Fire in the Lake (64 page)

In his official report on the war published a year later, General Westmoreland claimed that he had anticipated a major enemy offensive against the populated areas around the time of Tet, and that he had prepared for it by modifying his offensive plans and moving several units up to the area of the DMZ. Actually, Westmoreland had not taken the previous intelligence reports that seriously. General Weyand and certain civilians at the mission, who were more closely in touch with the situation, had pressured him to cancel some of his offensive operations in the border areas and bring some of his troops back into the area of Saigon. They had not, however, made him change his plans for deployment in the northern provinces, and particularly in the area of Hue.

In mid-January a North Vietnamese division had begun to maneuver around the American base at Dak To in the far reaches of the central highlands. Westmoreland reinforced the post and drove back the enemy units. At the same time a number of North Vietnamese divisions crossed the DMZ and surrounded the U.S. Marine outpost at Khe Sanh. Westmoreland was certain that the enemy wanted to overrun the base and create another Dien Bien Phu.
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At that point he (like General Navarre before him) had the choice of extricating the Marines or of reinforcing them while bad weather made bombing support and resupply by air problematical. He chose the latter course, just as he had chosen it at all the other large-scale border engagements in late 1967. By mid-January he had lifted six thousand Marines onto the barren plateau of Khe Sanh and moved several other brigades north of Hue for a total of forty thousand supporting troops. The North Vietnamese did not move. Though they far outnumbered the Marines at the base, they simply waited, transforming the siege into a war of nerves that quite preoccupied the American command as well as much of the American press. It preoccupied the U.S. military to the extent that a week after the Tet offensive had begun, Brigadier General Robert N. Ginsburgh, attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was still talking of the enemy's intentions to make Khe Sanh “another Dien Bien Phu.”
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What the American command had somehow neglected was the possibility that during the weeks of the siege other North Vietnamese and NLF units might simply walk around the blockade of American troops and into Hue itself. This they did, capturing a defenseless city. The American inattention to this move was all the more surprising since just four months earlier, by Westmoreland's account, General Giap had announced that the Liberation Forces would draw the American forces out to the border areas and then attack the population centers. He would, in other words, reverse the strategy he had used against the French. By his own account, Westmoreland had simply not believed that the enemy would undertake such a venture in the face of overwhelming American and GVN force. He thought that he had enough troops to stop an enemy offensive in both the border regions and the populated areas. And he was correct — that is, if the Tet offensive could be considered as a purely military engagement between two opposing armies.
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Once they collected themselves, the U.S. and the ARVN forces responded to the attack with the fury of a blinded giant. Forced to fight in the cities, they bombed, shelled, and strafed the most populous districts as if they saw no distinction between them and the jungle. By the fourth day of the battle, Allied planes had flattened large sections of Cholon and Gia Dinh, the extensions of Saigon. Even harder hit were those cities where the ARVN forces had not reacted at all. In the course of a week, American troops and planes bombed out parts of Kontum City, Can Tho, and Vinh Long, and reduced to rubble a third of My Tho, that rich Delta capital, and a half of Ben Tre. Hue suffered the worst of all. There the ARVN troops made so small an advance against the enemy that the North Vietnamese were able to reinforce the original assault battalions. After a few days, Westmoreland committed U.S. Marine units to fight a bloody house-to-house battle for the left bank of the Perfume River, where the university, the government office buildings, and the American consulate stood. As the North Vietnamese retreated slowly across the river and set up positions inside the heavy walls of the imperial citadel, he brought the troop strength up to three U.S. Marine Corps and eleven Vietnamese battalions.
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The American air force struck the poor quarters of the city. The GVN was left to bomb and shell the palace that was the last architectural monument of precolonial Vietnam. Still, it took a month to drive the enemy troops out of the citadel, and by that time the city lay in ruins.

Surveying the corpses and shattered buildings of Ben Tre, one American officer told an AP reporter, “We had to destroy it in order to save it.” His explanation was the only one the Americans could give for the damage they had wrought. The NLF had taken many civilian lives in attacking the cities, but the Americans alone had the firepower to destroy the sanctuaries they had created. By the end of three weeks the Allied command estimated the toll of civilian dead at around 165,000, and the number of new refugees at two million. Five hundred Americans died in the battles. But that was not the end of it, for the damage to Hue had not yet been calculated, and the fighting continued in many other regions of the countryside.

On retreating from the cities, the NLF entered the rings of formerly “secure” hamlets around their circumferences and stayed there to lob mortar shells back at the GVN and American bases. Instead of sending soldiers to drive the scattered Front troops out of the hamlets, the Americans stood back and bombed the villages of their own Vietnamese “allies.” As one American official in Binh Dinh province argued, “What the Viet Cong did was occupy the hamlets we pacified just for the purpose of having the allies move in and bomb them out. By their presence the hamlets were destroyed.”
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Whether or not the NLF had predicted the American response, the American official certainly could not imagine an alternate strategy. The destruction of those places occupied by the NLF — whether jungle, paddy, or village — had become standard operating procedure for the U.S. forces in Vietnam. The destruction of the Vietnamese cities and towns during the Tet offensive was merely a logical extension of that procedure.

The Tet offensive had an electric effect on popular opinion in the United States. The banner headlines and the television reports of fighting in the cities brought the shock of reality to what was still for many Americans a distant and incomprehensible war. The pictures of corpses in the garden of the American embassy cut through the haze of argument and counterargument, giving flat contradiction to the official optimism about the slow but steady progress of the war. Those who had long held doubts and reservations now felt their doubts confirmed. For the first time the major news magazines,
Time, Life,
and
Newsweek,
began to criticize the war policy overtly; television commentators such as Walter Cronkite, who had always backed the administration, now questioned whether or not the war could be won. In spite of the President's attempts to reassure the public and to reduce the offensive to the dimensions of an incident, the opinion polls showed that public confidence in the President's handling of the war had dropped to a new low of 35 percent. Even the most “hawkish” of the congressmen registered this disenchantment, as did the President's close advisers, particularly Dean Acheson, McGeorge Bundy, and the new Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford. In Chicago Robert F. Kennedy made a major speech on the war, saying quite bluntly that the United States was not winning it and should no longer attempt to do so. “Our enemy,” he said, “… has finally shattered the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves.… [They] have demonstrated that no part or person of South Vietnam is secure from their attacks.”
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In New Hampshire Senator Eugene McCarthy's student-run campaign for the presidential nomination took on a sudden life, speeding up the train of events that was to lead a month later to Johnson's decision to curb the bombing of North Vietnam and to withdraw his candidacy for the 1968 election.

The curious aspect of the American public reaction to the Tet offensive was that it reflected neither the judgment of the American officials in Saigon nor the true change in the military situation in South Vietnam. “The whole campaign was a go-for-broke proposition,” declared General Westmoreland shortly after the initial assault;
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later he would conclude that the offensive was a major defeat for the enemy. In backing up this judgment U.S. officials pointed out that the Viet Cong never took control of any city but Hue. The General Uprising promised by the Viet Cong cadres did not occur, and in most places the enemy could not sustain momentum after the initial onslaught. In a sense the enemy had delivered himself into the hands of the Allied troops. During the first week of the fighting the U.S. and GVN forces killed an estimated fifteen thousand enemy soldiers. The statistics were to increase as the weeks went by and to multiply once again during the May-June offensive — a renewed attack upon Saigon and other GVN strongpoints throughout the country. As the succeeding year was to show, the Tet offensive seriously depleted the NLF main force units and wiped out a sizable proportion of its most experienced cadres, driving the southern movement for the first time into almost total dependency on the north. By all the indices available to the American military, the Tet offensive was a major defeat for the enemy.

Victory or defeat — the very question seemed senseless in Saigon. To the Vietnamese of the cities the Tet offensive brought neither hope nor militance against the war, but merely a reinforcement of all the old attitudes. It came as a shock but not as a surprise. It was the Armageddon so long awaited, that confirmed to them their own ruin and their own helplessness before the blind forces of Fate. American officials told the press that the attack would bring a new unity and a new determination to the GVN. The GVN officials for their part debated whether or not the Americans had planned the offensive with malice aforethought or whether they had simply allowed it to happen in an attempt to frighten them into action. (Their suspicions were to some extent prompted by the claims of the American generals that they had expected an attack around that date.)
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The people of the cities did not rise up to help the Front during Tet, as many NLF cadres had expected, but they did not rise up to support the government either, even though most assumed that the Americans would eventually drive the Front troops out. The scope and timing of the NLF attacks showed not only that the GVN was riddled with NLF agents, but that the people within the “secure” areas had no real interest in supporting the government. The NLF and the North Vietnamese, after all, spent months putting together an operation involving an immense logistical effort in all regions of the country. They clandestinely introduced five battalions into Saigon alone. During the previous week their soldiers simply walked or rode on Hondas down the main roads into the city which were patrolled by at least three ARVN divisions as well as local security guards. They imported their weapons by the same routes in flower trucks and coffins. And not one citizen informed. The people of the cities had themselves opened the invasion route and passively awaited their destruction.

The physical damage was, of course, immense — more than a small country could possibly deal with on its own. The rebuilding would have taken months under the best of circumstances, but the Saigon government seemed to have fallen apart as completely as its architecture. As usual, those towns furthest from the source of American supplies suffered the most severely. Three weeks after the offensive, officials in the Delta capital of Can Tho had not so much as assessed the damage to the smaller capitals. Even in that city they had not begun to build shelters for the refugees because the money from Saigon had not arrived, and the merchants refused to extend credit to the government.
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Six weeks after the offensive the GVN had not provided a single brick or bag of cement for the people of Ben Tre. The high-school students and local Cao Dai officials pitched in to repair some of the buildings, but the government officials were nowhere in evidence. “In six weeks here,” said one American official, “we have seen that the Government cannot protect the people, or control them, or administer them or help them recover.”
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President Thieu was initially more concerned about the possibility of a coup, and later about explaining the disaster. About half of the ARVN forces in the Saigon area were on leave during the offensive, and no one knew how many of them later returned to their duties. Reportedly, all units were under strength, and only half of the Revolutionary Development teams returned to their posts in the Delta. The American command seriously contemplated taking the South Vietnamese “out of the business of pacification.”
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“One way or another,” wrote the columnist Flora Lewis, “Americans here talk about the war with passion and bitterness. Few Vietnamese do. They speak with the dull tones of hopelessness, of tragedy beyond response or, anyway, beyond any response but the dogged effort to stay alive.”
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Hue was a particular nightmare. At the beginning of March the U.S. troops were still bombing and shelling the outlying villages, while the people of the city searched for the bodies of their relatives in the ruins. Some ten thousand soldiers and civilians died in the battle; whole quarters were leveled by North Vietnamese rockets and by five-hundred-pound to seven-hundred-pound American bombs. The streets stank of decomposing corpses.
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As soon as the fighting began, all of the Vietnamese doctors moved into the university refugee center, appropriated rice and medical supplies, and refused to come out of their rooms to treat the hundreds of patients streaming in from the embattled portions of the city. When the American troops appeared, some of them attempted to flee, leaving scores of patients behind them dying of gangrene. As one American doctor said, “Their whole little world was torn down and they just withdrew. Instead of giving when they were most needed, they gave up. They totally insulated themselves. Astonishing.”
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