Fire in the Lake (63 page)

But the violence was only one side of this urge to self-destruction. On the other side there was a strange passivity, an inertia that was the image of social death. The Buddhists had been the first of the urban groups to fall into this state. After the 1966 invasion of Hue and Da Nang, they had abandoned three years of intense political activity for cynical, apathetic silence. Now unreservedly anti-American, Tri Quang waited in the An Quang pagoda in Saigon, making no further effort to organize or to mount demonstrations. (The junta, however, liked him none the better for it. During the Tet offensive the GVN troops leveled the An Quang pagoda, where the NLF had set up a post, killing a score of bonzes. Tri Quang was lucky to escape with his life.) The American mission was pleased by the lack of Buddhist “disturbances,” but the silence of the bonzes was only a signal of what was to follow for the rest of the urban population. As Nguyen Van Trung wrote:

Truly it is difficult to make a clear-cut decision in favor of either one of the two formal positions of today.…

If the Southern Liberation Front truly was merely resisting “American imperialist aggression,” then why up until now has it not yet been able to stimulate… an ardent uprising among all the people as in the 1945 period against the French colonialists? If a policy of opposing Communism has truly only been called into existence because of the aggression of the northern Communists, why has it not been able to stimulate a positive attitude of self-defense, why do we have indifference, desertions from the army, collaboration, escapes to the enemy army?

Trung then went on almost to paraphrase the letter written by the Buddhist student after the invasion of Da Nang:

We cannot make a clear-cut choice, but we have not yet found another way out. We are being closed in, our situation is like being in a bag. The problem is how to enable all of us to avoid the plight of having to choose.
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A paralysis had descended over the urban Vietnamese. In Saigon there were in 1967 some four hundred places — not establishments but simple rooms — where the students went to smoke opium. Opium had never been a habit even for the rich, but between 1967 and 1970 those rooms multiplied until there were some three thousand of them.
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An American journalist visiting Hue just after the Tet offensive was shocked to find the students sitting back and cracking jokes about the corruption of the Thieu government. Even after their city had been ruined they refused to take sides. The journalist could not get over it, but then he could not imagine their situation. For them to join the NLF meant to leave the Westernized Vietnam they had been brought up in, to enter a strange and possibly hostile world; while to join the GVN meant to join a mercenary army that was likely to have no future after the Americans left. The idea that they might change the GVN (no doubt what the journalist had in mind) was to them absurd. As one Vietnamese intellectual said, “The young people feel impotent before the corruption; they don't know what to attach themselves to, and that's why their revolt leads to suicide. They don't have the means of confronting the situation and finding the responsible parties. They find themselves lost.”
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In this case their Confucian attitudes agreed perfectly with Marxist logic: the GVN could not be changed by attempts at gradual reform, but only by a change in the whole state of society. Without that change they saw only suicide in all directions.

The government and “opposition” spokesmen called endlessly for movements of “national unity,” but it was becoming more and more plain that even they did not believe in it as a possibility. The American military successes had divided the Vietnamese even more thoroughly than the ARVN defeats. They had given them the sense that though they might survive as individuals, their society would not: it had changed beyond recognition. In 1967 Thieu's first premier, Nguyen Van Loc, told a meeting of the new national congress: “The scale of values of our society has led to an erosion of our society with the psychological result that everyone has become discontented and cynical.” The premier was referring not only to the intellectuals and the students, but to most of the political “moderates” — the Cochin Chinese bourgeoisie, the Catholics, and many of the deputies and the ARVN officers. And the psychological result was something more than cynicism — it was despair. “People today,” wrote Nguyen Van Trung,

have become abstract people rather than concrete people. Every man among us can no longer be regarded as he himself wants to think of himself, but instead as “that person” or, even more, as an “imaginary enemy,” against whom one must defend oneself. And so we divide ourselves up into categories, and claw each other, because we have labelled each other imaginary enemies. And finally, these errors and ugly deeds always arise because of others, while we ourselves are without sin.
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Brought up within a society whose very language implies that man is a function of the people around him, the Vietnamese experienced the division of their society as the alienation of will from action. As one official American report on “Vietnamese attitudes” noted, “The hope for peace, when expressed, often reflected a dim conception of external forces beyond one's control.… Thus from Binh Thuan in the Second Corps area it was reported that the people believed the Americans will send more troops to Vietnam next year to end the war sooner and help the campaign of President Johnson for re-election to the Presidency.”
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But the war actually was out of the control of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese of the GVN had no choice. At the same time (and this was the meaning of what they told the U.S. official), they had no commitment to the future that was being decided for them. As they saw it, the only course of action that lay open to them was a refusal of choice, a passive resistance to all demands made upon them. According to the same official report, when a new mobilization law went before the congress, one legislator insisted that the law was merely an attempt to calm American public opinion. Another asked, “Why should our young men be drafted to serve U.S. interests?” In the provinces a rumor circulated that the Americans had forced the Thieu government to accept the new law in order better to carry out their real intentions of killing as many Vietnamese as possible; another rumor was that the Americans were attempting to prolong the war in order to maintain a market for their surplus production. The second rumor was an answer to what for many Vietnamese was the most puzzling question of all: why, with all its great power, had the United States not won the war already? “To counter this with the argument that it's a Vietnamese war,” the American report continued, “falls on deaf ears, as many of these people feel it's now a war between the US and Communists.”
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It was into this atmosphere of American overconfidence, Vietnamese apathy and despair, that the NLF launched the Tet offensive of 1968.

15

The Tet Offensive

We begin '68 in a better position than we have ever been before, but we've still got problems of bureaucratic inefficiency. There are still leadership difficulties that will degrade performance. There is a requirement for tackling corruption in the countryside. We've got to cut down more on the RD team attrition. There's a crying need for better province and district chiefs, which the GVN itself has recognized.

Robert Komer

(Press Conference, Saigon, January 24, 1968)

At three o'clock in the morning on the first night of the Vietnamese New Year, nineteen NLF commandos blasted their way through the outer walls of the American embassy in Saigon. They entered the compound, killed two of the U.S. military police on duty, and attacked the heavy doors of the embassy with antitank rockets. Failing to break down the doors, they took cover in the compound, pinning down the “reaction force” of six Marine guards, and held off a helicopter assault by U.S. paratroopers until daylight. Not until nine in the morning did the U.S. troops regain control of the embassy. By the time embassy officials came to work, all nineteen of the young commandos lay dead, their bodies twisted over the ornamental shrubbery and their blood pooling in the white gravel rocks of the embassy garden. The battle for the cities had begun.

In the early morning of January 31, NLF troops attacked almost every important American base, every town and city of South Vietnam. The combined force of eighty-four thousand men simultaneously moved in to five out of the six cities, thirty-six out of the forty provincial capitals, and sixty-four district capitals. During the same night of the raid on the embassy, elements of eleven NLF battalions entered Saigon. One unit penetrated the grounds of the presidential palace, four blocks to the south; another took over the government radio station and a third assaulted the Tan Son Nhut air base, breaking through the heavily guarded perimeter to blow up aircraft and engage in gun battles with the American troops. In the Delta, Front forces moved into the most “secure” of the province capitals — Can Tho, My Tho, Vinh Long, Rach Gia, and Ben Tre — entrenched themselves in the poorer quarters, and drove the ARVN units to the defense of their headquarters. In the Second Corps area the NLF attacked the very center of Allied operations in Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, and Tuy Hoa and the great American base at Cam Ranh bay. Dalat, the resort town for Vietnamese generals and the site of the ARVN military academy, came under attack by six NLF battalions. But it was in the First Corps, where North Vietnamese troops joined the battle, that the offensive was by far the fiercest. From a hamlet outside of Da Nang the Front troops lobbed rocket and mortar shells into the American air base, closing down the field from which most of the tactical air strikes were run. Simultaneously, other units moved in on the American bases at Chu Lai and Phu Bai as well as the Korean headquarters down the coast, destroying scores of American airplanes and forcing the American troops to defend their positions while they overran all five of the provincial capitals. In Quang Ngai city and elsewhere they opened the jails and released thousands of prisoners. In Hue battalions of local NLF troops supported by North Vietnamese regulars overcame the ARVN defense forces and marched straight into the center of the city, occupying the university, the provincial headquarters, the central marketplace, and the imperial citadel.

The offensive came as an almost total surprise to the Allied military command. Nearly half of the ARVN soldiers in the country had left their units for the New Year holiday. Few American troops were stationed in and around the cities, for General Westmoreland had a long-standing policy of leaving the ARVN troops to stand guard over the cities and the heavily populated districts. Lieutenant General Frederick C. Weyand, the commander of American forces in the Third Corps, had put all his troops on maximum alert the night before the attack, but still there were only three hundred American troops ready for immediate action in Saigon.
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The timing of the Allied response therefore varied throughout the countryside. In certain places the large American units repulsed the attacks on their bases sufficiently quickly to aid the beleaguered ARVN units within one or two days. In other places, where the attacks were heavier, it took two or three days to open the airfields and mobilize the scattered troops.

The battle for Saigon claimed the first attentions of the Allied command. Forced to fight on their own terrain, the American and GVN commanders committed tanks, helicopter gunships, and bombers to the counteroffensive. By the end of that day they had burned the radio station to the ground, and bombed into ruins the model cotton mill outside the city and the single low-income housing project ever built by the municipality. But the NLF were not so easily dislodged. Holing up in Cholon and around the Phu Tho racetrack, they held out for two weeks, alternately disappearing and reappearing to direct sniper fire against the ARVN troops. The city was in chaos. Those American soldiers and civilians who lived outside the barracks and the center of town were forced to hide in their houses and defend themselves with small arms. A half-mile from the American embassy many of them witnessed NLF political cadres going from house to house declaring the complete victory of the Liberation and holding street “trials” for their prisoners. There were fire fights in the market squares between ARVN soldiers and NLF troops wearing ARVN uniforms. Tank units thundered through the city, demolishing whole buildings in their advance. Fires spread, and whole districts of thatched huts and jerry-built houses burned to the ground, leaving thousands without food or shelter. Crowds of civilians, panicked by the troops and bombers, flooded through the streets carrying their dead and wounded with them on bicycles or pedicabs.

Elsewhere the battle was equally intense. In Dalat, for instance, the NLF battalions entrenched themselves in the central marketplace and held out for weeks against a disorderly counteroffensive. In My Tho and Ben Tre, the ARVN battalions, caught off guard, barricaded themselves into their compounds, leaving the NLF to set up positions in the streets and fly their flags over the poorer quarters. Heavy fighting continued for some time in Kontum City and Ban Me Thuot. The vast montagnard refugee camps established by the GVN on their outskirts came under attack from both sides, and thousands of montagnards fled back into the jungles. In Hue, where the aftermath of the Buddhist crisis had permanently alienated large sections of the populace from the GVN, the ARVN disintegrated, allowing the NLF to take full control of the central city.

The shock of the Tet offensive carried through the United States as well as Vietnam. Over the past year Westmoreland, Bunker, and Komer had given the impression that the enemy threat had receded, that the American troops had pushed the main force units out of the populated areas into the jungles of the border. Now there were pictures of the mission coordinator, George Jacobson, leaning out of the chancellery window with a pistol, and televised reports of fighting in the center of Saigon. It was incomprehensible. The Americans had seemed so firmly in control — and yet they had allowed the enemy to launch a coordinated counteroffensive with eighty-four thousand men against all the cities and towns from the base of the Ca Mau peninsula to the DMZ. The fact that the American command had been unprepared for such a gross movement raised doubts about the quality of American intelligence and wisdom of American military strategy over the past two years.