Execution of Vietcong suspect by Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan in 1967. (Associated Press)
When War Seems Unwinnable: Why Tet Matters
By Stanley Karnow
02/01/2008
| 10 Comments
By the close of 1967, a half-million U.S. troops were in Vietnam, and Americans at home, viewing the war on television in their living rooms, had become inured to familiar images. Sweating in the fierce tropical heat and humidity, platoons of “grunts” were disgorged from hovering helicopters and cut through thick jungles or crossed flooded rice fields to faraway villages, occasionally stumbling onto mines or booby traps, or drawing fire from concealed snipers. Artillery shelled distant targets from lonely bases while jet aircraft recklessly bombed the boondocks, billows of flame and smoke rising in their wake.
The human agony was manifest in scenes of the wounded and dying on both sides -- the napalmed children, and the ordeal of innocent civilians caught up in the combat. Despite their private qualms, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his spokesman voiced rosy phrases like “We’ve turned the corner” and “We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
But their optimism was shattered on Jan. 31, 1968, the eve of Tet, the Asian new year. At least 70,000 Vietcong guerrillas abruptly poured out of the hinterlands and attacked more than a hundred South Vietnamese cities and towns, including Saigon, where a squad brazenly crashed into the American embassy compound.
I had been covering the escalating turmoil on and off since 1959. Reluctant to risk my skin by plunging into the pandemonium, I cautiously watched the unfolding spectacle from the top floor of my hotel, the “Carvelle.”Despite their private qualms, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his spokesman voiced rosy phrases like “We’ve turned the corner” and “We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer, and Vo Suu, a local NBC cameraman, were pluckier. Cruising around in a Jeep in pursuit of action, they ran into Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the leathery police chief, as he raised his revolver and, without hesitation, summarily pumped bullets into the head of a trembling Vietcong suspect. The hideous picture, broadcast by the networks or featured on newspaper front pages everywhere the next morning, vividly illustrates to this day one of the horrors of the conflict.
Analyzed in hindsight, the offensive has been misinterpreted. It did not, as popularly believed, stimulate American resistance to the war. The U.S. public, motivated by the mounting casualties, a tax surcharge and the lack of apparent progress, began to have reservations about the commitment in October 1967. The prevailing attitude in the United States, however, was hawkish rather than dovish -- as epitomized in the crude bumper sticker maxim, “Either win or get out.”
Nor did the Communists galvanize the effort to sway American opinion. Their goal was to instigate an uprising in South Vietnam by dramatizing to its population the vulnerability of the U.S. forces. They fumbled completely and, like many of my colleagues, I miscalculated the extent of their setback and the ghastly losses they suffered. Henceforth, the decimated Vietcong brigades would be replaced by North Vietnamese regulars, and their battles with the Americans increasingly conventional.
Nonetheless, the impact of the events at home was devastating. Johnson’s poll rating dropped precipitously, and he came within an ace of being defeated by Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate, in the New Hampshire primary in March. Opposition to the war mushroomed into a vehicle for disgruntled elements as disparate as the civil-rights movement in the South and the free-speech advocates in colleges across the nation. Aggravating the chaos were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Richard M. Nixon emerged from oblivion to promise that, if sent to the White House, he would “honorably” terminate the Vietnam involvement. Troubled by the strife and heart paroxysms, Johnson recused himself from the elections in November. But he selfishly crippled Vice President Hubert H. Humphey’s prospects by repudiating his speech criticizing the Asian engagement as hopeless.
I sensed that the war would drag on when I was chatting with a Communist delegate at a diplomatic conclave in Paris, in the spring of 1968. Chiding me for using the word “negotiations” to describe the sessions, he asserted, “To suggest that we are negotiating implies our eagerness to compromise, which we will never do. These are just talks.”
The same theme was repeated to me in a conversation in Hanoi in 1991 with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the legendary Communist commander, as we sipped tea in the parlor of his modest bungalow. I asked him how long he had been prepared to continue fighting. He replied in fluent French, “Ten, 20, 50 years, regardless of the cost, until victory.”
His response confirmed for me what I had earlier observed on the ground. We were challenged by an adversary ready to make limitless sacrifices to achieve its objective. Thus it was an unwinnable war. Perplexed by that conspicuous reality, Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander, and his officers would comment as they scrutinized the mounds of twisted Vietcong corpses, “Life means nothing to Orientals.” The obviously racist remark obfuscated their ignorance of the fact that 40,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, devoted to their respective causes, died within hours at Antietam in 1862.
The attempts by President George W. Bush and his staff to find parallels between Vietnam and Iraq have been chimerical. Directed by the central committee in Hanoi, our enemies in Vietnam comprised a homogeneous bloc whose purpose was to consolidate the partitioned country under their control. The “domino theory,” which maintained that their success would spark a sweep of Communist takeovers from Asian to the Middle East, was sheer nonsense.
In Iraq, by contrast, we face a complicated diversity of ethic and religious sects, each striving to promote its own agenda. Even if they could be curbed, we would be jeopardized by global terrorism, whose tentacles reach from Indonesia and the Philippines to North Africa into Europe and American itself. So Iraq is a sideshow compared to that danger. And little we learned in Vietnam can avert it.
Stanley Karnow, the author of "Vietnam: A History," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1991.
CATEGORIES IN THIS STORY:
© 2007 The Washington Independent
Comments:
Posted 02/01/2008 04:03pm with
Vietnam was lost, as is Iraq, by the sheer immorality of the conflict. Corruption ended the Vietnam war as corruption will end Bush’s Iraq genocide. Johnson lied about Vietnam and Bush and his gang of war criminal compatriots have lied 935 lies. It’s the freaking immorality, the torture, the illegal rendition, the illegal detention, the gross inhumanity of Bush, Congress, and the “support” of a distracted American people. Distracted? Gross dereliction of civic duty? Yeah, maybe that’s the one.
Posted 02/01/2008 11:14pm with
Iraq is lost because less than 150,000 soldiers are fighting the entire population. Years of brutality against the civilians in Iraq have made them entirely sympathetic to the insurgents (freedom fighters?). To save the country (from Saddam) we had to destroy it.
McCain, Lieberman and Bush are totally delusional. Its puzzling with McCain because he should know better. Did he defeat the Vietnamese from the Hanoi Hilton? Six years in captivity did not make him crazy, but running for president has. And Clinton is just as bad, in fact, wants to follow Lieberman into Iran. But would she encourage her daughter Chelsea to join the military and participate in these illegal invasions? Well, we all know the answer to that one. McCain and Clinton are both morally unfit to lead.
Posted 02/02/2008 12:02am with
Mr. Karnow first says the Tet Offensive did not “galvanize the effort to sway American opinion.” In the next paragraph he says “Opposition to the war mushroomed…” and goes on to cite the very broad coalition of organized groups that joined the anti-war effort. This double talk caught my attention. But the glaring absence from Karnow’s narrative about the relevance of Tet was the fact he completely ignored both the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence and the US Declaration of Independence. The Vietnamese modeled their war for Independence on the American one. The Iraqui factions may or may not learn from the American and the Vietnamese wars for Independence. But the American wrong in Iraq is solidly revealed by the American Declaration of Independence. We are losing in Iraq because we are violating our own national moral and political foundational principles. That fact needs no additional help to prevent us from winning anything in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the other places where our covert operators enjoy the financial and political blessings of our bi-partisan anti-American US Congress, Administration, and Courts. Those of us who believe we can turn Corporate America’s water boys and girls in Congress into patriots by yammering at them are the most seriously deluded.
Posted 02/02/2008 01:59am with
I am a VN vet (2 one year tours as an infantryman) and I still do not like it when people who should know better (Karnow) refer to the people of Viet Nam as our enemy. I reckon it’s like those who refer to John Mccain as a hero. Since when are you a hero for driving a plane over a country with no air craft and little air defense to drop bombs on mostly civilian targets?? Please explain why we contnue to call war criminals HEROS!! If 5 years in jail makes one a hero we sure have a lot more of them in the US no, when we have over 1 or is it 2 million people in jail here and now.
Posted 02/02/2008 11:27pm with
If there is one thing that I have learned in all my years of reading and studying history and politics, it is that nations DO NOT learn from their mistakes. The attitude of the U.S. government is, almost always, that Americans are somehow inherently better, smarter, more moral and have God backing us up, simply because we are Americans. Our national hubris has made us one of the most feared, yet least respected, countries on the face of the earth. Almost all of the Republican AND Democratic representatives in our government are still touting the status quo in terms of our foreign policy and so I am sad to believe that there will be no major changes in the forseeable future. In a nation with almost 300 million citizens, it is a sorry commentary on our national mentality, that the pathetic crop of political hacks vying for the Presidency, is the best that we can come up with.
Posted 02/04/2008 02:42pm with
“In Iraq, by contrast, we face a complicated diversity of ethic and religious sects, each striving to promote its own agenda.”
Wrong, Stan. “We” face responsibility for a bloodbath bordering on genocide as a direct consequence of an ill-conceived imperialist scheme to control the planet’s oil spigot.
“Even if they could be curbed, we would be jeopardized by global terrorism, whose tentacles reach from Indonesia and the Philippines to North Africa into Europe and American itself.”
The tentacles you’re referring to are the pentagon’s—the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world today (see below).
”...and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
—MLK “Riverside” speech
“So Iraq is a sideshow compared to that danger.”
So about a million Iraqi deaths are a sideshow? Stalin would have loved that sentiment.
“And little we learned in Vietnam can avert it.”
“We” learned nothing in Vietnam. But my hunch is that “we” will finally learn something in Iraq.
BTW, I’m sensing something missing in your little piece. You forgot to wax poetic and metaphysical about the awesome nobility of “our” intentions. My advice is that you consider retirement.
Posted 02/04/2008 03:47pm with
Mr. Karnow shows how little our leaders understood about the world by getting into the Vietnam War. Now we have a another generation of poorly informed elected leaders and their advisors whose poor judgment equals those of the Vietnam era. Maybe that maximum that people tend to rise to the height of their incompetence in an organizational setting is true. The irony us that our government spend trillions of dollars and apparently accomplish so little in domestic and foreign affairs. Political and governmental accountability may no longer be operating in a significant fashion. Executive branch political fabrication from Vietnam to Iraq has not changed either.
I was in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive in Qui Nhon province and it was an unforgettable.
http://uniskywriter.blogspot.com/
Posted 02/07/2008 06:36pm with
great article and terrific commentaries above –
Reading the article I was struck by the similarities between the neocon and Israeli-type propaganda explaining ‘why’ Islamic extremists are fighting against our neocon/sraeli-coordinated policies towards the Arab world and especially Palestine. The whole overarching Israeli and Neocon racist schtick “Life means nothing to Arabs – in fact, they WANT to go hump the 72 virgins” that they’ve sold to far more than just red-state fascist America – it all just makes me sick.
Everybody here knows why they really hate us – because we’re killing them, propping-up the intolerable Apartheid government in Israel, propping up Arab dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, as well as in Iraq, (until recently when we decided to kill Saddam), supporting and pitting Sunni vs Shite wars to benefit Israel and the above theft of oil, supplying gas to Saddam to gas the Kurds, cooperating with Israeli intelligence to create and stovepipe phony intel to take our nation to war, blah blah blah
For anyone who hasn’t seen or is unclear on the Sibel Edmonds case regarding Israeli and Turkish penetration/manipulation of our American national security – check out the below video- it’s the best overview on the Sibel Edmonds penetration and expose of the Neocon war and lie machine I’ve seen. It’s a pretty snappy movie and a great overview – it sure blew my mind
Sibel Edmonds: Kill The Messenger (must-see video)
http://www.video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1991080575212…
It’s the most complete synopsis/overview I’ve seen and gave me the necessary background/context to let me wrap my mind around this complex story. It’s 52 min long and excepting 2 minutes in the middle had me ‘glued to the tube’
Posted 02/11/2008 10:06pm with
I wasn’t in Vietnam but my older brother was a Marine Lt. Straight from college to Qua. Va. to Vietnam. At 21 he went thinking he was doing his duty as a man and an American. I followed the war thru his letters for a year. I remember the exact one that made me realize all illusions of any victory or even just cause were gone and his fight was to keep as many of his men alive as possible.
When he came home he gave away his uniforms, his three purple hearts, his 2 bronze stars and his silver star. The only thing he would ever pick up a weapon for again or let his two sons fight against would be an invasion of the US proper.
Vietnam showed us what our government was and made us rightful cynics.
Posted 02/19/2008 10:20am with
csmret:
I didn’t serve, for whatever that is worth. And I am no fan of McCain as a politician. But it is my understanding that McCain, while a prisoner, behaved in a truly courageous and heroic manner despite brutal torture and subhuman conditions.
I would not want to take that away from him nor dismiss it. As you point out, there is nothing de facto heroic about flying and dropping napalm and exfoliants on peasants. But faced with mano a mano brutality, McCain behaved much as we would wish an American officer to.
McCain was offerred release because of his father’s status, and refused until those men who had been captured before him were released. ”...McCain was finally released from captivity on March 15, 1973, having been a POW for almost an extra five years due to his refusal to accept the out-of-sequence repatriation offer…”
-{From wikipedia article}
It is for this behavior and sacrifice that I consider McCain a hero.
The fact that as a politician he is a complete wanker is a completely different beast.