Giap: The General Who Defeated America in Vietnam (28 page)

By the end of 1967, many close observers of the war judged it a stalemate. After three years of battering each other on battlefields all over South Vietnam, neither side had achieved clear dominance, and it was possible to read the balance of forces in different ways. Yet, if Vietnam could be read as a military stalemate of a sort, the underlying currents of the conflict as a whole seemed to favor the Communist cause. General William Westmoreland did not think so. An apparently serenely confident MACV commander returned to the United States to rally support for the war effort in the fall of 1967. In an address before Congress on November 21,
he reported: “We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view. . . . The enemy has many problems. He is losing control of the scattered population under his influence. He is losing credibility with the population he controls. . . . He sees the strength of his forces steadily declining.”
¹⁷
The gist of his address: Victory was within reach. More of the war was behind the United States than ahead.

Westmoreland was misreading the arc of the war in Vietnam, and badly. In fact,
his
strategy was failing. The elusive “crossover point,” the critical juncture where the American army had killed so many Communist troops that they could no longer be replaced, was nowhere in sight. In 1966, 71,000 Communist soldiers had been killed, and at least twice that many wounded. In 1967, 133,000 of Giap’s troops died, according to estimates that today seem reasonably on target if one considers figures released by the Vietnamese government long after the war. (In April 1995 Hanoi announced that 1,100,000 of its troops, both guerrillas and main force, died in combat between 1954 and 1975.) Yet Giap remained capable of replacing these losses with relative ease. The steadily more intensive US effort to cut off infiltration through both ground and air operations was failing.

The PAVN order of battle increased steadily from 1965 through December 1967. At the end of 1965, approximately 100,000 regular troops were deployed in South Vietnam. At the end of 1967, some 275,000 Communist troops were either in South Vietnam or its peripheral sanctuaries, capable of engaging in combat operations. Demographics went far in suggesting the crossover point would never be reached, given the strictures Washington had placed on the nature of the war. In 1966, 4 million of North Vietnam’s 18 million people were between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine. Half of them were deemed fit for military service. The Americans simply could not bleed North Vietnam out of the South.

By contrast, Giap’s understanding of the nature of the war was remarkably astute. From the very beginning of the escalatory stage, he had possessed a realistic understanding of the Americans’ liabilities, military and political, in waging a protracted war in South Vietnam. He correctly anticipated that the escalation of combat and expanding American casualty lists would exert strong pressures on the Johnson administration to limit the number of troops in Vietnam: “The American imperialists must restrict the US forces participating in a limited war, because without this restricting their global strategy will encounter difficulties, and their influences
over the world will be affected. They must achieve this limitation to avoid upsetting political, economic and social life in the United States.”
¹⁸

It was no accident that North Vietnam invested so much energy and effort in its sophisticated propaganda campaign, highlighting the destructiveness of the American way of war on the civilian population, characterizing the conflict to the world press as a “David versus Goliath” contest, “a struggle for the country’s survival.”
¹⁹

No segment of world opinion received such lavish attention as that of the American people, for Giap knew that popular opposition within the United States was a more important weapon in his war than even the best trained of his PAVN divisions:

Our people greatly appreciate the struggle of the American people against the aggressive Viet-Nam war of the Johnson administration, considering it a valuable mark of sympathy and support of our people’s just resistance. . . . The U.S. ruling circles have been increasingly opposed by the American people and being isolated politically to a high degree in the international arenas.
²⁰

The great theorist of modern war, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote memorably that, “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war upon which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.”
²¹
It is abundantly clear thirty-five years after the guns fell silent in Vietnam that Giap possessed that “far-reaching act of judgment” in spades. The same cannot be said for his American counterparts. Neither Johnson nor Westmoreland nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff saw Vietnam for what it was: a
revolutionary
guerrilla war, precisely defined by Brigadier General Samuel Griffith, USMC, in his introduction to Mao’s
On Guerrilla Warfare.
Such a conflict, he wrote,

is never confined within the bounds of military action. Because its purpose is to destroy an existing society and its institutions and to replace them with a completely new state structure, any revolutionary war is a unit of which the constituent parts, in varying importance, are military, political, economic, social and psychological. For this reason, it is endowed with a dynamic quality and a dimension in depth that orthodox
wars . . . lack. . . . In the United States, we go to considerable trouble to keep soldiers out of politics, and even more to keep politics out of soldiers. Guerrillas do the opposite. They go to great lengths to make sure their men are politically educated and thoroughly aware of the issues at stake . . . The end product is an intensely loyal and politically alert fighting man.
²²

As Giap and his staff developed operational plans for the greatest offensive in the war to date in October 1967, 50,000 Americans, mainly college-age men and women, joined by a growing number of Vietnam veterans, marched on the Pentagon to protest the American prosecution of a war that US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had already come to see as an unwinnable tragedy.

9

THE TET OFFENSIVE

Just before 0245 hours on January 31, 1968, amid the boisterous revelry marking the start of the lunar new year holiday known as Tet, a pickup truck and a taxicab bearing seventeen sappers of the PLAF’s 11 Commando Team screeched up to the symbol of American power in Saigon, the embassy compound. Within seconds, they blew a three-foot hole in its concrete exterior wall, and raced onto the lawn with automatic weapons ablaze, gunning down four American military policemen who were guarding the compound.

For the next few hours, US Marines, MPs, and a hodgepodge of embassy employees engaged the PLAF commandos in a sharp and chaotic firefight, attempting to prevent their entry into the embassy buildings. The commandos blew off the large seal of the United States hanging above the main entrance to the chancery with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, but the death of the sapper team’s commanders caused the momentum of the attack to slacken, and the entire unit was killed or captured. At 0930, the compound was declared secure. By that point, five GIs had also fallen, and a large contingent of the American press corps had already filed their first stories and video
footage for the late afternoon papers and the network newscasts in the United States. Initial reports filed in the heat of the action left the mistaken impression on the public that the embassy had been temporarily seized by PLAF sappers. Strenuous efforts on the part of MACV and the Johnson administration to correct this misconception about the embassy attack were initially lost amid the shock and the confusion of the several hundred spontaneous Communist attacks known to Americans as the “Tet Offensive.”

Indeed, fierce attacks seemed to erupt everywhere at once in South Vietnam. Ammo dumps went up in torrents of flame, airbases and scores of base camps were heavily mortared, and hundreds of their defenders were gunned down by apparently fearless sappers and suicide squads. PLAF units took even heavier casualties than the defenders, most of whom were ARVN rather than American troops. The widely dispersed assaults placed crushing demands on US-ARVN headquarters throughout the country: Where and in what strength should their mobile forces deploy in response? Chaos reigned throughout the first night as frantic and contradictory radio messages flooded into headquarters and command posts. American reporters and television crews throughout South Vietnam for the most part reported what they saw and heard without excessive editorializing, but inevitably their reports, the “first draft” of history, were interpreted by the American public as at best a crisis and at worst a catastrophe in the making.

Eighty-four thousand Communist troops were directly engaged in the first waves of the Tet attacks all across South Vietnam. The vast majority of the assault units were PLAF units, not PAVN regulars. The 4,000 specially selected troops who invested Saigon had rehearsed their attacks for three full months, in many cases using detailed replicas of their targets and working with plans that had been revised and refined for several
years
. Communist guerrilla forces had begun to infiltrate the city’s porous security checkpoints about a month earlier. In attacks on the presidential palace and five other high-visibility targets in the capital, the initial assaults stunned the defenders, who were partially overrun at several locales. Assault squads overwhelmed the workers in the main radio station and attempted to play audio tapes calling on the populace to rise up and join the fight against the puppets and imperialists.

Giap’s initial attacks benefited greatly from the absence of a large percentage of ARVN troops from their installations, and from MACV’s failure to detect the extensive preparations for the attack. Westmoreland had been expecting Giap to launch a major offensive close to the DMZ. He had never
considered widespread attacks a live option for Communist forces that had suffered so many casualties in recent months. In Quang Tri Province, just below the DMZ, several PAVN divisions had massed in recent weeks. The western anchor of the McNamara Line at Khe Sanh had already been under a formidable siege for a week. As a result, Westmoreland and his intelligence staff had concentrated most of their powerful mobile response units in the northernmost third of the country.

In short, the scope and ferocity of the Tet attacks came as a very unpleasant surprise to the American and South Vietnamese leadership. In the midst of so much carnage and mayhem, surprise turned to dread, and in some cases, to outright panic. Dozens of ARVN installations and GVN-controlled towns and villages were overrun. Communist forces quickly overwhelmed the defenders, dug in, and held their ground against counterattacks with fanatical intensity. Whipped up to a fever pitch by months of intensive indoctrination classes, many PLAF and PAVN troops held out until the last man.

Just outside the capital city, PLAF battalions struck at the huge airbase at Tan Son Nhut, where MACV headquarters was located, from three directions, threatening to overwhelm the entire installation. Other units attacked the massive logistical complex at Long Binh fifteen miles north of Saigon, while an entire Communist division closed in on the Bien Hoa airbase after a mortar and rocket attack. A powerful American relief force punched through a series of road blocks to blunt the attack on Bien Hoa, but it took very heavy casualties in the process. American bases outside Saigon were also attacked, but Giap had known from the outset that his forces were unlikely to overrun them, and indeed, most of the assaults against US forces were beaten back within hours.

The initial American response was as predictable as it was unfortunate. Shocked and angered US commanders unleashed indiscriminate supporting arms fire everywhere they spotted a target. More than 14,000 civilians were killed in the two months following the initial attacks, mostly as the result of overzealous American artillery and air strikes. An American correspondent on the scene with a gift for evoking the peculiar atmospherics of combat in Vietnam described the scene:

We [the Americans] took a huge collective nervous breakdown, it was the compression and heat of heavy contact generated out until every American in Vietnam got a taste. Vietnam was a dark room full of deadly objects,
the VC were everywhere all at once like spider cancer, and instead of losing the war in little pieces over the years we lost it fast in under a week. After that, we were like the character in pop grunt mythology, dead but too dumb to lie down. Our worst dread of yellow peril became realized; we saw them now dying by the thousands all over the country, yet they didn’t seem depleted, let alone exhausted, as the [US] Mission was claiming by the fourth day. We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop. As one American major said in a successful attempt at attaining history, “We had to destroy Ben Tre [a Communist target] in order to save it.”
¹

As a result of the ferocity of the US and ARVN counterattacks, virtually all Communist gains were reversed within three or four days.

There were a few notable exceptions. In Cholon, Saigon’s sister city, PLAF units held on to the Pho Tho racetrack until February 10, three days after the American command had established a large section of the city as a free-fire zone, and sporadic fighting around the track lasted for several more weeks. The most sustained fighting, though, was in the former capital of Hue, a beautiful city of temples and gardens, flooded with refugees from the heaviest fighting in the war in the northern provinces.

Two PAVN regiments seized most of the city, their path well prepared by local guerrilla forces and political cadres who had been preparing to install a revolutionary government once the city had been seized. A heavily outnumbered force of US Marines and ARVN troops engaged in ferocious house-to-house combat, initially without artillery or air support, to retake first the business and government district south of the Perfume River, and then the formidable Imperial Citadel, a heavily fortified city-within-a-city in the northern section of Hue. Some days the Marines were only able to gain ten or twenty yards, so tough was the resistance.