The American Legion Magazine | 1.1.18
By Alan W. Dowd
In late January 1968, North Vietnamese forces and the
Vietcong launched a massive offensive throughout South Vietnam. Hurling 84,000 personnel
at South Vietnam, the communists struck 36 of the South’s 44 provincial
capitals and 100 cities, including Hue in the northern part of the country, Qui Nhon in the center and
Saigon in the south.[i]Timed to coincide with a Vietnamese holiday known as Tet,
the operation came to be called the Tet Offensive. It was an unmitigated tactical-military
defeat for the communists that turned into a strategic-political victory—and proved
to be the turning point of the war.
What It Meant
What began on January 21, with an artillery bombardment on the U.S. Marine
outpost at Khe Sanh, exploded into an all-out offensive against the whole of
South Vietnam nine days later, as most Vietnamese celebrated the Tet holiday.[ii] Hanoi’s
choice of Tet was no accident. “The communists had proclaimed a
truce over this period,” President Lyndon
Johnson later recalled. But North
Vietnamese commander Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap used Tet-related festivals and travels
as cover for his audacious military-guerilla operation.
The communists suffered massive
casualties and were defeated by every battlefield measure. By the end of
February, 45,000 communist personnel had been killed and another 5,800 captured by U.S. and South
Vietnamese forces.[iii]“Tet was a military disaster for Hanoi,”
historian Derek Leebaert writes in The Fifty Year Wound.[iv]
But it proved to be a political disaster for Washington. The reason:
Washington’s words couldn’t overcome the images flowing out of Vietnam—and
worse, Washington’s words didn’t seem to reflect what was happening in Vietnam.
Just before
Tet, LBJ’s State of the Union address provided an upbeat report on Vietnam,
highlighting successful elections, noting that “the enemy has been defeated in
battle after battle,” detailing how South
Vietnam’s government had gained control over more cities and cheering
other “marks of progress.”[v]
Similarly, not long before Tet, Gen.
William Westmorland called 1968 “an important point when the end begins to come
into view.”[vi]
What the commander-in-chief and his top general in Vietnam were saying proved
jarringly out of step with what happened during Tet. In the
first 48 hours of the communist offensive, 232 U.S. troops were killed and 900
wounded.[vii]In and around Saigon, the enemy seizedradio stations and police stations, bombarded the airport and
Presidential Palace, and assaulted the U.S. Embassy.[viii]
Wearing
South Vietnamese uniforms, Vietcong guerillas breached the Embassy’s outer
walls in the predawn darkness of January 31[ix]and occupied parts of the Embassy for six hours.[x] The attack on the Embassy “stunned
American and international observers, who saw images of the carnage broadcast
on television as it occurred,” one battle history recounts.[xi]
NBC News footage from the first day of fighting featured breathless correspondents
shoving microphones into the faces of GIs in the midst of gun battles, GIs
crawling for cover, GIs scrambling to retake the embassy, GIs bleeding and
dying, Saigon in chaos—all transmitted into America’s living rooms.[xii]
LBJ later criticized “emotional and exaggerated
reporting.”[xiii]Media coverage of Tet was not inaccurate, but it
was incomplete—and strikingly different from coverage of World War II battles,
which were equally brutal and bloody, equally chaotic and fluid. Imagine if World
War II correspondents had beamed back images—virtually in real time—of the
bloody beaches at Normandy and Okinawa, the allied squabbling and confusion at
Sicily, the chaos and unpreparedness at Bastogne. Without
filter or context, such images can have a devastating impact on public support
and morale.
Indeed, when the American people saw the images of communist
forces laying siege to Saigon, they concluded the commander-in-chief was either
misleading them or out of touch. And when they
absorbed the full costs of Tet—3,895 Americans killed[xiv]in what The New York Times called “the heaviest and most sustained”[xv]fighting of the war—they turned against the war.
Ho Chi Minh’s primary objective was always the conquest of
South Vietnam and unification of the country under communism. But his secondary
target was 9,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C. “We don’t need to win military victories,” he said, “we
only need to hit them until they give up and get out.”[xvi]Although it was a military disaster for Ho, Tet
proved to be a smashing political success—after Tet, LBJ abandoned his bid for
reelection,[xvii]and Westmorland was reassigned—bringing Ho closer to his primary objective.
“Ho Chi Minh
thinks he can win in Washington as he did in Paris,”LBJ warned in 1967.[xviii] LBJ was right about Ho, and Ho was right about
his read of American politics.
What It Means
Vietnam was called the first “television war.”
Tet illustrated how powerful and corrosive this new medium could be for a
representative democracy at war. In an age of instantaneous communications, images matter more
than body counts or BDAs, more than statistics or metrics, more than congressional
testimony or Oval Office addresses.And when the
images don’t match the message, public support can erode rapidly.
Thus, our enemies
have become adept at using media and media images to target the American people.
Consider Iran’s humiliation of American hostages; Muammar Qaddafi's
claims that some of his children were killed and wounded by U.S. airstrikes; Iraq’s guided tour for CNN cameras of a
bombed-out “baby milk plant” during the Gulf War; the beastly treatment of America’s fallen in
Mogadishu; AQI’s footage of snipers and IEDs killing U.S. troops in Iraq; the beheadings
and butchery live-streamed by al Qaeda and ISIS.
In short, our
enemies continue to subscribe to Ho’s shrewd distinction between military victory and political victory. Recall Osama bin Laden’s taunt that
“When tens of your solders
were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets
of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat
and your dead with you…It was a pleasure for the heart of every Muslim…to see
you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut, Aden and Mogadishu.”[xix]
Dowd
is a senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute Center for America’s Purpose.
[i]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA8n114eYXc
[ii]https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2009/01/29/shock-and-awe-of-tet-offensive-shattered-us-illusions
[iii]http://www.nytimes.com/1971/10/24/archives/by-lyndon-b-johnson-the-tet-offensive-installment-viii-by-lyndon-b.html
[iv] Leebaert, The Fifty
Year Wound, p.351.
[v]http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=28738
[vi]http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/tet-who-won-99179501/#OLvw9vcVyHFQHqbQ.99
[vii]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA8n114eYXc
[viii] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18551391
[ix]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA8n114eYXc
[x] http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/31/world/tet-offensive-turning-point-in-vietnam-war.html
[xi]http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/tet-offensive
[xii]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA8n114eYXc
[xiii]http://www.nytimes.com/1971/10/24/archives/by-lyndon-b-johnson-the-tet-offensive-installment-viii-by-lyndon-b.html
[xiv]https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2009/01/29/shock-and-awe-of-tet-offensive-shattered-us-illusions
[xv]http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/31/world/tet-offensive-turning-point-in-vietnam-war.html
[xvi]https://books.google.com/books?id=Ac66atmEAaYC&pg=PR4-IA21&lpg=PR4-IA21&dq=Ho+Chi+Minh+said,+“We+don’t+need+to+win+military+victories,+we+only+need+to+hit+them+until+they+give+up+and+get+out.”&source=bl&ots=bucFi_4BgO&sig=w1QazZ1mrYSR_U5Oxo8mPGzqL4k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjd9OCbrqrXAhWWw4MKHU2YCAwQ6AEISTAJ#v=onepage&q=Ho%20Chi%20Minh%20said%2C%20%E2%80%9CWe%20don%E2%80%99t%20need%20to%20win%20military%20victories%2C%20we%20only%20need%20to%20hit%20them%20until%20they%20give%20up%20and%20get%20out.%E2%80%9D&f=false
[xvii]http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/tet-offensive
[xviii]https://archive.org/stream/nsia-JohnsonLyndonBainesBooksAbout/nsia-JohnsonLyndonBainesBooksAbout/LBJ%20Books%20About%2022_djvu.txt
[xix] Bin Laden’s Fatwa
against America, August 1996.