Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (57 page)

By April 1968 both sides in the upcoming American presidential election were talking of winding down the American military presence, either through Robert Kennedy’s promise of negotiated withdrawal, Hubert Humphrey’s hints of bombing halts, or Richard Nixon’s alternative of gradual “Vietnamization.” As Admiral Ulysses Grant Sharp, American naval commander of the Pacific fleet, put it after the amazing American victory at Khesanh, “They got so damned hysterical back in Washington over the Tet offensive that they sort of went off the deep end and decided to get the war over with even if we weren’t going to win it” (B. Nalty,
Air
Power and the Fight for Khe Sanh,
104). The gallant defense of the compound, terrible damage to the North Vietnamese, and abrupt abandonment of Khesanh were all emblematic of what Vietnam had become by late spring 1968, a quagmire where military operations did not necessarily have anything to do with perceptions about the value or course of the war. Khesanh, better even than Hué, revealed the incompetence of the high command, the bravery and discipline of the marines, the astonishing technological superiority of the air force—and the complete hysteria of much of the American media, which during the war habitually downplayed America’s ability to hurt the enemy, only in the aftermath of the conflict to exaggerate communist losses and suffering. The South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem, perhaps best summed up the paradox of winning yet losing Tet:

Not long after, it became clear to me that the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam would be only a matter of time and modalities. In that sense, the Tet attacks of 1968 could well be considered a prelude to the end of the war five years later. Thus, Tet was the climax of the Second Indochina War. Indeed, to me, Tet was the time when U.S. public opinion and misconception snatched defeat from the jaws of potential victory. (“My Recollections of the Tet Offensive,” in M. Gilbert and W. Head, eds., The Tet
Offensive,
133)

VICTORY AS DEFEAT

Quagmire

After Tet the American military often boasted that they had not suffered a single major defeat by enemy forces during the entire fighting in Vietnam. That brag, even for the entire decade of United States involvement, is largely valid, except for a few small compounds staffed by American advisers that were sometimes surprised and for a time occasionally overrun. Although there would be various phases of the Tet Offensive that would go on for months, the first stage of the fighting was essentially over in little less than a month. By the end of February 1968 Hué was free, and Khesanh was relieved in early April; smaller cities were liberated and secure by the end of the first week of the assaults.

Despite the sensational media coverage of the offensive, public opinion polls continued to show that a majority of American citizens supported United States involvement all through Tet—some surveys reported that 70 percent of the citizenry wished military victory rather than withdrawal. Walter Cronkite may have returned from Vietnam to announce to millions of Americans that their military was mired in stalemate and that “the only rational way out . . . would be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people” (N. Graeber, “The Scholar’s View of Vietnam,” in D. Showalter and J. Albert,
An American Dilemma,
29), but most Americans were still willing to support a war they thought could be won outright. The military’s problem in Vietnam, at least in the short term, was not an absence of an approving majority back home, but the growth of a vocal, influential, and highly sophisticated minority of critics—activists who cared much more deeply about abruptly ending American involvement than did the majority of supporters in maintaining it.

In the strictly military sense the tragedy of Tet was hardly found in defeat. The calamity was that in the wake of victory the Americans failed to capitalize on the communist disarray, halted the bombing, and gave the enemy the impression of weakness, rather than exultation in its success. Indeed, the decisive victory of Tet in 1968 marked a beginning of radical American retrenchment. The great buildup of 1965–67 was soon to peak at 543,000 total troops on April 4, 1968, and would then abruptly decline so that there were fewer than 30,000 soldiers on December 1, 1972, and essentially none after the cease-fire of 1973. President Johnson seemed to grasp the nature of his own dilemma of winning battles and losing the public relations war in America when he addressed his cabinet on February 28, 1968, a month after the beginning of Tet:

We have to be careful about statements like Westmoreland’s when he came back and said that he saw “light at the end of the tunnel.” Now we have the shock of this Tet Offensive. Ho Chi Minh never got elected to anything. . . . He is like Hitler in many ways. . . . But we, the President and the Cabinet, are called murderers and they never say anything about Mr. Ho. The signs are all over here. They all say “Stop the War,” but you never see any of them over there. Then he launches the Tet attack, breaks the truce and escalates by firing on 44 cities, all at the time that we are offering a bombing pause. It is like the country lawyer who made the greatest speech of his life but they electrocuted the client. We are like that now. (L. Berman, “Tet Offensive,” in M. Gilbert and W. Head, eds., The Tet Offensive, 43)

Even the North Vietnamese admitted that they had suffered a terrible defeat. Somewhere around 40,000 Vietcong and NVA regular troops had been killed in a few weeks. More of the enemy died during the single year of 1968 than all the Americans lost during the entire involvement of the United States for more than a decade. The communist strategy of bringing local cadres into the streets proved an unmitigated disaster. Far from causing a general insurrection, it only ended up in a bloodbath, destroying the Vietcong infrastructure in the South for at least two years. After Tet there was essentially no effective military arm of the National Liberation Front (NLF) left. It had to be rebuilt from scratch without its most veteran organizers. Such were the costs of the North Vietnamese’s complete misunderstanding of the lethality of American airpower, the discipline of its troops, and the overwhelming superiority of its supply train—factors that on the battlefield could trump for a while longer the disadvantages of surprise, poor generalship, and social unrest back home.

A variety of top-ranking communists came to admit the terrible price of Tet. Colonel General Tran Van Tra, in typical doublespeak, nevertheless confessed of the losses caused by the disastrous mistake to engage the Americans directly:

We did not base ourselves on scientific calculation or a careful weighing of all factors, but in part on an illusion based on our subjective desires. For that reason, although that decision was wise, ingenious, and timely, and although its implementation was well organized and bold, there was excellent coordination on all battlefields, everyone acted very bravely, sacrificed their lives, and there was created a significant strategic turning point in Vietnam and Indochina, we suffered large sacrifices and losses with regard to manpower and material, especially cadres at the various echelons, which clearly weakened us. (R. Ford,
Tet 1968,
139)

If the North Vietnamese knew they had lost the Tet Offensive, why did it seem to most Western observers that the enemy had in fact won?

Much of the problems in perception grew out of raised expectations immediately prior to the offensive. The beleaguered American military, stung by the antiwar movement, had prematurely assured the public at the beginning of 1968 that the war was winding down in an American victory. As part of the overly optimistic appraisal, it compounded the error by acknowledging that it was no longer enough for the Americans to defeat the enemy outright on the battlefield. By 1968 it was equally crucial for the military to achieve at least four other objectives if opposition at home were to cease and public support were to continue: proof that after four years of intense ground fighting, the North Vietnamese were close to capitulation; hard evidence that the South Vietnamese were at last ready to shoulder the majority of their defense obligations; assurance that America could achieve rapid withdrawal with a minimum of casualties; and confidence that South Vietnam was a liberal and humane democracy.

Tet, a clear American victory, dashed those pretensions. It showed that all these goals were now problematic; in a paradoxical way, the defeat ultimately proved the North Vietnamese long-term strategy prescient, if unconcerned with the human costs of such a sacrificial policy. As long as they were willing to suffer literally thousands of dead for a chance to engage the Americans, time was on the communists’ side. So an American intelligence officer summed up General Vo Nguyen Giap’s brutal strategy of attrition: “His is not an army that sends coffins north; it is by the traffic of homebound American coffins that Giap measures his success” (G. Lewy,
America in Vietnam,
68).

As long as the Soviets and Chinese supplied top-notch weaponry, as long as the Vietcong could pose to influential American journalists, academics, and pacifists as liberationists and patriots, rather than truce breakers and terrorist killers, and as long as the American military tried to fight a conventional war under absurd rules of engagement and over corpses counted and not ground taken and held, the North Vietnamese would recruit ample fresh manpower on the promise of a free nation to come—and always kill some Americans in the terrible arithmetic of relative body counts. An Aztec herald once warned Cortés that the Mexicas could lose 250 to every one Castilian and still win. In the modern context such an admonition had a profound effect on General Westmoreland— not because there were too few Americans or too many enemy on the battlefield, but because politically there really was a set limit to the number of American fatalities to be incurred. The American political establishment may have believed that Vietnam was a proxy war in an ongoing global twenty-five-year struggle against communist tyranny; but the American people increasingly doubted the need to give up their treasure and sons so far away, when the Chinese and Russians were unlikely to reach the shores of the United States via Vietnam. Had Westmoreland been Cortés at Tenochtitlán in 1520, he would have reported the Aztec threat back to King Philip, asked for instructions, and demanded more conquistadors before advancing. In actuality, Cortés agreed with the Aztec herald’s prognosis of numerical disparity and so planned to kill 250 Aztecs for every conquistador he lost!

During the Tet Offensive a total of 800,000 refugees left their villages, many of them flocking to Saigon, which was soon to swell to nearly 4 million persons. The American-sponsored rural pacification program known as Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) was near shambles, as hope faded that the countryside would ever be completely secure. The attack on Hué, the massacres there, and the penetration of the embassy grounds shocked many South Vietnamese. If American bureaucrats in downtown Saigon were not immune from attack, how safe were rural Vietnamese? Khesanh, heroically saved as a key base near the DMZ, was abandoned and razed—with no consideration of the symbolism involved therein in a war replete with symbolism. Undersecretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes summed up the American depression:

One thing was clear to us all: the Tet offensive was the eloquent counterpoint to the effusive optimism of November. It showed conclusively that the U.S. did not in fact control the situation, that it was not in fact winning, that the enemy retained enormous strength and vitality—certainly enough to extinguish the notion of a clear-cut allied victory in the minds of all objective men. . . . Even the staunch and conservative
Wall Street Journal
was saying in mid-February, “We think the American people should be getting ready to accept, if they haven’t already, the prospect that the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed, that it may be falling apart beneath our feet.” (
The
Limits of Intervention,
146–47)

After the victory of Tet the American military requested another 206,000 troops and a quarter million additional reserves—hardly a display to the American people that its armed forces were winning the war on the ground. Hoopes called that request a “stunner.” Without new battle tactics or long-term strategy, the MACV leadership envisioned an even larger American presence, exceeding the supposed 525,000-man limit. Yet the American people wondered: had not the United States a little more than twenty years earlier in Normandy defeated the German Wehrmacht with fewer troops in less time? The requests for more men were ignored.

The record-keeping of the U.S. military in Vietnam was notoriously inexact in assessing enemy dead, but by necessity it was mostly accurate in reporting American fatalities. Thus, most observers believed that Tet cost somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 American dead. The American people cared little that their boys were killing the enemy at unheard-of ratios of thirty and forty for each GI lost. They, like the military, looked instead to body counts—but, like General Giap, to American rather than North Vietnamese—and saw them soar to intolerable rates of more than three hundred or four hundred dead a week.

How odd that at the pinnacle of a lethal 2,500-year-old military tradition, American planners completely ignored the tenets of the entire Western military heritage. Cortés—also outnumbered, far from home, in a strange climate, faced with near insurrection among his own troops and threats of recall from home, fighting a fanatical enemy that gave no quarter, with fickle allies—at least knew that his own soldiers and the Spanish crown cared little how many actual bodies of the enemy he might count, but a great deal whether he took and held Tenochtitlán and so ended resistance with his army largely alive. Lord Chelmsford—likewise surrounded by critics in and out of the army, under threat of dismissal, ignorant of the exact size, nature, and location of his enemy, suspicious of Boer colonialists, English idealists, and tribal allies—at least realized that until he overran Zululand, destroyed the nucleus of the royal kraals, and captured the king, the war would go on despite the thousands of Zulus who fell to his deadly Martini-Henry rifles.

American generals never fully grasped, or never successfully transmitted to the political leadership in Washington, that simple lesson: that the number of enemy killed meant little in and of itself if the land of South Vietnam was not secured and held and the antagonist North Vietnam not invaded, humiliated, or rendered impotent. Few, if any, of the top American brass resigned out of principle over the disastrous rules of engagement that ensured their brave soldiers would be killed without a real chance of decisive military victory. It was as if thousands of graduates from America’s top military academies had not a clue about their own lethal heritage of the Western way of war.

Analogies,
True
and
False

In the sixth and seventh books of his history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), Thucydides chronicles a litany of errors on the part of the Athenian leadership and its citizenry during and after their armada’s voyage to Sicily (415–413 B.C.). He tells us that there was sharp debate over the decision to send the fleet in the first place and that the allies of Athens on Sicily, who requested help from Syracusan aggression, proved to be corrupt, duplicitous, weak, and in the end worthless in battle. The chief Athenian architect of the expedition, Alcibiades, was recalled by a volatile Assembly back home before he even entered battle. He ended up giving aid to the enemy and residing in Sparta—the chief antagonist of Athens during the entire twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War.

The other commanders, Lamachus and Nicias, were irresolute, blinkered, and paranoid about the political consequences of becoming bogged down in an unwinnable war, despite the overwhelming force they brought along from Athens. Indeed, the old conservative Nicias’s reluctance to attack Syracuse decisively, coupled with his request for massive reinforcements, seemed driven more by worry about his own political future than by strategic wisdom. While Thucydides laments that the campaign could have been won had the Athenians just supported their troops, his own history at times seems to belie those very conclusions. The Athenians, he tells us, sent not one armada, but two—men, ships, and supplies in excess of even the amount requested by their own generals.