would look bad if we just pulled out. He diddled, and people my family knew died as a result. All because, I think, of the media pushing a message that simply wasn't true.

Cronkite, a dedicated leftist who never skewed from the Democrat party line, put it like this:

To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

What Cronkite willfully ignored and what was painfully clear to anybody willing to actually look was that the Tet Offensive was a massive defeat for the communists. The Viet Cong, clearly sent into action by the North Vietnamese for set-piece battles for which they were ill-suited, were essentially eliminated as a fighting force and were irrelevant for the rest of the war. The NVA suffered horrific casualties, especially at Khe Sanh but elsewhere as well, from which they never really recovered. the battle of Hue, one of South Vietnam's largest cities, was portrayed by the media at the time as a massive U.S. defeat.

The Marine Corps, rightly so, views Hue as one of their finest moments. It wasn't pretty, but in house-to-house fighting, the Marines blasted the NVA and Viet Cong out of that city, one building at a time. Because the NVA and VC were ordered not to retreat, enormous numbers of them died in place. Marine casualties were high, but nowhere near what the communists suffered. Hue was the last truly major battle of the war, as the North Vietnamese afterward settled for nipping at the edges. That steady stream of casualties eroded the U.S. will to fight, largely thanks to Cronkite and company convincing the public we were fighting a losing war. It was a self-fulling prophecy. But it wasn't true:

The communist attack on Hue, South Vietnam’s third largest city, was part of North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive. Viet Cong units infiltrated the city dressed as ordinary civilians and after midnight on Jan. 30, 1968 they seized key strongpoints. Five thousand North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops also swarmed down on the ancient provincial capital.

. . .
Besides being outnumbered, the Marines were hampered by bone-chilling cold weather and rain that limited visibility and air support. They also fought under strict rules of engagement that excluded the use of heavy artillery and air strikes within the bounds of the historic city.
Apart from a handful of tanks, Marines had to retake Hue only with the weapons they could carry on their backs against a fanatical Viet Cong and NVA armed with mortars, rockets and heavy machine guns – and ready to fight to the death house by house, sometimes room by room.
. . .
Though completely outnumbered, the Marines managed to clear the enemy from the southern and eastern sectors of Hue less than two weeks after the battle started. Then they relieved exhausted South Vietnamese troops to retake the city’s historic citadel.
By Feb. 24, the Marines had regained almost all of Hue. On the 25th, Marine Capt. James Coolican led soldiers from South Vietnam’s elite Black Panthers in storming the last NVA stronghold, the Imperial Palace.
On Feb. 28, Marines moved to cut off the remaining NVA forces fleeing the city. On March 2 Operation Hue City officially ended, after 216 Americans had been killed in action and 1,584 were wounded. Communist losses were more than 5,000 killed and wounded.

Fuck Walter Cronkite and what he did to this country. You can argue that we shouldn't have been in Vietnam to begin with -- and you might be right -- but that one's on John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Once we were there, fight the damn war. Johnson never fought anything but the next election, and he begged off of that, choosing not to seek another term because he knew he'd fucked up. Tet was a win for the U.S., but like Barack Obama decades later in Iraq, Johnson let the media turn it into a loss. And, yeah, a single Marine regiment held off four NVA divisions at Khe Sanh and rendered two of them combat ineffective.