9781422279021

VIETNAM WAR

Chapter One THE TET OFFENSIVE

D uring the first days of 1968 the signs that the Communist forces were on the verge of launching a major undertaking continued to increase, while it was more obvious that the North Vietnamese army was concentrating two, if not three, divisions around the Khe Sanh Combat Base in the far north-west of South Vietnam; these divisions, as a defecting lieutenant had revealed, were to launch their attempt to seize Khe Sanh in the course of the upcoming Tet (lunar New Year) holiday. A captured document revealed that the Communists now felt that the time was right for a “general offensive and general

Words to Understand Attrition: The act of exhausting and weakening by repeated harassment. Propaganda: Ideas and facts spread deliberately to further a cause. Uprising: A localized act of popular violence in defiance of an established goverment.

uprising” of the South Vietnamese population “to take over towns and cities” and “liberate” Saigon, while another such documents dealt with the Communist plans for a major offensive in Pleiku province to begin “before the Tet holidays.” The commander of the II Field Force, Lieutenant General Fred C. Weyand, drew the conclusion from all the evidence available to him that the Communist forces in the III Corps operational zone around Saigon were moving up from their sanctuary areas along the South Vietnamese/Cambodian frontier in the direction of Saigon. Other signs of an impending offensive included the capture, in the central coastal city of Qui Nhon, of 11 NLF soldiers in a house raided by South Vietnamese troops. These soldiers, who had with them a tape recorder and two pre- recorded tapes, revealed under interrogation that there were to be Communist attacks on

LEFT: President Lyndon B. Johnson and General William Westmoreland in Vietnam a month before the Tet Offensive. OPPOSITE ABOVE: Allied armor on the move.

OPPOSITE BELOW: A sniper’s extemporized firing loophole.

12