CHAPTER SIX

THINGS FALL APART

JANUARY–JUNE 1968

Citizens of Hue, carrying what few belongings they’d been able to take away with them when they fled the battle for their city, return to what’s left of their homes and shops in late February 1968.

SOMETHING’S GOING TO HAPPEN

A few days before the Tet Offensive begins, NLF commanders study the target they’ve been assigned. According to the man who took this picture, several of the men in it died in the subsequent fighting.

AS 1968 BEGAN, Lieutenant Tobias Wolff from Newhalem, Washington, was serving as an adviser to an artillery battalion with the ARVN Seventh Infantry Division, stationed just outside the provincial capital of My Tho in the Mekong Delta, thirty-seven miles southwest of Saigon. Despite the presence of U.S. troops and intensified pacification efforts, three out of four of the surrounding hamlets were believed to be under NLF control, but the city itself—with its broad, tree-lined streets, ancient fishing fleet, and crumbling French-era homes overlooking the Mekong River—was a relatively serene place, and when, in late January, Wolff learned that a carnival had been set up in a riverfront park as part of the days-long Lunar New Year celebration called “Tet,” he and his sergeant decided to go into town and have a look around.

The streets seemed more crowded than usual, Wolff remembered, but he had no inkling that some of the strangers he passed were NLF fighters waiting for the signal that would soon launch Le Duan’s General Offensive, General Uprising. “They had been coming into My Tho for weeks,” Wolff wrote years later. “The [South] Vietnamese didn’t know, the American advisers didn’t know. The town was full of them and nobody said a word. I wouldn’t forget that afterward—not a word of warning from anyone. For weeks they were all around us, on the streets, in the restaurants, gathering for the great slaughter and tasting the pleasures of the town until it began.”

In the park, Wolff and the sergeant wandered among “the puppet shows, the jugglers and fire-eaters” until, he wrote, he decided to try his hand at a “dinky shooting gallery with a couple of antique .22s….A stoop-shouldered man, tall for a Vietnamese, took the place to my right. A pair of younger fellows stood behind him and cheered him on. He shot well. So did I. We didn’t acknowledge that we were competing but we were, definitely. Then I missed some and quit for fear I’d miss more. ‘Good shooting,’ I said to him. He inclined his head and smiled. It might have been an innocent smile, but I think of it now as a complicated, terrible smile.”

Some three and a half weeks earlier, on the evening of January 1, Radio Hanoi had broadcast a poem, written by Ho Chi Minh.

This spring far outshines the previous springs,

Of victories throughout the land come happy tidings.

Let North and South emulate each other in fighting the U.S. aggressors!

Forward!

Total victory will be ours.

The broadcast was filled with static. The reader’s voice was muffled. But for communist commanders, its message was unmistakable. The General Offensive, General Uprising that Le Duan and his allies on the politburo believed would end the war was drawing closer.

Tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops were already in place in South Vietnam. The NLF had infiltrated dozens of cities and towns. Tons of smuggled Chinese- and Soviet-made weapons had been spirited toward intended targets in sampans and flower carts, coffins and false-bottomed trucks, then hidden in pagodas and churches and barbershops and buried in paddy fields and garbage dumps and cemeteries until the signal came for them to be retrieved.

And the communists had quietly developed a new war-making technique with which to fight the ARVN and the Americans, aimed at taking as many allied lives as they could while losing as few of their own as possible—specially trained “spearhead” or “special operations” sapper units made up of both men and women, meant to prepare the way for conventional troops rushing along behind. “The training was elaborate,” one sapper recalled. “We learned how to crouch while walking, how to crawl, how to move silently through mud and water, how to walk through dry leaves….In teams of seven men, we practiced moving in rhythm to avoid being spotted under searchlights, synchronizing our motions, stepping with toes first, then gradually lowering heels to the ground.” Barefoot, their bodies often painted green to blend in with foliage, sappers slipped through or beneath barbed wire, carrying rocket launchers, AK-47s, and explosive charges with which to breach fortified defenses.

MACV saw no special significance in Ho’s verse; each year, after all, he broadcast a patriotic New Year’s poem that was repeated on the eve of Tet. In a classified cable sent the day after the broadcast, General William Westmoreland again assured Washington that things in Vietnam were on the upswing. “The enemy did not win a major battle in Vietnam in 1967,” he wrote, and “through careful exploitation of the enemy’s vulnerability and application of our superior firepower and mobility, we should expect our gains of 1967 to be increased many-fold in 1968.” Meanwhile, he assured his superiors, U.S. forces would continue to be able to “detect impending major offensives and mount spoiling attacks.

There were more than ten thousand American military and civilian intelligence officers at work in South Vietnam, so many amassing so much data that it was impossible to analyze it all adequately. Still, here and there hints of what was to come filtered up the chain of command: enemy units were detected moving around in inexplicable ways; enemy defections were down, a sign of high morale; captured enemy reports described coming attacks on several cities; eleven cadres were caught in the city of Qui Nhon carrying prerecorded tapes calling on the local people to rise up against the Saigon government. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Earle Wheeler thought the North might be readying something along the lines of the “desperate efforts of the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.” Lyndon Johnson told the Australian prime minister to expect last-ditch “kamikaze” attacks in the coming weeks. “All of these things were saying to us, ‘Something’s going to happen,’ ” Philip Brady, now working for USAID, remembered. “But we didn’t know exactly what.”

NLF fighters and local sympathizers form a human chain to smuggle weapons across a river. The coming struggle, they were told, “will be the greatest battle ever fought throughout the history of our country. It will bring forth worldwide change but will also require many sacrifices.”

SIDESHOW

GENERAL WESTMORELAND thought he knew. “I believe that the enemy will attempt a country-wide show of strength just prior to Tet,” he told Washington, “with Khe Sanh being the main event.”

Khe Sanh Marine Combat Base was the westernmost of the American strongpoints established below the DMZ in 1966 to prevent the enemy from seizing South Vietnam’s northernmost provinces. It occupied a treeless plateau, honeycombed with cement bunkers and defensive positions and ringed with thickly wooded hills. Its location—just eight miles east of Laos—made it an important base from which to monitor and hinder enemy infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as well as a potential jumping-off point for the cross-border invasion Westmoreland still hoped he could one day persuade the president to underwrite.

Lieutenant General Lewis W. Walt, the top Marine commander in Vietnam, had never wanted to send men there. “It’s too isolated,” he said, “too hard to support.” Its only overland link to other Marine bases was Route 9, an old dirt road that in places was no wider than a driveway, subject to washouts during monsoons and ideally suited for ambushes. Replacement and resupply would have to be brought in by air in a mountainous region where blankets of fog often made landing and taking off all but impossible. “When you’re at Khe Sanh you’re not really anywhere,” said Brigadier General Lowell English, assistant commander of the Third Marines, whose men would be tasked with defending the base. “You could lose it and you really haven’t lost a damn thing.”

Westmoreland overruled them. In 1967, in a series of bloody battles remembered as the “Hill Fights,” Marines successfully beat back repeated North Vietnamese attempts to seize one or another of the summits overlooking the base.

That fall, Marines patrolling near Khe Sanh had come upon new enemy bunkers, freshly dug fighting positions, and freshly created roads. It was clear that North Vietnamese troops were massing in the hills—eventually, there would be somewhere between twenty thousand and forty thousand of them. Westmoreland believed that North Vietnam wanted to isolate and destroy a major U.S. force at Khe Sanh—just as the Viet Minh under General Giap had done to the French at Dien Bien Phu fourteen years earlier. (The American assumptions seemed plausible, because U.S. commanders assumed that Giap was in command; in fact, he remained in temporary exile in Hungary.)

Any attacks mounted elsewhere in South Vietnam, Westmoreland was sure, would only be a diversion. Attrition was finally having the impact he’d hoped for; the communists had simply suffered too many casualties to focus serious attention on more than one target at a time. “The most logical course for the enemy,” he said, was to overrun the northern provinces, “coupled with lesser attacks throughout the rest of the country to tie down American forces that might be moved to reinforce the North.”

To thwart that plan, Westmoreland reinforced Khe Sanh with four battalions of Marines belonging to the Twenty-Sixth Regiment—some six thousand men, augmented by three hundred ARVN rangers—and sent unit after unit northward to I Corps, until, by January’s end, half of all American combat maneuver battalions were stationed there, ready for any eventuality.

One Army commander, Lieutenant General Frederick C. Weyand, was less sure of the enemy’s intentions. Responsible for defending the approaches to Saigon, he had been overseeing combat along the Cambodian border, and when the enemy there seemed suddenly to have vanished, he got permission to reposition a third of the troops under his command—fifteen combat battalions—closer to the South Vietnamese capital. Had he not done so, the character of the upcoming battle for that city might have been very different.

On January 2, the day Westmoreland sent his latest upbeat report to his superiors, his prediction about Khe Sanh seemed to have been confirmed. Sentries manning an advance outpost just west of the base camp spotted six men in U.S. Marine uniforms strolling along a path beyond the defensive wire. Twice ordered in English to stop, they didn’t respond. The Marines opened fire, killing five and wounding a sixth, who managed to stagger away into the jungle. The men turned out to be a North Vietnamese regimental commander and his staff, apparently scouting the area in preparation for an assault.

Ever since taking command in South Vietnam, Westmoreland had hoped the enemy would somewhere mass his troops so he could destroy them with overwhelming American firepower. Khe Sanh now seemed to provide the perfect opportunity. He adopted a two-part plan he called Operation Niagara “to evoke an image of cascading bombs and shells.” First, reconnaissance aircraft would photograph every inch of the surrounding terrain to pinpoint enemy positions while helicopters carpeted the countryside with acoustic devices to detect voices and seismic sensors to record truck and tank vibrations. Then, he readied a giant flight of more than two thousand warplanes, prepared to hit the enemy when the time came.

Just after midnight on January 21, North Vietnamese troops attacked Hill 861A, one of the summits that overlooked the base camp, and nearly captured it, then began pounding Khe Sanh itself with rockets, mortars, and artillery shells.

Marine Private John Corbett, from Nyack, New York, who had only recently arrived, took cover with two other men in his fighting hole, roofed with sandbags and dirt-filled ammunition boxes. An enemy rocket hit the main Marine ammunition dump. “It sounds as though all the Fourth of July fireworks of my youth have come back to blow up altogether,” Corbett wrote. “The…noise starts to disorientate us….[I]t hurts our eardrums so badly that in desperation we tear the filters off cigarettes and plug them into our ears….Dirt continues to filter down on us from shaken sandbags on the roof.” The initial explosion set off smaller ones that went on for forty-eight hours, filling the air with shrapnel.

Although the continuous explosions were terrifying, Corbett wrote, the Marines did their best to fight back.

Even with our base’s ammunition dump exploding, with fires burning all around us, with our mortar’s barrel still glowing and overheating, with an unexploded enemy mortar round sticking out of the dirt several feet away, the men in my squad are singing. Though I am undoubtedly the most scared Marine in Khe Sanh at the moment, I am also the proudest because of the song we are singing: The Marine Corps Hymn. “From the Hall of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country’s battles on land or on the sea.” I join in. This singing together, under these circumstances, keeps our courage up. I am very proud to be here with these Marines.

A foggy morning at Khe Sanh. “The digging of defensive positions is not what the Marines have trained me for,” a veteran recalled. “The Corps didn’t instruct us on how to build a bunker or dig a trench line….We were trained to attack and destroy, to always be the aggressor, to never spend a second night on the same piece of real estate when there is more to attack.”

Early in the struggle to hold the base, a Marine who has survived several days of savage combat on Hill 861A seeks solace in his Bible.

The explosions had destroyed 90 percent of the Americans’ ammunition. The enemy had cut off Route 9. Big C-125 and C-130 transport planes lumbered in to replenish supplies. Their cargo included four large crates addressed to “Fifth Graves Registration Team, Khe Sanh”; each contained one thousand pounds of body bags. When enemy gunners zeroed in on the single landing strip, helicopters had to take over the dangerous task of resupply.

Private Corbett and his buddies soon saw that they were bait, meant to lure enemy troops out into the open so they could be blasted from the air. Major Mirza Baig, the target selection officer at Khe Sanh, explained Westmoreland’s tactic. “Our entire philosophy [is] to allow the enemy to surround us closely, to mass about us, to reveal his troop and logistic routes, to establish his dumps and assembly areas, and to prepare his siege works as energetically as he desires. The result [will be] an enormous quantity of targets…for heavy bombers.”

Reporters and photographers choppered in and out as the siege began, and the imperiled, surrounded men at Khe Sanh quickly caught the imagination of the American public. Unlike most combat in Vietnam, here was a struggle civilians could understand: surrounded U.S. Marines holding on, though heavily outnumbered. During the sixty-day period between February and March, Khe Sanh was the subject of one-third of all the AP stories filed from Vietnam, a quarter of the Vietnam clips on the network nightly news, and seventeen days’ worth of Vietnam headlines in TheNew York Times.

Khe Sanh consumed President Johnson’s attention, too. Ninety sixty-eight was an election year. “I don’t want any damn ‘Dinbinphoo,’ ” Lyndon Johnson said. He asked again and again if General Westmoreland had all the men and materiel he needed, ordered a scale model of the battlefield installed in the White House so he could follow the fighting there hour by hour, and often wandered down to the situation room in the early morning hours insisting on the very latest news. To allay his anxiety, General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, signed a document on behalf of his colleagues assuring the president that Khe Sanh would never fall. So concerned were U.S. commanders about the possibility of failure that if things began to look bad, Westmoreland recommended the use of “tactical nuclear weapons or chemical agents.” Later, he would explain that since the area around the base was “virtually uninhabited,” civilian casualties would have been minimal. How the Marines would have been shielded remains unclear.

It never came to that. As part of Operation Niagara, 2,700 B-52 sorties would drop a total of 110,000 tons of bombs during a siege that would last 77 days. “Some Marines open their mouths and scream to equalize the effects of the bombs’ concussions,” Private Corbett wrote.

The planes are above us and dropping bombs close to our lines. They fly so high we can’t see them or hear their jet engines….We hear a horrific screeching, tearing noise—the sound of bombs falling. They sound as though they are ripping the sky….[It] is a frightening but beautiful sound, because the bombs will kill many enemy soldiers. Shock waves ripple from the bombs’ impact. The valley trembles….A single two-thousand-pound bomb can leave a crater thirty feet deep. Everyone has jumped from the trenches and foxholes clapping, whistling and cheering for the bombers. It was as if it’s a ball game and our team has just scored. I guess it has.

No one knows how many North Vietnamese died in the hills surrounding Khe Sanh before the siege was finally lifted: MACV’s estimate was between ten thousand and fifteen thousand. The precise number of Americans killed and wounded is unclear, too, but if the entire Khe Sanh campaign is taken into account, roughly 1,000 died and 4,500 more were wounded.

EXPOSED

Ron Ferrizzi and a Hughes OH-6 Cayuse light observation/attack helicopter

Vietnam was the first real helicopter war. Chopper pilots flew more than 36 million individual sorties before it was over. They scattered propaganda leaflets over the enemy and poured lethal fire into their positions; carried troops and supplies and artillery pieces into battle—and lifted the wounded off the battlefield so swiftly that most reached a field hospital within fifteen minutes. It was a perilous business; U.S. Army aviators suffered the highest casualty ratio of any contingent of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam.

In 1968, Ron Ferrizzi, a policeman’s son from the Swampoodle neighborhood of North Philadelphia, was a helicopter crew chief with the First Air Cavalry, Charlie troop, First Squadron, Ninth Cavalry, initially flying out of Two Bits, the same Central Highlands landing zone where Hal Kushner had been stationed before his capture by the NLF. Ferrizzi flew in light observation helicopters—“like riding around in a lawn chair,” he remembered, “we were so exposed”—that were expected to be the infantry’s eyes in the field. They flew so low and so slowly, Ferrizzi remembered, that he could sometimes see the eyes of the enemy. “My job was to get shot at, to draw enemy fire, to see where the enemy was,” he remembered. “I got shot at a lot.”

Determined to destroy a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun during the siege of Khe Sanh, the pilot of his chopper flew so close to the ground the gun’s crew couldn’t depress the barrel far enough to fire at him. With his machine gun, Ferrizzi managed to take out all five crew members. On another occasion, when a U.S. helicopter was shot down and burst into flame, Ferrizzi jumped from his chopper to free the trapped crew. As he struggled, the wrecked chopper exploded, blowing him into the air. When he came to, he was bleeding and badly burned and the enemy was close enough that he could hear them talking. A machine gun opened up, but somehow he managed to clamber back aboard his chopper. For his bravery under fire he was awarded the Silver Star.

Combat was traumatic, but life between firefights in the thickly forested Central Highlands was sometimes surreal. From the air, Ferrizzi and another crew chief once shot a tiger, said to have been menacing a Marine detachment. He was also expected to keep an eye out for elephants. “If we spotted any we had to land the aircraft, pick up elephant turds, and bring them back to the base to find out what they were eating. If the elephant was being used as a pack animal for the North Vietnamese its diet might include plants from another part of the country and it would be gunned down.” If not, they were to be left alone.

Huey (UH-1 Iroquois) helicopters belonging to the 199th Light Infantry Brigade ferry ARVN and American troops into battle somewhere in the Mekong Delta.

Messages: A Marine hunkers down as a shell comes in, wearing a helmet with a few words for the journalists who fly into Khe Sanh and then can fly out again.

This Marine’s helmet includes both his blood type, in case he is wounded, and a calendar marking off the months till he can go home.

Another Marine protects himself with cards he considers lucky.

“It was never easy to guess the ages of Marines at Khe Sanh, since nothing like youth ever lasted in their faces for very long,” wrote the journalist Michael Herr. “It was the eyes: because they were always either strained or blazed-out or simply blank, they never had anything to do with what the rest of the face was doing, and it gave everyone the look of extreme fatigue or even a glancing madness.”

ONCE EVERY THOUSAND YEARS

FROM TIME TO TIME over the coming weeks the North Vietnamese would probe Khe Sanh’s defenses, but the all-out assault that Westmoreland was sure was coming would never materialize. His basic assumption turned out to be spectacularly wrong: Khe Sanh would be the sideshow; the attacks on cities and towns and military installations about to begin all across South Vietnam would be “the main event.” “Even if I had known exactly what was to take place,” Westmoreland’s intelligence chief, Brigadier General Phillip Davidson, recalled, “it was so preposterous that I probably would have been unable to sell it to anybody. Why would the enemy give away its major advantage…its ability to be elusive and avoid heavy casualties?”

In Hanoi, Party First Secretary Le Duan’s basic assumptions were about to be tested, too. For the coming offensive to succeed, two monumental things would have to take place simultaneously: the South Vietnamese “puppet army” would have to collapse, and the people of the southern cities would have to rise up and join the revolution.

“All our thinking was focused on finishing off [the enemy],” one North Vietnamese general remembered. “We were intoxicated by that thought.” Another recalled that “no one was allowed to harbor any doubts or to even think about the possibility of winning a partial victory….Never once did we discuss…what would we do [if] the enemy counterattacked?” “The slogan was, ‘An opportunity like this comes once every thousand years,’ ” remembered Le Cong Huan, who had fought with the NLF at Ap Bac. “We were confident. We were told to bring only our newest uniform to wear when we seized Saigon.” “In some units,” the journalist Huy Duc recalled, “enthusiasm was so high that before heading toward their assigned targets they destroyed their cooking pots and burned their huts because they were so sure they’d never have to come back.”

The general outline of the plan for the offensive had been shared with regional-level commanders three months earlier, but precise targets and the exact date on which the attacks were to be launched were not finally set until January 15. It was to be midnight on January 31, the night between the first and second days of Tet, then just two weeks away. Even then, only those at the very top were let in on the secret, for fear of alerting the enemy.

Tet is the most important holiday in the Vietnamese calendar, observed in different ways by people of every faith, a festive three-day interval between the end of the arduous harvest season and the beginning of spring planting. Special markets go up overnight, selling candied fruit and marigolds and peach and kumquat trees. Homes are cleaned to eliminate any trace of misfortune that might have marred the previous year. Children get new clothes and auspicious red envelopes filled with cash. Special foods are prepared and special offerings made to the ancestors. Above all, it is an annual coming-together of the family, and tradition dictated that both sides observe a cease-fire to allow troops not stationed at too-distant points to rejoin their families for the festival. By January 30, an informal thirty-six-hour truce agreed to by both sides was to go into effect. Thousands of ARVN troops would be at home for the holidays.

General Huynh Cong Than was an NLF subregional commander in Long An Province, in the western part of the Mekong Delta. A veteran of the war against the French, he’d been working for weeks getting his forces ready to attack Saigon. He knew what his men were supposed to do but not yet when they were supposed to do it. “There were mountains of work to be done,” he recalled. Some units were undermanned, and he had to scour the countryside for youths to fill them out, some as young as thirteen. There were not enough arms to go around. Reinforcement units promised by NLF higher-ups failed to appear. The geography of the city his men were meant to help capture was a mystery to many of them. “We did not know the situation in the city outskirts and in the inner city,” he remembered, “so we had to send cadres to contact our people who were operating in those areas.”

Despite all the obstacles he faced, General Than had faith in those directing the revolution. “Even though problems of every sort confronted us,…the atmosphere was very enthusiastic….Our enthusiasm was based on our understanding that, this time, total victory was certain. Even though we had not found solutions for all our problems, everyone believed that these were just local difficulties encountered only by our own individual units….Our national-level leadership, our superiors, had made careful calculations for this offensive. Certainly they would only have made this decision if it were certain we could win, because this was a major decision—it was not just one single battle to be fought in just one locality….While our preparations were carried out on an urgent basis, no one yet knew the exact date of the offensive….[When] both Liberation Radio and Radio Saigon announced a cease-fire that would last several days to allow the population to celebrate the new year in the traditional manner, [we] thought this meant any attack would have to be launched after Tet.”

Meanwhile, U.S. and ARVN forces continued to conduct business more or less as usual. Since arriving in Vietnam, Marine Corporal Bill Ehrhart had patrolled around Hoi An and Dong Ha, survived fighting in Leatherneck Square, and endured thirty-three days under sporadic shelling at Con Thien. “Toward the end of January, they pulled us back to Phu Bai, to the big Marine base there, just south of Hue,” he remembered. “We’d been out in the field continuously for about four months. So we were going to go back and rest and refit, re-equip ourselves. I’m figuring at that point I’ve got a month to go. I’m home free. When you got down to being a ‘double-digit midget’ and you had ninety-nine days to go, you’d make a short-time calendar—which was usually a Playboy centerfold—and you’d literally draw these ninety-nine little segments on it. And every day you’d fill in a segment. They were numbered. And the idea was that when you’d filled in your short-time calendar you’d take it back to the world [the United States] and trade it in for a real one. So I had this short-time calendar. Our operations officer, Major Murphy, had the same rotation date as me. Then we got this new S2 officer, Captain Black. And the very first thing he does is say, ‘That’s inappropriate. Take that down.’ Well, Major Murphy turns around and he goes, ‘Captain, that’s my short-time calendar. Corporal Ehrhart maintains it for me.’ This captain looked like he’d just sucked a lemon. But there was nothing he could do.”

Women of the NLF hurry along a village path, carrying crates of ammunition toward Saigon. The coming attacks on the cities, Party Chairman Le Duan said, would constitute a “sharp dagger through the throat of the enemy.”

Time was almost up for Marine Corporal Roger Harris, too. In fact, he was scheduled to fly out of Vietnam on January 29. He and his unit were still hunkered down under enemy shelling at Camp Carroll, just south of the DMZ. But he had his orders, and he was determined to get out. He said goodbye to his friends and headed for the landing zone. “When the helicopters came in, I helped put the body bags on the helicopter. And I got on with the bodies. We landed in Dong Ha, which was division headquarters. When we got about two hundred meters from the airstrip, the airstrip started getting hit. I’m just thinking personally that God realizes that He made a mistake because some of the guys that got killed that were with me were good Christians that never had sex, didn’t swear. And I had been this sinner. God realized He made a mistake: He killed the Christians and I got away. So now Death is following me. They told us that in another hour or so a plane was going to come in. When it did come in the artillery started coming in again. We jumped on and took off. We landed at Danang and boarded airplanes again, finally on our way home. We were sitting there. Everybody’s slapping five. We made it. Then, all of a sudden, whump, whump, whump, Danang airstrip starts getting hit, artillery’s coming in. And I’m thinking it’s all coming after me. It’s all about me, you know. God doesn’t want me to make it out of here.”

Enemy rockets and mortar rounds hit the airfield at Danang early in the morning of January 30, 1968. Hanoi Radio falsely claimed that the attack was meant to “punish the U.S. aggressors…who insolently slighted the traditional Lunar New Year festival of the Vietnamese people” by canceling the ceasefire.

The plane managed to take off despite the barrage, and as Harris headed home he had no way of knowing that the shells that had seemed to pursue him everywhere were the opening salvo of what came to be called the Tet Offensive.

Confusion about the calendar had caused NLF and North Vietnamese forces in several places, including Danang, to jump the gun. Long after the war, a Vietnamese military history explained what had happened:

The orders stated that region and province leaders were to be informed of the exact day and hour seven days before the attack and that district leaders and the commanders of independent regiments, spearhead battalions, and urban commando groups were to be informed forty-eight hours ahead of time. In 1968 North Vietnam announced a change in the lunar calendar. According to the new calendar, the first day of Tet would be one day earlier than the date on the old calendar [used in the South]. In [Central Vietnam] and the Central Highlands our forces were already hidden in place right outside the target objectives and were unable to delay their attacks.

And so, between midnight and three a.m. on January 30—a full twenty-four hours before the agreed-upon jumping-off time—the communists shelled and attacked seven towns and cities: Nha Trang, Ban Me Thuot, Hoi An, Kon Tum, Qui Nhon, and Pleiku, as well as Danang. Each assault was beaten back within hours, but the element of surprise was badly undercut.

“This is going to happen in the rest of the country, tonight or tomorrow morning,” intelligence chief Davidson warned Westmoreland. President Thieu had already canceled the ceasefire and recalled all ARVN personnel on leave. Westmoreland placed U.S. forces on “maximum alert.” But since the summer of 1967, U.S. forces had been placed on some kind of heightened alert about half the time and for the most part nothing untoward had happened, so most officers were not unduly concerned. With half his combat forces concentrated in I Corps, and still convinced that any potential attacks elsewhere would be purely diversionary, there wasn’t much more Westmoreland could do. He did not pass up his afternoon tennis game at Saigon’s Cercle Sportif.

News of the surprise attacks confused NLF commanders, too. General Than, who’d been readying his troops for an attack on southern Saigon that he had assumed was not to begin until after Tet, was asleep in the early-morning hours of January 30 when a cadre from the local NLF headquarters burst into his room.

“The situation is extremely critical,” he said. “We have orders that Saigon must be attacked tonight!”

Than was appalled. At first, he remembered, all he could do “was stand there moaning, ‘Oh my God! Oh, my God!’ ” He now had just twenty hours in which to rally ten battalions of fighters, issue three-days’ rations and arms sufficient for the coming struggle, and then march his soldiers toward the city in broad daylight, hoping that they would somehow not be spotted by the enemy and that the guides who were needed to lead them to their targets would be in place and ready when they got there. He did his best.

SPLIT THE SKY AND SHAKE THE EARTH

THE MAIN THRUST of the Tet Offensive began shortly after midnight on January 31. Over the next forty-eight hours, some eighty-four thousand NLF and North Vietnamese troops would hit 36 of 44 provincial capitals, 64 of 245 district capitals, more than fifty hamlets, dozens of ARVN and American bases, and five of the six largest cities in the country, including three that Hanoi called the “focal point targets”—Hue, Danang, and Saigon. Their goal, their commanders told them, was to “split the sky and shake the earth.”

To the people of Saigon, asleep in their beds, the first mortar barrage was not especially disturbing. The sound of distant explosions was commonplace in Saigon. ARVN and NLF forces frequently exchanged fire in the city’s outskirts; in any case, President Thieu, anxious to reassure his people that he was fully in charge and that the Saigon government was stable at last, had authorized four days of Tet fireworks.

Eventually awakened by an aide, General Westmoreland stayed by his telephone as reports of fresh attacks came in from all over South Vietnam. Their scale was stunning. MACV had expected assaults of some kind, but nothing like this. Never before had communist troops dared to enter South Vietnamese cities; nor had so many ever been committed to such a broad, coordinated campaign.

Years later, Westmoreland would claim that the attacks had been “a surprise to the American people but not to us on the battlefield.” His peers did not agree.

“Boy, it was a surprise, let me tell you,” Robert Komer, the head of CORDS, recalled. “I was at Westy’s elbow.” “My God,” said General William A. Knowlton, assistant division commander to the Ninth Infantry Division, “it’s Pearl Harbor all over again.” Some two hundred officers were attending a New Year’s pool party when the shooting began. Not a single top commander was present at “Pentagon East,” the sprawling MACV headquarters at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the northern edge of Saigon. At first, aides to General Creighton W. Abrams Jr., Westmoreland’s second in command, did not bother to wake him. Ambassador Bunker was attending a party to celebrate “the light at the end of the tunnel”; Marine security guards had to hurry him into an armored personnel carrier and rush him to a secure location. “There was an intelligence failure,” he privately admitted later. “We had no inkling of the scope, the timing, or the targets of the offensive.”

For maximum impact, the communists had chosen a handful of targets in Saigon they considered central to the American and South Vietnamese cause. Sapper squads were to seize and hold each of them for forty-eight hours until a relief force could reach them. Simultaneously, U.S. military installations in the city’s outskirts would be attacked in an effort to keep American troops occupied and unable to rush into the city. (In the end, virtually all the opposition that NLF fighters faced within Saigon during the first two days of fighting would come from ARVN troops, augmented by some seventeen thousand armed members of the National Police.)

General Weyand, whose last-minute foresight had circled the city with U.S. forces, remembered that the map showing the reported attacks in and around the city soon reminded him of “a pinball machine, one light after another going on as it was hit.” He would spend hours shifting nearly five thousand mechanized and airborne U.S. troops from place to place to thwart the enemy’s assaults.

Sappers slipped through the wire at Long Binh, eleven miles northeast of Saigon, the site of the largest U.S. installation in Vietnam, and managed to blow up a huge ammunition dump. A mushroom cloud rose above the airfield so vast that some Americans thought there had been a nuclear explosion. But when NLF troops followed along behind, they were virtually obliterated by gunships, airstrikes, and artillery.

The NLF attacked Bien Hoa, South Vietnam’s busiest air base, too. Sleeping above the nearby USAID office, Phil Brady and his wife and a colleague named Bob Mellon awakened to gunfire. “All hell broke loose,” Brady remembered. “There were VC moving on the house, moving everywhere. A lot of shooting, a lot of confusion. We were shooting back out the window and my wife was reloading. When we ran out of ammunition we’d slide the magazine down the tiles and she was down there at the other end filling them up and sliding them back. Tells you how tough she is.” These attackers, too, were quickly wiped out.

NLF reinforcements rush through a Saigon suburb toward the city. Most arrived too late. Many never got there at all.

From three sides, three communist battalions blasted their way onto the Tan Son Nhut Air Base, threatening the MACV complex and the headquarters of the Seventh Air Force as well as hundreds of airplanes and helicopters. They were met by a motley but determined assortment of allied troops: U.S. Air Force Security Police, security guards assigned to MACV and to Vice President Ky, whose home was on the base; a battalion of ARVN paratroopers who happened to be there waiting for a plane; and a squadron of tanks summoned by General Weyand from Cu Chi, fourteen miles away; flares dropping from their commander’s control helicopter to light their way. NLF fighters were eventually driven into a nearby textile mill, where allied airpower eliminated them. When it was all over, 162 bodies were found inside.

Many years later, Bui Hong Ha, an NLF mortar man who managed to survive the struggle at Tan Son Nhut, recalled what had happened to him and his unit: “My battalion crossed the Vam Co River and advanced toward Saigon, but we still had not been told what target we were supposed to attack. The fact that a General Offensive was about to be launched was kept absolutely secret. When we reached the approaches to Saigon we finally were given the important mission of attacking and capturing Tan Son Nhut Air Base….We were very happy, and we had no fear of danger or of being killed. My 82mm mortar team was ordered to shell the air base. We used ‘Charge 3’ on our mortar rounds. With such a large propellant charge the recoil was very powerful, and the explosion of the mortars firing made our ears ring. The ground was so dry and hard that we were unable to dig in to build protected firing positions. Every time we fired our mortar we had to have two of our soldiers stand on the…base plate to hold it down. After firing for a while, we ran out of ammunition, so we then began to fight with infantry weapons. At that very moment a swarm of enemy helicopters suddenly filled the sky. They swept down on us, pelting us with bullets. Because the ground was so hard we could not dig foxholes, so many of our men died very tragically. We had only a few dozen men left out of our entire battalion. That night we withdrew. Local residents gave us food and water and carried our wounded away for medical treatment. In 1995, we finally found a mass grave where 181 of the battalion’s officers and enlisted men were buried. Every year when the Tet Lunar New Year arrives I go to the cemetery to light incense sticks in memory of my fallen comrades-in-arms.”

A hastily assembled group of men belonging to the 377th Combat Security Police Squadron fire at NLF forces trying to capture Tan Son Nhut airport.

As the fighting raged at American bases outside Saigon, small NLF commando squads, under the direction of superiors housed in a noodle shop on Yen Do Street, moved toward hand-picked targets within the city.

Nothing would go according to plan.

A squad ordered to seize the Chi Hoa Prison and release its five thousand inmates never got there; the guides meant to lead them to it had all been killed by the police.

The sappers who attacked the ARVN Armored Command and Artillery Command headquarters fared no better: the tanks they’d hoped to steal had been moved elsewhere; artillery pieces had been rendered useless by removing the breech locks; a promised ARVN mutiny meant to have been instigated by NLF agents failed to materialize. All the trespassers were killed or captured.

Twenty men dressed as policemen shot their way into the government radio station, hoping to broadcast prerecorded tapes proclaiming Saigon’s liberation by the NLF. But as the shooting started a technician radioed to the transmitting tower fourteen miles away and ordered the wires between it and the station cut, and the station broadcast Viennese waltzes and Beatles songs instead. ARVN troops set the station on fire and shot most of the sappers as they tried to flee.

The two most spectacular attacks took place in the heart of the city, within easy walking distance of the hotels in which newspaper and television reporters were housed.

Thirty-four sappers, dressed in South Vietnamese army uniforms, blasted through the gate of the Presidential Palace only to be killed or driven out again. The survivors took refuge in an unfinished apartment building across the street and held out there for two days before ARVN troops and American MPs wiped them out. TV crews captured it all on film.

Meanwhile, just three blocks away, nineteen sappers used a satchel charge to blow a hole in the wall of the U.S. embassy compound. There were supposed to be twice as many men but half never turned up. As they wriggled through the gap, an American MP radioed his headquarters: “They’re coming in! They’re coming in! Help me! Help me!” He and another MP managed to shoot several intruders, including their leader, before they were themselves killed. With no one to give them orders, the surviving sappers seemed confused as to what to do next. They did not try to enter the gleaming new six-story chancery building—though an AP reporter wrongly reported that they had done so. Instead, they took what cover they could behind pillars and concrete planters as American MPs and chopper-borne paratroopers picked them off, one by one. The last NLF fighter, badly wounded but still firing his AK-47, staggered inside a villa at the corner of the compound and was shot to death by a retired army colonel with a pistol tossed to him through the window by an MP. That gunfight, too, was filmed.

All nineteen sappers were killed or captured. Five Americans died, and five more were wounded. Three innocent South Vietnamese civilian employees were also killed, at least one of them shot by an American while he frantically waved his embassy ID card. The front of the embassy was pocked with bullet and shrapnel holes. The Great Seal of the United States had been blasted from over the entrance. Bloody Vietnamese and American corpses lay sprawled on the immaculate lawn—“like a butcher shop in Eden,” one reporter wrote.

At nine thirty that morning, fifteen minutes after the final shots were fired, General Westmoreland toured the grounds, then did his best to reassure the stunned reporters who had watched it all. “The enemy’s well-laid plans went afoul,” he said. The attacks across the country had been “very deceitfully calculated” both to undercut public confidence in the war’s steady progress and to divert attention from the major assault on Khe Sanh he was still sure was imminent. “The enemy exposed himself by virtue of his strategy and he suffered great casualties….As soon as President Thieu…called off the truce, American troops went on the offensive and pursued the enemy aggressively.”

With gunfire still echoing across the city, and with more reports of communist attacks cascading in from everywhere, Westmoreland’s relentless optimism struck some reporters as surreal, even delusional.

A later appearance at the embassy by Ambassador Bunker did little to change their minds.

REPORTER: Is Saigon secure right now?

ELLSWORTH BUNKER: Saigon’s secure as far as I know.

REPORTER: There’s no more fighting in the streets?

BUNKER: There may be some in the outskirts still. I’m not sure. Don’t know.

Saigon was far from secure, and would not be fully secure for more than a week. And neither Bunker’s reassurances nor Westmoreland’s could blunt the impact of television footage of bloody combat in the symbolic heart of the American effort in Vietnam. If the United States was winning the war, as administration spokesmen had been saying for months, how could this possibly have happened?

The NLF may have failed to achieve its primary objectives, but its fighters were still in the streets, still seeking revenge on the Saigon regime, still hoping the people of the city could be persuaded to rise up in their support.

Duong Van Mai Elliott and her husband, David, had been asleep in the RAND Corporation villa on Pasteur Street near the Presidential Palace when the assault on the embassy began. “We heard gunfire, and our first reaction was ‘Must be another coup d’état,’ ” she recalled. “Then we heard that the Viet Cong had attacked Saigon and were still attacking. It came as a total shock because we always thought Saigon was safe, the safest place in all of South Vietnam.” She hurried to her parents’ house and found them huddled inside, “the doors and windows shut, very dark. They were afraid because our house was located near a slum. And we always assumed that there were a lot of Viet Cong agents living among the poor where they could hide very easily and that they were going to come out and look for government officials and military personnel to kill.”

Her parents’ fears were justified. NLF assassination squads, guided by spies, were moving through the back streets armed with lists of “blood debtors of the people” marked for assassination—bureaucrats, intelligence officers, ARVN commanders, ordinary soldiers home on leave and their families. They went from house to house. People hid their family albums for fear a snapshot would give away their connection to the Saigon regime. Nguyen Tai, a North Vietnamese spy who supervised operations of the murder squads in Saigon, was pleased. “The armed scouts of our security network did a number of excellent jobs in assassinating traitors,” he remembered.

NLF fighters armed with AK-47s escort three captives along a Saigon street during the Tet Offensive. No one knows the prisoners’ fate.

An assassination squad captured an ARVN colonel at his barracks, tied his hands, led him behind a church, and shot him. His widow was captured at home. “A young fellow about eighteen years old held a [machete] to my neck,” she remembered. “He was about to chop it but I begged for my life. My children…screamed and screamed. The leader was waiting outside. He yelled through the door, ‘What are you waiting for? Just liquidate her so we can go. Don’t waste time talking.’ ” The younger man took pity on the woman and told her to hide but warned that if he saw her again he would have no choice but to kill her.

A taxi driver remembered that when the guerrillas came to his street, “they decapitated three people and left their bodies and heads lying at a coffee shop.” They killed three more the next day. “I don’t know what crimes these people committed. I only saw the VC throw their corpses in the street and forbid anyone’s passing that place.”

In one neighborhood, another resident recalled, they forced everyone out of their homes to act as jurors at so-called “people’s courts,” before which they brought those they accused of collaborating with the government. “The VC addressed the people: ‘If you say these men are guilty, we shall punish them; if you say they are not guilty, we shall release them.’ The people said, ‘Not guilty,’ so the VC did not kill anyone in our area.”

Propaganda squads with megaphones chanted: “Compatriots, arise and give us a hand in getting Ky and Thieu down.” “Nightly they came to every house,” one man recalled, “exhorting the people…to take to the streets and go for demonstrations. They told the people to take the [South Vietnamese] flags down and hoist the NLF ones because they had already liberated the capital. No one responded to their calling. Nobody took to the streets, and nobody hoisted the NLF flag.” The wife of a pedicab driver spoke for a good many people: “This is a war between the two sides, and it is their business. We will obey both sides when asked.”

“The civilian population had a very good attitude toward our troops when they encountered our men,” the NLF commander General Huynh Cong Than recalled, “but we never saw any large demonstrations….We were not playing a supporting role for an uprising of the masses as we had thought….The rate of advance of our spearhead battalions began to slow….Our ammunition supplies decreased, day by day….Meanwhile, the political struggle, which was to have been launched by the students and the masses, still had not appeared….What were the conditions among the masses and the students in Saigon that led our people to the conclusion that millions of people were boiling over with revolutionary zeal and were prepared to sacrifice everything for the cause of independence and freedom?”

Some Saigonese, stunned to find the war now being fought in the supposedly safe streets of their capital, assumed that there must be a sinister explanation: otherwise, how could the United States, with all its firepower, have let it happen? A rumor spread that the Americans had deliberately allowed the enemy to enter Saigon and other cities in order to force President Thieu to negotiate with the NLF so U.S. forces could go home. This baseless story was so widespread that Ambassador Bunker would have to broadcast an official denial.

A CONTINUOUS NIGHTMARE

THE WHITE HOUSE had been as stunned by what was happening in Vietnam as were the commanders in the field. The president was presiding over his regular Tuesday lunch meeting when he got the news. “Principals only” were present—Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, CIA chief Richard Helms, General Wheeler, and, on this occasion, Clark Clifford, just confirmed as the new secretary of defense but not officially set to take charge until March 1.

The lunch discussion centered on Khe Sanh—the president’s “obsession,” Clifford remembered. General Wheeler proposed that General Westmoreland be authorized to tell the Saigon government he was planning a waterborne invasion of North Vietnam. Wheeler was sure that communist spies within the South Vietnamese high command would inform their masters in Hanoi—who would then rush troops from Khe Sanh to defend their coastline. Clifford opposed what he called “this strange idea”—“it could easily leak, backfire, or lead to actual ground combat in North Vietnam.” But McNamara thought the idea worth exploring. So did the president.

An aide entered and handed Walt Rostow a note. Rostow left the room and returned with what Clifford recalled as “a dramatic announcement”: “We have just received a flash message from the National Military Command Center. We are being heavily mortared in Saigon. The Presidential Palace, our military installations, the American embassy, and other parts of the city have been hit.”

Silence followed, broken by the president: “This could be very bad.”

General Wheeler assured everyone that there was nothing to worry about. This sort of thing happened all the time in Saigon: “This is about as tough to prevent as a mugging in Washington.”

On February 2, forty-eight hours after most of the attacks began, President Johnson called a White House press conference intended to calm public anxiety about what they had begun to see on their television screens. He assured the room full of reporters that “we have known for some time that this offensive was planned by the enemy. The ability to do what they have done has been anticipated, prepared for, and met….The biggest fact is that the stated purposes of the General Uprising have failed. Communist leaders counted on popular support in the cities….They found little or none.”

True, “services” in the cities had been disrupted—just as they sometimes were in the U.S. if there was a riot or a serious strike—but they would soon be restored. The president struck a note of caution: the situation remained “fluid,” he said; “a massive attack” on Khe Sanh was still “imminent,” but “we feel reasonably sure of our strength.”

Johnson was asked if “this present rampage in South Vietnam” would lead to a change in strategy.”

The answer was no. Nor, the president said, had he received any requests for more troops. General Westmoreland had assured him that he had all the men and materiel needed to get the job done.

Critics in and out of Congress were not persuaded, either by the president or by his doggedly sanguine spokesmen in Saigon. “If this is a failure,” Republican Senator George Aiken of Vermont said, “I hope the Viet Cong never have a major success.” “Something enormous has gone wrong,” said the editors of The Cleveland Press, “and it cannot be shrugged off with the kind of flimsy explanations given so far.” The editors of The Baltimore Sun agreed: “If we expected attacks, why were we caught utterly by surprise?”

Despite the confident air the president tried to convey to the press, the days immediately following Tet were a time of “frustration and genuine anguish,” he remembered; he sometimes felt as if he “were living in a continuous nightmare.”

Compounding the president’s anxiety was another cold war confrontation in another part of Asia. The same day the Khe Sanh siege began, thirty-one North Korean commandos had attacked the South Korean executive mansion in Seoul; twenty-six South Koreans and three Americans died before all the would-be assassins were killed or captured. Two days later, the North Korean navy seized an intelligence-gathering vessel, the USS Pueblo, along with eighty-three members of her crew. Johnson was convinced that the two events were closely connected, and that Moscow was colluding with North Korea in an effort to make Washington divert its forces from Vietnam—and force Seoul to withdraw its troops from there as well.

Hawks in Congress demanded military action to rescue the captives; Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of Louisiana, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, urged Johnson to threaten the use of nuclear arms if the crew were not immediately let go. Johnson called almost fifteen thousand reservists to active duty to be sent to Korea, but the last thing he wanted was a second war in Asia. Delicate negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang were already under way at Panmunjom, aimed at getting the Americans back without further conflict. Seoul resented being excluded from the talks—the Americans did not wish the assassination attempt on the South Korean president and the potential release of the crew to be conflated. The leader of the South Korean opposition warned that the U.S. must never admit that its ship had been in North Korean waters, for fear it would only lead to further aggression, and someone leaked to a CBS reporter a false story that a deal had been reached in which, in exchange for such an admission, the prisoners would be released. (Secretary of State Rusk would soon publicly admit that Washington wasn’t “one thousand percent sure” the ship hadn’t intruded into North Korean waters, but it would be eleven months before the crew was released.)

On the morning of February 5, Garnett D. “Jack” Horner, a veteran White House correspondent working for The Washington Star, called the president for clarification. The two men began by talking about Korea, but the Tet Offensive and the American public’s reaction to it was now uppermost in the president’s mind.

LYNDON JOHNSON: Hello.

JACK HORNER: Good morning, Mr. President.

JOHNSON: Hi, Jack.

HORNER: We need guidance this morning, sir.

JOHNSON: Guidance? Is that all you want?

HORNER: Yes, sir.

JOHNSON: No quotation.

HORNER: That’s right.

JOHNSON: No attribution. No connection. Give it absolutely none.

HORNER: Absolutely none.

JOHNSON: Your press is lying like drunken sailors every day. First thing I wake up this morning was trying to figure out after seeing CBS,…watching the networks, reading the morning papers, was how can we win—possibly win—and survive as a nation and have to fight the press’s lies.

There was no quid pro quo agreement with the North Koreans, he told Horner, his voice quivering with anger—“not one goddamned thing to it.” And by falsely suggesting that there was one the press had further complicated an already tense situation. There were other dangerous rumors floating around Washington, he continued. The columnist Drew Pearson, for example, claimed General Westmoreland was on his way out. “That’s just as untrue as it could be,” Johnson said. “There’s nobody that works for me that’s been more satisfactory all the time.”

JOHNSON: Now the truth of the business is, he has done an expert job. Anybody that can lose four hundred [Americans] and get twenty thousand [enemy dead] is pretty damn good. [Casualty figures seemed to shift with every spokesman.]

HORNER: Yes, sir.

JOHNSON: And I don’t admit that this is a communist victory, and I don’t think anyone but a goddamn communist admits it. That’s what I think….It’s just like a quarterback on a football team playing for your side, and you getting out and whipping the hell out of him….I’m trying to protect my country, and they’re all whipping me. Not a son of a bitch said a word about Ho Chi Minh….He hasn’t been elected to nothing. He’s a dictator if there ever was one….They talk about us bombing, yet these sons of bitches come in and bomb our embassy and nineteen of them try a raid on it—all nineteen get killed—and yet they blame the embassy. I don’t understand it….We think we killed twenty thousand; we think we lost four hundred. We think that of course it’s bad to lose anybody—any one of the four hundred—but we think that the good Lord has been so good to us that it is a major, dramatic victory. And I think, what would have happened if I lost twenty thousand and they lost four hundred? I ask you that.

A CALLOUS DISREGARD

The AP photographer Eddie Adams was roaming the Saigon streets on the second day of the Tet Offensive when he happened upon several South Vietnamese marines escorting a man wearing shorts and a checked shirt toward the An Quan pagoda. The man’s hands were tied behind his back, and he appeared to have been beaten. Adams fell in behind them, snapping an occasional picture as they moved along. An NBC film crew followed them, too.

A cluster of soldiers stood in front of the pagoda. Adams recognized Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the head of the South Vietnamese National Police. Loan was a tough-minded anticommunist, close to Marshal Ky, who had overseen the crushing of the Buddhist revolt in 1966 and saw the Americans as insufficiently committed to the South Vietnamese cause.

The prisoner was brought before him. He was an NLF agent named Nguyen Van Lem and may have been the head of an assassination squad. (He had been found with a pistol adjacent to a hastily dug grave that held the bodies of seven South Vietnamese policemen and their families.) He and Loan exchanged words that no one else heard. Loan ordered one of the soldiers to shoot the prisoner. When the men hesitated, Loan drew his own pistol and shot him through the head. Then he spoke a few words of explanation to Eddie Adams: “They killed many of my people, and yours, too,” and strode away.

Adams had photographed the whole thing. So had the TV crew.

The White House hoped that the next day’s American newspapers would be dominated by a second press conference held by General Westmoreland that was meant to put as much positive spin as possible on what was happening in South Vietnam’s cities. Almost 6,000 enemy troops had been killed, Westmoreland assured reporters, compared to 530 Americans and South Vietnamese. The offensive had been “characterized by treachery and deceitfulness. It showed a callous disregard for human life.”

But the front page of most papers that day also featured Eddie Adams’s photograph of the shooting by General Loan. It, too, seemed to show a callous disregard for human life—but on the side of America’s ally. “The man was wearing a checked shirt,” Professor Sam Hynes remembered. “And the photographer had come up very close and had pressed his shutter just as the officer pulled his trigger. So camera and gun went off together and you could see the man’s head bulging at the side where the bullet was about to come out. We were there, face-to-face with this man who was dying. Right now. Dead.”

Two nights later on the Huntley- Brinkley Report, the NBC cameraman’s color footage of the same public execution would be seen by some twenty million people.

“It was a devastating thing to [witness],” James Willbanks remembered. “And I think many Americans began to ask themselves, ‘Are we supporting the wrong guys here?’ And it sort of bought home to the dinner table—or the breakfast table if you saw it in the newspaper—the brutality of this war and the fact that it looked like it was never going to end.”

Dean Rusk berated newsmen for reporting such a brutal act, implying that the killing of a bound prisoner by a high government official, in broad daylight on a Saigon street, in front of journalists, was somehow not newsworthy. “Whose side are you on?” he asked. “I don’t know why people have to be probing for the things that one can bitch about, when there are two thousand stories on the same day about things that are more constructive.”

In Saigon, Phan Quang Tue, the son of the opposition leader Dr. Phan Quang Dan and now himself a fledgling politician, understood the impact the photograph and footage had on South Vietnam’s American allies. “We paid a big price for that picture. It was a turning point because it made Americans think, ‘Do we want to spend our money and the lives of our sons to protect a system that allows that?’ ”

IT BECAME NECESSARY

THE AMERICAN PRESS, headquartered in Saigon, understandably focused almost exclusively on the fighting in that city; the war had never come so close to them before. But the Tet Offensive seemed to be happening everywhere. ARVN and American forces quickly blunted most assaults. The enemy was suffering terrible losses. The same weaknesses that undercut their attack on Saigon were evident elsewhere, as well.

Plans for the attack on My Tho, for example, called for an initial artillery and mortar salvo of between one thousand and two thousand rounds, but the necessary shells never turned up. In the end, just thirty-six were actually fired. Sappers led four battalions—some two thousand NLF soldiers—into town, intent on seizing the headquarters of the Seventh ARVN Division. One American who was quartered in the city never forgot waking up and watching from his bedroom window as they streamed along the street below. “I’ve seen a lot of scrawny little Viet Cong prisoners and corpses,” he said, “but that night the Viet Cong outside my window looked seven feet tall.”

They quickly shrank to size. The guides meant to take them to their target got lost. ARVN tanks drove many back toward the edge of town. Gunfire drowned out the voices of the propaganda squads with megaphones calling upon the citizenry to rise up. U.S. Navy SEALS with sniper rifles picked off enemy soldiers from the third floor of their barracks. “I think it’s great,” one said to another. “All our trips into the jungle, and now they are coming to us.” Boats from the Mobile Riverine Force ferried in American infantry. “Pockets of enemy resistance had to be wiped out to prevent the Viet Cong from closing in behind the allied troops,” one commander recalled. To do that, airpower and artillery were called in.

Twisted steel, all that remains of a market building in Ben Tre after some fifty hours of allied bombing and artillery. “It is always a pity about the civilians,” an Air Force major who’d taken part in the assault told a reporter. They “don’t know where the lines are…don’t know where to hide, and some of the weapons we were using were area weapons.” But “there could have been many more dead,” he said. When he’d been ordered to napalm “a thousand Viet Cong” said to be retreating from the city, he flew down low enough to see that they were not soldiers but terrified women and children and called off the attack. “I think I saved hundreds of civilians,” he said.

The ARVN Artillery Battalion based outside the city to which Lieutenant Tobias Wolff was attached kept firing around the clock. “The process by which we helped lay waste to My Tho seemed not of our making and at all times necessary and right,” he recalled. “As the ARVN battalions in town came under more and more pressure we began to drop shells on the buildings around them. We bombarded the old square surrounding [the ARVN division commander’s] headquarters where he and the province chief were holed up with their staff officers. There were pockets of terrified government officialdom and soldiery huddled throughout the town, and every time one of them got through to us on the radio we put our fire right where we wanted it, no questions asked. We knocked down bridges and sank boats. We leveled shops and bars along the river. We pulverized hotels and houses, floor by floor, street by street, block by block. I saw the map. I knew where the shells were going, but I didn’t think of our targets as homes where exhausted and frightened people were praying for their lives. When you’re afraid, you will kill anything that might kill you. Now that the enemy had the town, the town was the enemy.”

U.S. Phantom fighter bombers screamed in over the burning city, strafing and bombing the already damaged buildings. A third of My Tho was destroyed, and half the populace was rendered homeless. “The place was still smoldering two weeks later,” Wolff recalled, “still reeking sweetly of corpses. The corpses were everywhere, lying in the streets, floating in the reservoir, buried and half-buried in collapsed buildings, grinning, blackened, fat with gas, limbs missing or oddly bent. Some headless, some burned almost to the bone, the smell so thick and foul we had to wear surgical masks scented with cologne, aftershave, deodorant, whatever we had, simply to move through town.” A taxi driver who had burned to death inside his charred vehicle was still behind the wheel; someone had put dark glasses on him and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.

Still more destruction was done to the nearby city of Ben Tre. There, Americans, outnumbered by an NLF regiment, called in massive air and artillery firepower to dislodge it. Forty-five percent of the dwellings were destroyed. Afterward, a reporter quoted an American major as having said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

“A lot of people knew that the country could never be won, only destroyed,” the journalist Michael Herr wrote. “After Tet, 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.”

John Paul Vann, now back in Vietnam as commander of all civilian and military advisers in the Third Corps Tactical Zone, warned that civilian resentment of the inadvertent damage both U.S. and ARVN forces were doing was growing at an alarming rate. “Unless stopped,” he said, “the destruction is going to exceed our capability for recovery and battles we win may add up to losing the war.”

It took ten days to subdue Saigon. A twenty-four-hour curfew was imposed. (An exception was made for coffin makers, whose hammers and saws could be heard around the clock as they rushed to fill the steadily growing demand.) Eventually, surviving NLF fighters were cornered in and around a racetrack in Cholon, the western neighborhood populated largely by poor Chinese. Residents were ordered from their homes, creating a free-fire zone, so that the last remaining guerrillas could be blasted from their hiding places. Much of the area was burned or blown apart, but the threat was finally lifted.

AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT KIND OF FIGHT

THE LONGEST, BLOODIEST BATTLE of the Tet Offensive was fought in the streets of one of the country’s loveliest cities, Hue, Vietnam’s onetime imperial capital and still a center of Vietnamese culture and intellectual life.

On the outskirts of Hue, a commander entrusts an NLF flag to a Main Force unit the day before the attack on the city is to begin. This flag, or one just like it, would soon fly above the old walled city, called the Citadel.

For months, just outside the city, nineteen-year-old Nguyen Thi Hoa and the four young women in her village NLF cell had been putting aside rice and salt for what she was told was only “something big being planned.” Then, two weeks before Tet, she and her friends were asked to guide Main Force fighters disguised as ordinary citizens to rendezvous points within the city. “It was very compartmentalized,” she remembered, “so we still didn’t know what the plan was. For those two weeks they were supposed to avoid enemy forces and not engage.” On the eve of Tet, with NLF fighters already in place, North Vietnamese units appeared, in uniform and armed far more heavily.

Colonel Ho Huu Lan, fresh from months spent fighting the U.S. Marines south of the DMZ, remembered that he and his men “had had to move fast in order to arrive at Hue by the 30th of January. We marched at what we called the ‘magic speed,’ and it took us only ten days. When we were going through the jungles, the local soldiers had cut trails for us and at night local fighters lit the way.”

Nguyen Thi Hoa was one of those who guided them toward their objective. “Everywhere we went,” she remembered, “people brought Tet food out to them, sweet cakes and rice cakes. But our troops did not have time to stop and eat. So they were eating while walking, one hand holding their weapons. They were very excited. We were even more excited.”

The city they were about to try to seize was divided in two by the Perfume River. The south side was occupied by the bustling New City, site of the local MACV headquarters. Across the river was the Old City, or Citadel, where two-thirds of the city’s people lived. Surrounded by water on all sides—by the river as well as a moat ninety feet wide and twelve feet deep—with walls forty feet thick, thirty feet feet tall, and more than a mile and a half in length, it was large enough to contain a maze of narrow streets, shops, residences, pagodas, parks, an airstrip, the headquarters of the First ARVN Division, and the walled Imperial Palace, from which the Nguyen dynasty once ruled.

Hue, split by the Perfume River between the Citadel and the New City

At 3:40 in the morning on January 31, First Lieutenant Tran Ngoc Hue—Harry Hue to his American advisers—was asleep at his home just inside the western wall of the Citadel when the sound of explosions woke him. As a boy, he had witnessed firsthand the cruelty of the French and the Viet Minh and, like his father before him, had enlisted in the South Vietnamese army, convinced that both colonialism and communism were alien to his homeland. Trained at the Dalat Military Academy, he had risen quickly to command the Hac Bo, or “Black Panther,” company, the elite all-volunteer reaction force of the First ARVN Division. At first, he thought the sounds he’d heard were fireworks, but as they grew louder and more insistent, he realized they were rockets and mortar shells.

He dressed quickly and set out on a bicycle for the airstrip. Hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers were already moving through the dark streets. One entire battalion was fanning out to occupy the residential area of the walled city; a second was supposed to overrun the airstrip and then seize the compound housing the ARVN headquarters in the Citadel’s northeastern corner. Hue, like all the men in his company, was a son of the city and fiercely protective of his hometown. As he pedaled, he recalled, “there were VC running all around me. I’d watch them go down one street and I would head the other way. I knew where I was going. They didn’t.”

He found his men already engaged with the enemy at the airstrip, took charge there, and, grabbing a light anti-tank weapon (LAW), fired a rocket into a dozen enemy soldiers, killing three and scattering the rest. Together, he and his unit and an ordnance company then held their ground until word reached him that the ARVN division commander, Brigadier General Ngo Quang Truong, wanted them to withdraw to the headquarters compound. Half of Truong’s troops were on leave; most of the rest were stationed outside the city. He needed help. Hue rallied his men. “The enemy has pushed us into a corner!” he shouted over the sounds of battle. “We must fight for our own survival, for the survival of our families, the survival of Hue City, and the survival of our fatherland! Will you fight with me?”

He finished by shouting, “Hac Bao!” His men shouted it back at him and fell in as he raced toward the compound. When they got there, Hue remembered, “I…saw that the enemy had set up three machine guns overlooking the gate to support an attack. I brought up some LAWs, and we blew away the machine guns. Then we threw down a smokescreen and dashed into the compound. We were very lucky.” “Harry Hue was bigger than life in the field,” his American adviser remembered, and “utterly fearless.” Had he not taken charge at the airstrip and then rallied his men to defend the compound, it might well have fallen—and with it the entire Citadel.

At roughly the same time the communists were attacking the walled city on the river’s north bank, they rained rocket and mortar shells on the MACV compound on the south side. Behind its six-foot walls were a two-story, twenty-room hotel annex, a dispensary, a chapel, a barbershop, an officer’s club, and canvas tents, housing some two hundred U.S. advisers and Australian warrant officers. “It was a typical rear-echelon billet, heavy on the steaks and shrimp and light on the heavy weapons,” one resident remembered. “The occupants were advisers and support personnel, not killers.”

The barrage eventually ended, but due to apparent confusion among the sappers waiting to attack, five minutes ticked by, time enough for the men inside to gather up their weapons and prepare to fight. They beat back two assaults. North Vietnamese troops took up positions in the surrounding buildings and prepared to wait the allies out.

By eight in the morning, only the ARVN headquarters within the Citadel and the MACV compound on the south side of the river remained in allied hands, and both were under siege, while a vast gold-starred, blue-and-red NLF flag flew above the Imperial Palace, a sign that unlike any other South Vietnamese city, Hue had actually fallen to the enemy. As if to prove it, NLF political officers with megaphones accompanied by armed guards moved through the streets of the Citadel reading out from pre-prepared lists the names of those they considered enemies of the revolution. Those named—denounced as “surviving functionaries of the puppet administration and officers and men of the puppet army who were skulking”—were ordered to report to a certain school. Many would never be seen again.

The Americans in the MACV compound radioed for help. With so many reports of so many attacks in so many places flooding in at once that morning, and unaware that the equivalent of an enemy division was now occupying Hue, the base commander at the First Marine Division Forward Headquarters at Phu Bai dispatched a single undermanned company to reinforce the men holding the MACV compound—A Company, First Battalion, First Marines, First Marine Division—Bill Ehrhart’s company.

Ehrhart was at the end of his tour and could have stayed back, but he chose to go. “Won’t be nothing to do around here with everybody else gone,” he explained to his gunnery sergeant. “I’ll go nuts sitting around here all alone.”

“We loaded into the trucks,” he wrote, “and rumbled into the darkness up Highway One toward Hué, eight miles north.” Highway One was the old colonial highway that ran from Saigon all the way north to close to the Chinese border. During the French war, the stretch near Hue was called “the Street Without Joy” because so many convoys had been ambushed there. It was about to live up to its reputation once again.

The Marines, joined by four tanks, rolled past half a dozen abandoned ARVN tanks stopped earlier that morning by enemy fire as they had tried and failed to blast their way to the embattled force trapped within the Citadel.

“Less than an hour after we had awakened,” Ehrhart wrote, “with dawn just breaking, the convoy entered the south side of the city, the silhouettes of two- and three-story buildings visible ahead of us. We passed a Shell gasoline station. And then all hell broke loose.”

Enemy soldiers dug in close by on either side of the road behind walls and inside buildings and on rooftops, let loose a withering fusillade that struck against the sleepy convoy with the force of a sledgehammer crushing a cockroach: automatic weapons, small-arms, rockets, recoilless rifles, mortars, grenades. Everything. All at once. Men began to topple over in the trucks….Marines scrambled pell-mell out of the trucks, diving wildly for anything that offered cover….I lay in a ditch, pushing the barrel of my rifle up over the…top and firing wildly, not daring to look for a target, only trying to make somebody duck out there.”

A second company was sent to relieve them, armed with two self-propelled twin 40mm guns. Together, they fought their way out of the ambush and along the street to the besieged compound. Ten Marines died getting there, and thirty more were wounded. “I could never imagine there could be so many NVA in the whole world,” Ehrhart recalled. “And they had to be NVA. The Viet Cong never had anything like this: the recoilless rifles, the heavy machine guns; not in these numbers. The mythical NVA were real, and they were all in Hue City, and they were all trying to kill me.”

Marine headquarters still had no idea of the odds they faced. Some of the exhausted men were ordered to keep going, to cross the Perfume River and break through to the ARVN compound. Their commander warned that he had too few men. He was ordered to “go anyway.” He tried. As his men stepped onto the Nguyen Hoang Bridge, a machine gun at the other end opened up. Ten men fell. Lance Corporal Lester A. Tully made it across and hurled a grenade that knocked out the machine gun. (He would be awarded a Silver Star.) Two platoons followed him but came under withering fire from what their commander remembered as “virtually every building in Hue City” north of the river. He had no alternative but to pull back across the river. Forty-nine men had been lost. Nothing had been gained.

Marines take up positions inside a house on the south side of the Perfume River. It would take five days of house-to-house combat to fight their way four blocks between the MACV advisers’ compound and the municipal hospital. “In each garden,” an eyewitness recalled, “from street to street, everywhere—manholes, walls, or anything that was somewhat a good place to hide—contained soldiers.”

As the scale of the struggle grew clearer, reinforcements began to arrive. The ARVN were to clear the Citadel while the Marines drove the enemy from the New City. “I could feel a knot developing in my stomach,” one Marine captain remembered as his unit entered the battle. “Not so much from fear—though a hell of a lot of fear was there—but because we were new to this type of situation. We were accustomed to jungles and open rice fields, and now we would be fighting like it was Europe during World War II. One of the beautiful things about the Marines is that they adapt quickly, but we were going to take a number of casualties learning some basic lessons in this experience.”

“It was ugly, ugly fighting,” Ehrhart remembered. “But it was exhilarating. I was scared utterly witless—but it was the greatest adrenaline high I’d ever experienced: to have real armed targets to shoot at; to be able to say, ‘We’re going to go over there and take that house away from them,’ and then proceed to do it—and to stay there and hold it. Instead of turning around immediately and going back where you came from; at last, to be able to fight back!”

Slowly, the Marines—now reinforced by several more companies—pushed farther and farther out from the MACV compound. Small squads moved from house to house. They blew holes through walls with rocket launchers or recoilless rifles, then sent in fire teams to clear the structure room by room, firing M16s and lobbing grenades.

Marines peer into what’s left of the nineteenth-century Citadel. On February 10, with the south side of the river more or less secure, they’d been ordered to cross the river and go to the aid of the ARVN forces fighting to regain the Old City.

On the sixth day, Ehrhart was in a second-floor bedroom of a former official’s residence when an enemy B-40 rocket hit within a few feet of him. “I was utterly stone deaf,” he recalled. “Under any other circumstances I would have been evacuated. But I could see, I could walk, and I could shoot. So I stayed.”

The fighting continued. Civilians, driven from their homes by one side or the other, sought sanctuary wherever they could find it. Hundreds made their way to the campus of the University of Hue, filling its dormitories and classrooms, stairwells and hallways with frightened men, women, and children. “They had all gone there to get the hell away from having grenades thrown into their living rooms,” Ehrhart remembered. “And one of the guys comes in and says, ‘I found this girl who will fuck us all for C rations.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Wait, we’re in the middle of this big battle.’ But I’m nineteen years old and my buddies are going to. And once again I demonstrated to myself how little courage I actually had. I’ve lived with it ever since, but I did it because I wasn’t going to say, ‘You guys, we shouldn’t do something like this.’ Even more than the killings, it’s the thing I think I’m most ashamed of when I think back on the time I spent in Vietnam. I think it’s because my mother’s a woman, my wife’s a woman, my daughter’s a woman. Somebody gets shot? Not a good thing. You see somebody running away? It could’ve been a VC. But that woman? Nah. I had every opportunity to say no.”

The next day, in the midst of still another firefight, a lieutenant in a jeep pulled up in front of the building from which Ehrhart and five fellow Marines were firing at the enemy. “Come on, Ehrhart!” he shouted. “Chopper’s on the LZ right now. You want to go home or not?” From the helicopter that lifted him up and away from the ruined, smoking city he could see a farmer and his water buffalo working a flooded field and women in conical hats carrying twin baskets hurrying along between the paddies as if there were no war.

Back in Hue, the fighting went on. When the Marines had finally cleared the south side of the river, they turned their attention to the Citadel. By then, John Laurence noted,

the Americans and North Vietnamese were like two exhausted boxers in the final round of an ugly fight that had already been decided, trying to hang on long enough to get in a few last shots without getting killed, waiting without hope for someone to stop it. Each day the Marines advanced a few more meters across the burned ground, and each day the two sides sent back another load of battle dead….And yet after twenty days, the Marines in Hue seemed to have adjusted to the noise and smoke and death. To most of them, it had become normal, a background to the blighted landscape. When shells came, some of them no longer bothered to duck.

The weather added to the grimness. “The days were cold and dark,” Laurence continued.

Monsoon rain fell on the city in a slow drizzle that kept everything but the barrels of the guns cool and wet. Fog crept in and cast a blanket of mist across the blasted houses, broken walls, and fractured trees of no-man’s-land. Low clouds cut the light and trapped the lingering smoke from burning rubble and campfires. The Citadel was enveloped in a wet gloom that gathered early and haunted the morning like the memory of a bad dream.

From the roof of the ARVN headquarters, Army Captain George W. Smith watched the relentless allied bombardment of enemy positions within the Citadel: “It was almost like watching a thunderstorm. I could see the explosions a split second before I heard the rumble. Chunks of mortar flew a hundred feet in the air after the delay fuses exploded and then fell to earth in all directions. Training my binoculars to the east, I could see the lightning flashes of the naval guns of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. The naval shells sounded like freight trains roaring past a crossing on some midwestern plain….It was later reported that the U.S. Navy had fired over 4,700 shells into Hue and surrounding areas….When the naval guns were not firing, the heavily loaded Skyraiders and jets roared in with high-explosive bombs, napalm, and tear gas. It was hard to imagine anyone surviving this continuous bombardment—but the enemy soldiers did. In fact, some of them popped out of their holes to fire rounds at the departing planes in a show of defiance,…a glowing testament not only to the enemy’s fortitude and resilience but to the builders of this nineteenth-century fortress as well.”

After twenty-six days of combat, the South Vietnamese flag again flies above a battered Citadel gate.

Harry Hue and his Hac Bao company seemed everywhere at once. They hurled back repeated assaults on ARVN headquarters, escorted the first South Vietnamese relief force into the Citadel, and led a successful fight to retake the airstrip, flew from place to place plugging gaps in the defense perimeter, and broke the encirclement of two different South Vietnamese units. On February 22, Hue and his men were given the honor of retaking the palace compound. “It was an emotional moment,” he recalled. “There were a lot of enemy bodies lying around…but there were no enemy soldiers.” A few months later, Harry Hue—now a captain—would be awarded first the Bronze Star and then the Silver Star, the highest award for valor that can be bestowed by the United States on an allied soldier.

Finally, on March 2, with the flag of South Vietnam once again flying above the Imperial Palace, the fight for Hue was officially declared at an end. Two hundred and twenty-one Americans had died and another 1,364 had been badly enough wounded to be medevaced from the battlefield. The ARVN had lost 384 dead and another 1,800 wounded—and 30 more were listed as missing in action. The allies estimated that 5,000 enemy troops had been killed fighting within the city and another 3,000 in the surrounding countryside.

The surviving North Vietnamese and local NLF fighters had finally been permitted by their commanders to withdraw from the city and return to their hidden jungle bases. Nguyen Thi Hoa, the young woman who had acted as a spy and guide for North Vietnamese troops before the battle, retreated with them. She had initially been occupied with carrying the wounded away from the battlefield, but as the fighting went on she had found herself and her comrades fully engaged. “When the Americans charged, if we didn’t shoot them, surely, they would shoot us,” she recalled. “So I had to shoot first. When I found them, I shot them. An American, not that far away, about ten feet, opened fire. So I raised my AK. I aimed. And I dropped him.” She hadn’t wanted to leave the area. “We wanted to stay in our villages,” she remembered, “but we had to follow orders. The retreat was terrible.” Fighter planes strafed them. Navy shells rained down on the road. “We had to hide during the day. We withdrew a bit, then hid, then continued to withdraw.” When they finally reached their forest sanctuaries, food was scarce: “A very small bowl of rice once a day with tree ferns and weeds foraged from the forest. ‘If you just want to follow a happy road,’ we used to say, ‘you shouldn’t be a revolutionary.’ ”

After the battle, the people of Hue stream back through the Citadel’s pulverized south wall to pick up the pieces of their lives. “Hue has nothing now, nothing,” a medical student said. “It is not only the loss of our buildings and monuments, it is the loss of our spirit. It is gone.”

In the city they had left behind, some 6,000 civilians had died. Of the city’s 135,000 residents, 110,000 were homeless, and stood by helplessly as ARVN troops—and a scattering of Americans—systematically looted the abandoned buildings. “All remnants of shops were emptied,” a Dutch resident of the city remembered. Looters were everywhere, “dragging bags of rice, furniture, tables, chairs, and an ancestral altar, clothing, radio sets, anything that could be carried….Two-and-a-half-ton army trucks were parked in front of the ruined houses, warehouses, and stores, and quickly loaded with rice, furniture, refrigerators, desks, motor scooters, bicycles, anything at all.”

In the end, little was left of Hue, one reporter wrote, except “ruins, divided by a river.”

A SMEAR AGAINST THE REVOLUTION

Second Lieutenant Phil Gioia (foreground) and men from his platoon

In early March, two weeks after Hue had finally been recaptured, Second Lieutenant Phil Gioia of the 82nd Airborne Division was leading his platoon along the sandy bank of the Perfume River on the outskirts of the ruined city, looking for caches of weapons that might have been buried by the enemy before the battle began.

Gioia’s sergeant, Reuben Torres, saw something sticking up from the ground. He thought it was a root. It turned out to be an elbow. The Americans got out their entrenching tools and began to dig. The smell quickly became unbearable, even when the men put on protective masks. Some men vomited.

At first, Gioia and his squad assumed they’d found a spot where the retreating enemy had buried their dead comrades. “But when we found the first body, it was a woman,” he recalled. “She was wearing a white blouse and black trousers. She had her hands tied behind her back. She’d been shot in the back of the head. Next to her was a child, who’d also been shot. The next person to come up was another woman. At that point it was clear that this wasn’t the enemy.” Gioia’s men uncovered 123 bodies in two shallow ditches, men, women, and children. Some, their mouths filled with sand, appeared to have been buried alive.

Over the months that followed the battle other mass graves around the city would yield other bodies—at least 2,800 of them—including Catholic priests and Buddhist monks, civilian volunteers from Canada, the Philippines, and the United States, schoolteachers, and South Vietnamese government and military officials, their wives, and their children.

Hanoi would always deny that innocent civilians had been killed at Hue. And it became almost an article of faith among some antiwar protestors that the killings at Hue had either never taken place at all, had been fabricated to serve Saigon’s propaganda purposes, or had simply been the spontaneous acts of a few retreating soldiers bent on vengeance.

But evidence subsequently showed that many of these deaths had been systematic rather than spontaneous. In the first hours of the communist occupation of the city, NLF cadre went from house to house with carefully prepared lists of names of “blood debtors”—men and women opposed to the revolution and therefore deserving of revenge. Many were tried before hastily assembled “people’s courts” that meted out on-the-spot punishments ranging from ostracism to execution. Some were shot publicly to serve as object lessons; others were led away and killed just out of sight. Still others were murdered late in the battle, because NLF fighters feared if they were allowed to live they would betray their captors once Saigon was back in charge. “When our forces withdrew from Hue, if they’d released the people they’d arrested, their former prisoners would have denounced the revolutionaries,” the soldier and historian Nguyen Ngoc remembered. “I don’t know whether the order to kill them came from the local commanders or higher up. But they killed the people they’d arrested. Some had worked for the South Vietnamese government or for the Americans, but there were people who were wrongly arrested, too, maybe because of some personal grievance, and they were all killed. This is a smear against the revolution, a stain on the revolution’s record.”

Garbed in mourning white, widows grieve at a mass reburial of some of those executed by the communists at Hue.

MIRED IN STALEMATE

IN THE MIDST OF THE FIGHTING in Hue, some marines had looked up to see an unexpected visitor: Walter Cronkite, the anchor of the CBS Evening News and the most trusted newsman on television, wearing a helmet and flak jacket and carrying a notepad, picking his way among the ruined buildings, interviewing infantrymen and officers, trying to understand what was happening.

Cronkite was no stranger to war. During World War II he had landed with the first U.S. troops in North Africa and Normandy, parachuted into Holland, flown in B-17 bombers over Berlin, and covered the Battle of the Bulge. (The fighting in Hue reminded him of the fight for Bastogne, he said.) He had first visited Vietnam in 1965, shortly after the first Marines landed there, and came back applauding the men who had sent them. Theirs had been “a courageous decision,” he said. “The communist advance must be stopped in Asia and…guerrilla war as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged.” What impressed him most was the notion of simultaneously waging a war and building a nation, something no one had ever dared try before.

Nine million Americans tuned in to hear him every evening, in part because of his reputation for scrupulous objectivity; his personal opinions, he often said, had no place on the Evening News. He had loyally backed Morley Safer when he came under attack for his early report showing Marines burning a village, and he was unflinching in his willingness to include in his nightly news reports combat footage of a kind rarely seen by the general public during World War II. “In a war situation every American ought to suffer as much as the guy on the front lines,” he believed. “We ought to see this. We ought to be forced to see it.” But, as another veteran CBS newsman recalled, Cronkite remained one of the “World War II guys” who thought it “unseemly to not be 100 percent behind the troops,” and he had been summoned to the White House three times so that President Johnson and other officials could assure him that steady progress was being made. “They kept telling me there was light at the end of the tunnel,” he remembered.

Tet changed everything. “What the hell is going on?” Cronkite had asked when the first reports came in. “I thought we were winning the war.” Eleven days after the offensive began, he and a CBS crew landed in Saigon to see for themselves.

General Westmoreland assured him that the communists had suffered a great defeat; even in Hue, he claimed, the enemy was on the run. The next day, Cronkite set out to see for himself. He and his crew tried first to go to Khe Sanh but were turned away; it was thought too dangerous. Instead, they joined a convoy of trucks headed for Hue. There, it quickly became clear that Westmoreland had misled him. No one was on the run. The Marines were still fighting house to house; incoming artillery shook the building in which he and other reporters lay curled up on the floor trying to snatch a few minutes’ sleep. When Cronkite and his companions left for their next stop they shared their chopper with a dozen dead Marines in body bags.

Before returning to Saigon, Cronkite spent an evening at the Phu Bai combat base with General Abrams, Westmoreland’s deputy commander and an old acquaintance from the war in Europe. Abrams was “remarkably candid” about the shock the offensive had been and the damage it had done, Cronkite recalled, but when the general and his staff began to discuss what to do next he was appalled: “It was a highly and brutally technical discussion of firepower and kill ratios and the like. How, in effect, we could kill more Vietnamese.” “It was sickening to me,” Cronkite remembered. “They were talking strategy and tactics with no consideration of the bigger job of pacifying and restoring the country. This had come to be total war, not a counterinsurgency. The ideas I had talked about in 1965 were gone.”

Back in Saigon and about to fly home, he dined on the roof of the ten-story Caravelle Hotel with three CBS correspondents who’d been covering the war—Peter Kalischer, Robert Schakne, and John Laurence. Again, he’d been told Saigon was secure, though four of its nine districts were still officially considered “red”—unsafe and off-limits—and he could see black smoke rising from the burning docks downriver and helicopter gunships pouring fire into areas on the city’s outskirts said still to be harboring the NLF. He kept asking how it could have happened. MACV had told him Tet had been an American and South Vietnamese victory because so many enemy soldiers had been killed. “I acknowledged the huge numbers of deaths,” John Laurence said, “but pointed out that the northerners would replace their losses and come back at us again. And again, and again. And the sooner we realized the fact that we were not going to win this fucking war, the better for everyone, especially the Vietnamese and the Americans who were being butchered by the thousands. For no good purpose.” On the way to the airport, Cronkite’s driver had to take a circuitous route to avoid enemy mortar fire.

At ten o’clock on the evening of February 27, Eastern Standard Time, twenty million Americans tuned in to watch an hour-long Cronkite special, “Report from Vietnam.” At its end, he did something he’d never done before: he stepped forward to express his own views on the Vietnam War and America’s role in it. He was careful to say that his remarks were “speculative, personal, subjective.” “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi’s winter-spring offensive has been forced by the communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that—negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

Walter Cronkite (with microphone) and a CBS camera crew interview Lieutenant Colonel Marcus J. Gravel, commander of the First Battalion, First Marines during the battle of Hue. “I was assured by our leaders back in Saigon that we had the enemy just where we wanted him,” Cronkite remembered. “Tell that to the Marines, I thought.”

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.”

President Johnson was traveling that evening and unable to watch the report. The well-worn story that he said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country,” or some variant of it, is probably apocryphal. But George Christian, the president’s press secretary, remembered that “shock waves rolled through the government,” nonetheless.

I SHALL NOT SEEK, AND WILL NOT ACCEPT

THE INITIAL IMPACT of the Tet Offensive on American opinion was mixed. Neither Walter Cronkite’s public doubts about the war, nor night after night of grisly combat footage on the evening news, nor the widely reproduced image of the commander of South Vietnam’s National Police executing a bound prisoner in the street initially appeared to damage American support. Just before Tet, according to George Gallup, 45 percent of his respondents believed U.S. entry into the war had been a “mistake”; immediately afterward, that number remained unchanged. More Americans still saw themselves as “hawks” than “doves”; support for continued bombing actually rose from 71 to 78 percent, while the numbers favoring a bombing halt fell from 26 to 15 percent.

Most Americans did not yet want to give up on a war in which American boys were so heavily engaged, but Tet did badly shake their faith in how the president was waging that war. Disapproval of his handling of it rose from 47 to 63 percent in February, and would rise still further in March.

The administration continued to insist that the Tet Offensive had been “a devastating defeat for the communists.” The basic assumptions on which the North Vietnamese mounted their offensive had been proved wrong, after all. Hanoi’s leaders had assumed that the ARVN would crumble, that South Vietnamese soldiers would come over to their side. Instead, not a single unit defected. The civilian populace Hanoi had expected to rise up may have been dissatisfied with their government, but they had little sympathy for communism, and when the fighting began, most people simply hid in their homes to escape the fury in the streets.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, who had opposed the offensive and did not return from Hungary to resume his post as supreme commander of the armed forces and minister of defense until it was well under way, later admitted that it had been a “costly lesson, paid for in blood and bone.” “Giap wasn’t the only one to see that the Tet Offensive was a defeat,” the journalist Huy Duc said. “Many members of the General Staff, and certainly the generals who commanded troops in the field, shared General Giap’s point of view because they had suffered unimaginable losses. Several very high-ranking officers of the People’s Army surrendered. That had never happened before. No units emerged intact. Some companies existed only on paper, because they had just a couple of soldiers still alive.”

Of the 84,000 NLF and North Vietnamese troops who are estimated to have taken part in the Tet Offensive, more than half are thought to have been killed, wounded, or captured, perhaps 20 percent of the total communist forces then stationed or living in the South. Nguyen Van Tong, the political officer who had helped win the NLF Main Force victory at Binh Gia, watched in sorrow during Tet as his comrades tried and failed to take an army training center in Saigon; he remembered that his Ninth Division “lost over three thousand soldiers killed, and around eight or nine thousand soldiers wounded. Up to 1968 we had only southerners. However, after the first phase of Tet, we had to ask for replacements from the North.”

“The American military command celebrated the Tet Offensive as a victory,” John Laurence remembered. “They said, ‘They finally came at us, and we blew them away.’ Which was basically true. But the administration had been telling the American public for months that the war was being won; that the NLF and the North Vietnamese were ground down to such an extent that we could see the end of the war—a victory. So when Tet hit, it contradicted everything that the administration and the Saigon country team had been telling the American public.”

“Despite their retrospective claims to the contrary, the reaction of our most senior military leaders approached panic,” Clark Clifford remembered. General Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff, admitted that “we suffered a loss, there can be no doubt about it.” Robert Komer reported that pacification had been drastically undercut: “In terms of hamlets, we lost 38 percent of our pre-Tet holdings”; just 4,500 of South Vietnam’s 12,500 hamlets were now “secure”; nearly 3 million South Vietnamese were no longer even nominally loyal to Saigon. General Westmoreland’s hope that the ARVN would soon be able to take over the bulk of the fighting had been dashed. South Vietnamese troops had generally performed well in meeting the Tet attacks, but the desertion rate was high, they had lost more than nine thousand men, and the average battalion strength was just 50 percent. It would take at least six months to get them back into the shape they’d been in before Tet.

“Well,” the president complained to his advisers, “it looks as if you all have counseled, advised, consulted, and then—as usual—placed the monkey on my back again. I don’t like what I am smelling from those cables from Vietnam.” At a February 8 meeting that included the Joint Chiefs, he wanted to know how the United States was going to deal with further attacks. (The chiefs’ initial suggestion had been stepped-up airstrikes on new targets around Hanoi and Haiphong, even though month after month of bombing had obviously had little effect on the enemy’s ability to mount an offensive in the South.) Johnson wanted to be sure Westmoreland had all the men he needed, and wondered if he should call up the Army Reserve and even ask Congress for a declaration of war.

Johnson’s apparent willingness to consider taking unprecedented action spurred Joint Chiefs Chairman Wheeler into action. Since 1965, he and the other chiefs had pushed for a wider war—more frequent and less-restricted airstrikes on the North, incursions into Laos and Cambodia to destroy enemy sanctuaries and cut off reinforcements and resupply, even a possible landing in North Vietnam itself. Beyond that, Wheeler believed that U.S. forces overseas were stretched too thin to deal simultaneously with potential crises in Korea or Berlin or elsewhere. Up to now, their repeated efforts to persuade the president to replenish them by calling up the strategic reserve had failed. But now, if Westmoreland were to request enough more troops, Wheeler thought, he might be able to force Johnson’s hand.

Westmoreland fell in line, sending a cable to Wheeler whose tone seemed almost diametrically opposed to all the optimism he’d expressed immediately after Tet. Whereas he’d claimed then that the offensive was merely a “diversion” and a “last gasp,” that he had matters “well in hand,” he now said that since the enemy “had launched a major campaign signaling a change of strategy of protracted war to one of quick military/political victory during the American election year…we are in a new ballgame where we face a determined, highly disciplined enemy, fully mobilized to achieve a quick victory. He is in the process of throwing in all his military chips to ‘go for broke.’ We cannot permit this. I need reinforcements of combat elements. Time is of the essence. A setback is fully possible.”

To meet the emergency, the president agreed to send 10,500 men right away, but still balked at calling up the reserve.

Wheeler flew to Saigon. The report he submitted on his return only added to the sense of crisis. It now turned out that the enemy offensive had been a “near thing.” Nor was there any reason to believe it had “run its course.” The enemy’s determination appeared to be “unshaken.” By contrast, South Vietnam’s government, suffering from low morale and the demands of a flood of new refugees, was incapable of meeting fresh attacks. “In many areas pacification is at a halt. The Vietcong are prowling the countryside and it is now a question of which side moves fastest to gain control. The outcome is not at all clear. I visualize much heavy fighting ahead….General Westmoreland does not have theater reserve.”

For all those reasons, he was now requesting 205,000 fresh troops in three phases—108,000 by May 1, 42,000 by September 1, and 55,000 more by year’s end—plus an additional call-up of 280,000 reservists. (The second and third tranches would be used to rebuild the strategic reserve unless communist gains in Vietnam required their presence.)

The scale of the request astonished the administration, Clifford recalled, and the president “was as worried as I [had] ever seen him.” Johnson now faced a terrible dilemma: If he agreed to the generals’ request, he risked greatly expanding the Americanization of the conflict during an election year and at a time when the voters’ confidence in his handling of the war was already declining. But if he rejected it, he could be accused of going back on his pledge to provide everything his field commander asked for while the war would likely drag on as it had for the last three years with no victory in sight.

Using a specially prepared terrain map of the Khe Sanh area installed in the White House Situation Room, Walt Rostow explains the situation to President Johnson and Air Force General Robert N. Ginsburgh of the National Security Council staff. Even after the Tet Offensive, General Westmoreland continued to tell the commander in chief, “I still see the enemy position in Khe Sanh as the greatest threat.”

Exhausted, unsure what to do, and impatient with his generals, who seemed incapable of coming up with new ideas, the president asked Clifford to form a task force and begin what Dean Rusk would call an “A to Z Reassessment” of the war effort. “Give me the lesser of evils,” Johnson told Clifford. “Give me your recommendations.”

The president liked and trusted Clark Clifford. Washington’s best-known, best-paid corporate lawyer, he was courtly, persuasive, discreet, and hugely knowledgeable about how things were done in Washington. As counsel to Harry Truman, he’d helped persuade his chief to adopt George Kennan’s concept of containment of the Soviet Union, drafted the legislation that brought both the CIA and the Department of Defense into being, and helped engineer Truman’s come-from-behind victory in 1948. He’d supervised the presidential transition for John Kennedy, and chaired his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board after the Bay of Pigs. He was among the first people Johnson asked to see after Kennedy’s assassination, directed his election campaign in 1964, and had been offered the Defense Department because Johnson wanted someone at the Pentagon who could get along better with the military than Robert McNamara had. To be sure, in 1965 Clifford had warned the president that Vietnam “could be a quagmire,” and he had sided with George Ball in opposing General Westmoreland’s initial request for tens of thousands of troops that same year. (“If we lose fifty thousand men it will ruin us,” he’d told Johnson then; far better to “moderate our position” and seek a way out.) But once Johnson had committed to a ground war, he’d been a self-styled “full supporter of our policy,” convinced that the best way out of Vietnam was to continue to “hit them hard.”

That was about to change.

“Politely but firmly,” using his status as a supposedly naive newcomer, Clifford seized the opportunity to ask the military fundamental questions that hadn’t been asked since the ground war began to see if they could justify the troop request. In his view, they could not. Notes were not taken, but Clifford later reconstructed the gist of those conversations.

Will 205,000 more men do the job? They could give no assurance that they would.

If 205,000 might not be sufficient, how many more troops might be needed—and when? There was no way of his knowing.

Can the enemy respond with a buildup of its own? He could.

Can bombing stop the war? No. Bombing was inflicting heavy personnel and materiel losses, but by itself it would not stop the war.

Will stepping up the bombing decrease American casualties? Very little, if at all. Our casualties are a result of the intensity of the ground fighting in the South.

How long must we keep on sending our men and carrying the main burden of combat? We do not know when, if ever, the South Vietnamese will be ready to carry the main burden of the war.

Clark Clifford, Dean Rusk, and Lyndon Johnson confer in the Oval Office, March 26, 1968. Clifford, not yet installed at the Department of Defense, was already growing skeptical about the possibility of victory in Vietnam. “How do we gain support for major programs if we have told people things are going well?” he asked. “How do we avoid creating the feeling that we are pounding troops down a rathole? What is our purpose? What is achievable?”

This exchange and many others like it disturbed me greatly. The military was unable to provide an acceptable rationale for the troops increase. Moreover, when I asked for a presentation of their plan for attaining victory, I was told there was no plan for victory in the historic American sense. Although I kept my feelings private, I was appalled: nothing had prepared me for the weakness of the military’s case.

The Clifford task force’s report to the president, delivered on March 4, recommended that he send Westmoreland an additional 22,000 troops on an emergency basis and urged him to approve a call-up of 262,000 men to replenish the strategic reserve. But it also suggested that a final decision about the full request be delayed until the completion of a “complete review of our political and strategic options in Vietnam.”

Clifford told the president that the new request had brought him to a “watershed.” “Do you continue down the same road of more troops, more guns, more planes, more ships?” he asked Johnson. “Do you go on killing more Viet Cong and more North Vietnamese? There are grave doubts that we have made the type of progress we had hoped to have made by this time. As we build up our forces, they build up theirs. The result is simply that we are fighting now at a higher level of intensity….We seem to have gotten caught in a sinkhole. We put in more, they match it, put in more, they match it….I see more and more fighting with more and more casualties on the U.S. side, and no end in sight.” With a weak government in Saigon and a badly depleted ARVN force, there was “no reason to believe” that 205,000 more men—“or double or triple that quantity”—could drive the communists from South Vietnam.

On March 10, a front-page New York Times story by Hedrick Smith and Neil Sheehan headlined “Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men, Stirring Debate in Administration” laid the ongoing argument within the administration bare. Worse, from the administration’s point of view, were anonymous quotes from “high administration officials.” One said Vietnam was a “bottomless pit”; another confessed that Tet had shown him and his colleagues that “all we thought we had constructed was built on sand.”

That same day, a fresh Gallup poll revealed that 49 percent of Americans, more than ever before, now thought the United States should never have become ensnared in Vietnam; only a third believed progress was being made in the war, down from 50 percent during the public relations offensive of the previous fall.

More and more Americans were now asking if the United States had been winning the war—if Tet had been such a disaster for the enemy—why were still more men needed? Dean Rusk was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and grilled for eleven hours. “We are in the wrong place,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said, “and we are fighting the wrong kind of war.” Senator Frank Church of Idaho warned that the U.S. seemed “poised to plunge still deeper into Asia, where huge populations wait to engulf us and legions of Americans are being beckoned to their graves.” One hundred and thirty-nine members of Congress sponsored a resolution demanding a complete congressional review of U.S. policy in Vietnam. The editors of Newsweek declared that “the war cannot be won by military means without tearing apart the whole fabric of national and international relations….Accordingly, unless it is prepared to indulge in the ultimate, horrifying escalation—the use of nuclear weapons—…the U.S. must accept the fact that it will never be able to achieve decisive military superiority.” NBC anchor Frank McGee warned that “the enemy now has the initiative, he has dramatically enlarged the area of combat….[T]he war as the administration had defined it is being lost.”

On the evening of March 12, President Johnson watched the returns come in from the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, where he was facing an unexpected challenge from Eugene McCarthy. Johnson had dismissed his challenger as “the type of fellow who did little harm and damn little good…always more interested in producing a laugh than a law in the Senate.” And the most recent poll had suggested he would crush his upstart rival, two to one. But the president was not a declared candidate, so the president’s supporters had had to depend on a massive write-in campaign. They didn’t get it. Johnson won just 49.6 percent of the vote against 41.4 percent for his opponent. The result was generally reported as evidence of growing antiwar feeling—though many of those who had voted against the president actually wanted him to prosecute the war more vigorously.

Johnson tried to laugh it off. “The New Hampshire primary,” he said, “is the only race…where a candidate can claim 20 percent is a landslide and 40 percent is a mandate, and 60 percent is unanimous.” But he knew he was in trouble, and there was more to come.

Ever since he had inherited the presidency, Johnson had both feared and hated the late president’s brother, Robert, whom he privately called “a grandstanding little runt.” The feeling was mutual: Kennedy saw Johnson as a usurper, could not bear to call him “president,” considered him “mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” Kennedy had left Johnson’s cabinet in 1964 to run for the Senate from New York and had been distancing himself from the president’s Vietnam policy ever since. He accused Johnson of transforming his brother’s limited guerrilla war into an all-out one, called for peace negotiations even if they resulted in a “compromise government,” and denounced American bombing of the North.

Robert Kennedy on the campaign trail. Despite the huge exuberant crowds he drew, one of his advisers wrote, “[h]e always looked so alone…standing up by himself on the lid of the trunk of his convertible—so alone, so vulnerable, so fragile you feared he might break.”

The Tet Offensive had intensified Kennedy’s antiwar feelings. It had “finally shattered the mask of official illusion,” he said, because it had shown that “no part or person of South Vietnam was secure.” He confessed that he had himself once been one of those who had reported progress toward victory when none was really being made. But he was no longer able to pretend that it served the interest of the people of South Vietnam to devastate their country and wage war in their streets. Nor was it in the interest of the United States to conduct a war so cruel and so destructive as to cause “our oldest friends to ask, more in sorrow than in anger, what has happened to America?”

Antiwar friends and supporters had repeatedly urged Kennedy to challenge Johnson for the presidency and he had always turned them down, fearing that the cause was hopeless, that voters would simply think he was acting out of anti-Johnson pique, that he might fatally divide the Democratic Party. But accelerating events and McCarthy’s unexpected success changed his mind, and now, on March 16, just four days after the New Hampshire primary, Robert F. Kennedy declared his candidacy for the presidency

The next day, before a packed field house at Kansas State University, he made his case against the war. “Every night,” he said, “we watch horrors on the evening news. Violence spreads inexorably across the nation, filling our streets and crippling our lives.” The administration had no answer to the war—“none but the ever-expanding use of military force…in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything. Can we ordain to ourselves the awful majesty of God—to decide what cities and villages are to be destroyed, who will live and who will die, and who will join the refugees wandering in a desert of our creation?…In the next months we are going to decide what the country will stand for—and what kind of men we are.”

The audience of fifteen thousand exploded in applause. “The field-house sounded as though it was inside Niagara Falls,” one reporter wrote. “It was like a soundtrack gone haywire.” Polls would soon suggest that Kennedy was more popular than the president.

“It was the thing I feared from the first day of my presidency,” Johnson recalled. “Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. The whole situation was unbearable for me.”

His initial reaction to Kennedy’s announcement was to double down on Vietnam. The same day the senator launched his campaign in Kansas, the president appeared before the National Farmers Union in Minneapolis: “Your president has come to ask you people, and all the other people of this nation, to join us in a national effort to win the war….We will—make no mistake about it—win….We are not doing enough to win it the way we are doing it now.”

Clark Clifford was worried. With skepticism about the war growing steadily, speeches like that could lose the president the election. In a speech delivered at San Antonio the previous year, the president had expressed willingness to stop “all aerial and naval bombardment when this will lead promptly to productive discussions.” The Tet Offensive had seemed to signal that Hanoi was uninterested in talks. But it was suggested that now might be the time to test that notion again.

Dean Rusk agreed: “We could try stopping the bombing during the rainy season in the North. It would not cost us much militarily since our air sorties are way down at that time anyway.” He doubted the temporary halt would actually bring about talks, but at least it would make the United States seem less bellicose when the bombing began again.

Clifford took the suggestion much more seriously. He saw it as a possible way out of the war and urged a halt above the 20th parallel, hoping for reciprocal action by the enemy. When the president called him to talk about the upcoming election, he used the opportunity to make his case.

LYNDON JOHNSON: I think what we’ve got to do…is get out of the posture of just being the war candidate that McCarthy has put us in, and Bobby’s putting us in, the kids are putting us in, and the papers are putting us in….We’ve got to come up with something….Our right hand is going after [Hanoi’s] jaw…on the war front, but we ought to have a peace front, too, simultaneously, and use both fists, not just one, not just fighting with one hand behind us, so that we can say we’re the peace candidate, but we’re the true peace candidate. We’re not the [Neville] Chamberlain peace. We’re the Churchill peace. We’re not the guy who’s going to throw in the towel and let them take Athens, we’re the Truman who stands up and finally saves Greece and Turkey from the communists….The course they [Kennedy and McCarthy] have of temporary peace…, why, you’d have peace until [the communists] got their government installed, and then, by God, you’d have—

CLARK CLIFFORD: Another war…

JOHNSON: A bigger one than ever. Now…we’ve got to come up with something…

CLIFFORD: What it is: We’re out to win, but we’re not out to win the war. We’re out to win the peace.

JOHNSON: That’s right.

CLIFFORD: And that’s what we give them and…our slogan could very well be: “Win the peace with honor,” and I think we’ve got to get that thought over. Now I’ve been giving some consideration to offers of de-escalation…

The president said he might be willing to stop the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong for “a period that didn’t really hurt us.” Then, if Hanoi reciprocated by, say, recognizing the neutrality of the DMZ, “we’re willing to sit down and pull our troops out of there as soon as the violence subsides and willing, as well, to take our treasure and go back and help rebuild…as we did with the Marshall Plan. But we’ve got to have something new and fresh that goes in there along with the statement that we’re going to win.”

CLIFFORD: Right. But we have to be very careful what it is we say, “We’re going to win.”

JOHNSON: That’s right.

CLIFFORD: I think we frighten the people if we just end with “and we’re going to win.” They think, “Well, hell, that means we’re just going to keep pouring men in until we win militarily.” And that isn’t what we’re after, really.

JOHNSON: We’re not going to get these doves, but we can neutralize the country; that way, it won’t follow them, if we can come up with something…

CLIFFORD: Yes, that’s right, I think you’ve put your finger on it. We have a posture now in which Kennedy and McCarthy are the peace candidates and President Johnson is the war candidate. Now we must veer away from that, and we can do it.

What was needed, Clifford argued, was a “consistent, far-ranging policy that we don’t have.”

CLIFFORD: I think we have to keep in mind that maybe before the [Democratic] convention—and if not before the convention, before the election—I think we have to work out some kind of an arrangement where we start some negotiation.

JOHNSON: Well, you can’t do that one-way, you know. And these folks [the North Vietnamese] are not wanting to do that.

CLIFFORD: I know.

JOHNSON: They wanted to get rid of us.

CLIFFORD: Yeah, that’s right. But I think there’s a good chance to do that if [the plan] is prepared properly….All I’m saying is we don’t have such a plan, and the major…task now is to come up with such a plan, and I intend to give a good part of my time and effort to seeing if we can’t come up with such a plan.

The first tangible sign that Johnson was beginning to see that the way the war had been waged was not working, that something new was needed, came on March 23, when he announced that he was summoning General Westmoreland home to become Army chief of staff. It was a promotion, but many saw it as punishment for his having failed to see the Tet Offensive coming. The headline in a Saigon English-language newspaper was “Westmoreland Kicked Upstairs.”

The president’s speechwriters were at work on a report to the nation, planned for the evening of March 31. Johnson was still blowing hot and cold about the proposed bombing pause. Eager to nudge him closer to that strategy, Clifford suggested that the Wise Men, the veteran cold warriors who had twice urged Johnson to hold steady in Vietnam, return to the White House for another briefing. Clifford knew that Dean Acheson, the senior-most member of the group, had already shifted his view; the military, he’d told the president, “are leading you down the garden path.” Discreet phone calls to several other members of the informal group suggested to Clifford that they had also shifted away from their initial hard-line positions.

The group convened at the State Department on March 25 and was briefed by Philip Habib of the State Department, George Carver of the CIA, and Major General William DePuy. They were stunned by what they heard. Tet appeared to have changed everything. How long would it take to win the war? “Maybe five, maybe ten years,” they were told. Could victory be won at all? “Not under present circumstances,” said Habib. “What would you do?” he was asked. “Stop bombing and negotiate.” When DePuy boasted that the enemy had lost more than 80,000 troops during Tet, UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg asked about the ratio of killed to wounded. Three to one would be a conservative estimate, the general thought. “How many operatives do you think they have operating in the field?” DePuy cited the official MACV figure: 230,000. “Well, general,” Goldberg said, “I am not a great mathematician, but with 80,000 killed and a wounded ratio of three to one, or 240,000, for a total of 320,000, who the hell are we fighting?”

At the head of the luncheon table, President Johnson presides over the fateful final meeting of the Wise Men, March 26, 1968. Left to right: General Creighton Abrams, George Ball, Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, General Matthew Ridgeway, Dean Acheson, the president, General Omar Bradley, Averell Harriman, Clark Clifford, Cyrus Vance, Walt Rostow, and Dean Rusk

McGeorge Bundy, who had left the White House to become president of the Ford Foundation, came back for the meeting and summarized the participants’ deliberations for the president: “The majority feeling is that we can no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left and we must begin to take steps to disengage. When we last met we saw reasons for hope. We hoped then there would be slow but steady progress. Last night and today the picture is not so hopeful.”

Johnson did not comment as the Wise Men weighed in, but he took notes. “Can no longer do the job we set out to do….Adjust our course….Move to disengage.”

The president was shaken, Clifford remembered: “The men who had helped lay down the basic line of resistance to communism in the world, the statesmen of Berlin and Korea, had decided they had had enough in Vietnam. The price was not commensurate with the goal.” The cold war was still worth waging, they believed; China and the Soviet Union still needed to be contained. “Their opposition to the war was based solely on the belief that Vietnam was weakening us at home and in the rest of the world. And they were right.”

President Johnson announces a partial bombing halt of North Vietnam—and his own unwillingness to run again for president, March 31, 1968. “I was never surer of any decision I ever made in my life,” he told the press afterward.” I have 525,000 men whose very lives depend on what I do, and I can’t afford to worry about the primaries. Now I will be working full time for those men out there.”

And there was still more bad news for the president. With no end to the war in sight and the budget deficit soaring, European investors had begun cashing in their dollars for gold. The dollar itself—and the U.S. economy—now seemed under threat.

On the evening of March 31, 1968, seated behind his Oval Office desk and squinting into the television lights, dark rings beneath his eyes, Johnson looked grim and weary. Neil Sheehan, covering the White House then, remembered the toll the war seemed to be taking on him: “His face was a mask of exhaustion and defeat. It was very sad to see the man. He was broken by it.”

He wanted to talk of peace, he said. “There is no need to delay the talks that could bring an end to this long and this bloody war….So tonight, in the hope that this action will lead to early talks, I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict…unilaterally and at once….I have ordered our aircraft and our naval vessels to make no attacks on North Vietnam, except north of the demilitarized zone, where the continuing enemy buildup directly threatens allied forward positions.” Even this limited bombing could come to an early end, he said, “if our restraint is matched by restraint in Hanoi.”

He praised the South Vietnamese for showing new signs of resolve—Saigon had ordered the mobilization of 135,000 new troops, extended ARVN tours of duty for the duration of the war, and was about to start drafting eighteen-year-olds. He was sending just 13,500 more men to Vietnam—support troops to back the small emergency combat force he’d recently dispatched. No mention was made of Westmoreland’s call for 205,000 men; though no one could have known it then, the era of apparently open-ended escalation was over.

The president asked “all Americans, whatever their personal interest or concern, to guard against divisiveness and all its ugly consequences.”

Then, Johnson stunned the nation and the world: “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the presidency of your country,” he said. “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

After thirty-seven years in public life, Lyndon Johnson had become a casualty of his own war. The Chicago Tribune—no friend of Democrats or the Democratic president—hailed his decision as “an act of self-abnegation unparalleled in American history.” William Fulbright, his old friend turned antagonist, described it as “the act of a very great patriot.”

Four days later, Radio Hanoi announced that it was willing to begin talks. The Chinese accused their ally of “disappointing the world” by even considering compromise with the Americans. But the Soviets backed the proposed negotiations, and governments around the globe expressed hope for an end to the fighting.

“The rancorous, near hysterical atmosphere of the Tet offensive has been entirely transformed since the President’s speech,” a British correspondent wrote from Washington. “Most appear to believe that whoever captures the presidency [this November] will be obliged to end the conflict within a matter of months. How this is to be done or what concessions are to be made is very much a matter of detail.”

MERE ANARCHY IS LOOSED UPON THE WORLD

JOHNSON’S WITHDRAWAL from the 1968 presidential contest and Hanoi’s willingness to negotiate robbed Robert Kennedy of his most important issue. His rivals for the Democratic nomination were now McCarthy, and—although he would not announce his official candidacy until late April—Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Before he could hope to claim the Democratic nomination and take on the likely Republican nominee, former vice president Richard M. Nixon, whom his brother Jack had defeated eight years earlier, he faced a gauntlet of must-win presidential primaries.

Indiana’s was first, and on the evening of April 4 Kennedy was flying to Indianapolis when R. W. Apple of The New York Times told him that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis. Kennedy “sagged,” Apple recalled. “His eyes went blank.” When they landed, Kennedy learned that King had died. He was scheduled to make an outdoor speech in a black neighborhood. The mayor and the police chief told him not to go. It was too dangerous. His wife begged him to stay away, too. “I’m going to go there,” he said. “That’s it.” He asked that no police accompany him.

“I’m only going to talk to you for a minute or so this evening,” he told the crowd of a thousand waiting in the dark, “because I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”

Some among his listeners moaned. Others began to weep. Kennedy went on, speaking without notes. “He was up there,” a reporter remembered, “hunched in his black overcoat, his face gaunt and distressed and full of anguish.”

“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings,” Kennedy said, “and he died because of that effort.

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black…you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country. In greater polarization—black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love….

“We’ve had difficult times in the past. We will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.

“But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and our people.”

That night, Indianapolis was one of the few urban centers that did not experience chaos. Over the next week, African Americans—grieving, frustrated, angry—poured into the streets of more than one hundred cities and towns, including New York and Oakland, Newark and Nashville, Chicago and Cincinnati—and in Washington, D.C., where, for the first time in history, the Situation Room monitored combat in American streets. Forty-six Americans died, and 2,600 more were injured. Twenty thousand were arrested. Twenty thousand regulars and 34,000 National Guardsmen were called out to restore order.

Marine Corporal Roger Harris would not be one of them. He had come home in early 1968, a veteran of thirteen months of savage combat below the DMZ. He landed in California and took a plane home to Boston. “I was feeling good,” he recalled, “because I survived and I fought for my country. I got off the plane at Logan and I stepped out there in my uniform with my duffel bag and I’m just happy to be home. I walked out to the curb and the cabs just kept going by me. And there was a state trooper standing there. And I didn’t realize what was happening, but he stepped in the street and he stopped a cab and he said, ‘You have to take this man. You have to take this soldier.’ And the driver looked over at me and he said, ‘I don’t want to go to Roxbury.’ They don’t see me as a soldier, you know. They see me as a nigger coming home. I’m thinking I’m a Marine. I just fought for my country thirteen months in the combat zone. And I can’t get a cab to get home. You know, sad, sad.”

An infantryman patrols a ruined section of the nation’s capital in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “When white America killed Dr. King, she declared war on black America,” Stokely Carmichael told a news conference. There could be “no alternative to retribution….Black people have to survive, and the only way they will survive is by getting guns.”

Now, he was stationed at Quantico Marine Corps Base, just thirty-six miles from Washington. When his unit was called out to help quell the riots in the nation’s capital, he recalled, “I was ready to go until I saw what they were giving out. I thought they were going to give us billy clubs and I thought we were going to stand in front of buildings and protect businesses. But they were passing out flak jackets, helmets, M16s with live ammunition—the same things we had in Vietnam. And when I saw that I said, ‘I’m not going. I’m not going.’ And my company commander said, ‘What did you say?’ I said, ‘I’ve got family in Washington, D.C.’ And he said, ‘So what does that mean? Get on the truck, Marine.’ I said, ‘I’m not going. So I got Article 15—non-judicial punishment—and I didn’t make sergeant because I refused to go.”

Roger Harris’s feelings echoed those of many African Americans serving overseas. The Vietnam War was fought by the first fully integrated American military in history—in Korea, there had still been some all-black and all-white outfits—and in units actually engaged in combat it had been working well. After spending a month talking with black troops in Vietnam, a black reporter for The Chicago Daily Defender found that “the men in the line companies who are fighting and dying…have pushed through the barriers of racial and ethnic prejudice.” Robert Sanders, a black paratrooper from San Francisco who served with the 173rd Airborne, agreed. He remembered feeling closer to the men in his integrated unit “than I do my own blood sisters and brothers….We was so close it was unreal. That was the first time in my life I saw that type of unity and I haven’t seen it since….It was beautiful. It sort of chills you, brings goose bumps just to see it, just to feel it.”

Dr. King’s death—and the reaction of some white troops to it—threatened to destroy that unity. At Cam Ranh Bay, a group of white sailors hoisted a Confederate flag over the naval headquarters and paraded around in makeshift Ku Klux Klan robes. At Danang, one black Marine wrote home, “when Martin Luther King was killed, a group of about 150 Negro soldiers went to the chapel, which always had been open 24 hours a day, to say a prayer for him.” MPs refused them entry. When some of the men moved on to the enlisted men’s club and began talking about Dr. King, armed guards were called “as though we were rioting. We are supposed to be American soldiers fighting a war in Vietnam. But it seems as though the white man thinks we’re still at home.”

When the news of King’s death reached the Fourth Infantry Division at Kon Tum, a black noncommissioned officer named Allen Thomas Jr., remembered, “the young guys wanted to hurt somebody.” He and a group of other African American noncoms led hundreds of black soldiers to a field, where they camped for several days. “We went to the officers, asked them to back off,” Thomas remembered. “The last thing you wanted was to set [the men] off….Let them get over their anger and hurt.”

Beneath North Vietnamese and NLF flags, Parisian students take to the streets in opposition to the war.

Reports of anger and hurt seemed to be coming from everywhere that spring, as young people took to the streets. Their motivations were many, but opposition to the war in Vietnam was a common denominator. In Italy, students shut down the University of Rome. London police arrested two thousand demonstrators outside the U.S. embassy. In Paris, tens of thousands marched, chanting, “Johnson Assassin.” West Germany endured the worst street rioting since the rise of Adolf Hitler. There were similar scenes in Madrid, Rio, Jakarta, Tokyo.

Tet deepened antiwar feeling on American campuses, as well. There were more teach-ins, more demonstrations. At the university of Wisconsin–Madison, students planted four hundred white crosses. “We thought the campus ought to look like a graveyard,” one ex-student said, “because that’s where most of the seniors are headed.”

At Columbia University in Manhattan, students occupied several campus buildings to protest the university’s collaboration with a think tank that advised the military. The administration eventually called in the police, who drove the demonstrators out of the buildings—arresting 712 people and sending more than 100 students and faculty members to the hospital. The SDS saw it as a triumph, proof that determined protestors could bring a great institution to a halt. “The Columbia strike more than any other event,” one student leader said, “has given the radical student movement the belief that we can really change this country.” Tom Hayden called for “two, three, many Columbias.”

A Columbia University professor arrives for class to find the hallway blocked by antiwar protestors, April 1968. “At a time when the radical movement was the most disheartened and dispirited,” recalled Mark Rudd, a leader of the campus uprising, “the Columbia student rebellion broke through the gloom as an example of the power a radical movement could attain.”

Earlier that year, Robert Kennedy had published an op-ed in The New York Times in which he warned that the bleak vision of William Butler Yeats now seemed to be being fulfilled: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

The euphoria that had followed Johnson’s partial bombing halt and Hanoi’s expressed willingness to talk had rapidly died away. Washington and Hanoi bickered for more than month over where negotiations should take place. Geneva, Phnom Penh, Rangoon, New Delhi, and Warsaw were each proposed by one side or the other, only to be rejected. Indonesia, impatient to see an end to the bloodshed, offered a battleship in international waters. That, too, was rejected.

Finally, the two sides agreed on Paris. There, beneath a vast crystal chandelier in the grande salle of the Hotel Majestic, Hanoi’s spokesman, Xuan Thuy, declared that the sole purpose of meeting was to arrange for the “unconditional cessation of the U.S. bombing raids and all other acts of war so that talks may start.”

The seventy-seven-year-old head of the U.S. delegation, W. Averell Harriman, replied that Washington was willing to stop the bombing completely—but only if Hanoi agreed to a mutual troop withdrawal along the DMZ, ceased attacks on Saigon and other cities, and agreed to “prompt and serious talks” thereafter.

Xuan Thuy rejected that notion: only the United States had violated the buffer zone, he said. If the talks failed, “the American side would bear the full and entire responsibility.”

Weeks would go by. Neither side budged. “Never,” one member of the American delegation confided to a reporter, “have I heard two nations call each other sons of bitches so politely.” President Johnson began to consider calling his delegation home. Clark Clifford helped talk him out of it. The American people had high hopes for the talks, he said, and “if we do anything to wreck [them] Bobby [Kennedy] shoots up and public opinion goes against us.” (By “us,” he simply meant the Johnson administration; the president had pledged to remain neutral in the upcoming presidential contest.)

Meanwhile, the politburo had begun implementing a policy it called “fighting-while-talking, talking-while-fighting.”

BRINGING THE FLAMES OF WAR

ARMY LIEUTENANT VINCENT OKAMOTO arrived in South Vietnam on April 30, 1968 and bunked down at the 90th Replacement Batallion compound at Bien Hoa, awaiting assignment to one outfit or another. He’d been born during World War II in a Japanese American war relocation camp at Poston, Arizona, the seventh son of Japanese immigrants. All six of his brothers had served in uniform—two fought with the celebrated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated unit of the war—and so, when his country went to war again in Vietnam, he believed he should go, too. He took reserve officer training at UCLA, endured training as an elite airborne ranger at Fort Benning, and had been stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when flag-draped coffins began to come home after the Tet Offensive.

“If a paratrooper was killed in Vietnam and his family lived within driving distance of Fort Bragg, there was a set routine,” Okamoto remembered. “The padre or the chaplain or the rabbi and a young lieutenant would check out a car, and drive to that location. Eventually, my turn came up. It took a while to find the location, and when we finally did, it was something out of Tobacco Road—broken-down house, old dog sleeping on the porch. I followed the padre. He knocked on the door, and an elderly African American woman answered it. I think she knew the instant she saw us why we were there. She didn’t say a word, but she stepped back, and let us come in. The padre said, ‘I’m terribly sorry to inform you that your son was killed in Vietnam.’ And she just sat down. Didn’t say a word. And then her husband called from somewhere in the back, saying, ‘What’s going on?’ And he came in, and said, ‘What do you gentlemen want?’ And again, the padre said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, but your son was killed in Vietnam.’ The wife is still stoic, not saying a word. He says, ‘No, there’s a mistake.’ He leaves the room and comes back with this letter. He said, ‘Look, see? We got it yesterday, my son was still alive yesterday.’ The chaplain looked at the letter, and said, ‘It’s a week old. I think your son was killed…on the day he wrote this letter.’ The father broke down and started weeping. We offered whatever service we could and we left.

Training to become an airborne ranger, Vincent Okamoto prepares to jump.

“I just felt like a lowlife, because I’d been playing soldier at Fort Bragg, going to the officers’ club at night, having dinner, knocking back a couple of shots of tequila. And here’s this poor couple, I think they were sharecroppers; their only son gets killed in Vietnam. So as soon as we got back to the post, I said, ‘I’m never going to do this duty again.’ So I walked to the adjutant’s office, and I said, ‘Give me my request for transfer. I want to go to Vietnam.’ And that was the first time that I really saw the Army work with efficiency. They said, ‘Sure, man.’ And about a week later, I got my orders to go to Vietnam.”

A resident of the Cholon neighborhood watches helplessly as fire creeps toward her home during the fierce fighting that engulfed parts of Saigon during “Mini-Tet” in May 1968. Some thirty thousand homes were destroyed, many by U.S. and South Vietnamese air attacks meant to blast NLF fighters hidden within them. “The Viet Cong has no air force of its own,” said the Saigon police chief, “so he uses ours.”

Refugees crowd together, surrounded by the few household objects they’ve managed to salvage, on the grounds of a Catholic church in Saigon. Mini-Tet displaced nearly eighty-seven thousand Saigonese.

On his second night in South Vietnam, mortar rounds hit the base, Okamoto remembered, and he took shelter in a darkened bunker. “It was hot. It was crowded. Everybody’s sweating, everybody’s scared. A near miss shook the bunker with a concussion. Everybody got quiet. The guy sitting right next to me lit a cigarette with an old Zippo lighter. And all of a sudden, I hear someone say, ‘There’s a gook in here!’ And I start looking around. It’s dark. The light goes out. And people say, ‘What?’ ‘Where?’ ‘Who?’ And it just happened that another second lieutenant that I had met the day before said, ‘Hey, Okamoto, is that you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Be at ease, people, he’s an American.” And then another voice, with a distinct southern drawl, said, ‘Hey, no offense, partner; but if I was you I’d dye my hair blond and whistle ‘Dixie’ when it gets dark.’ ”

The mortar shells that hit Bien Hoa that night were part of a second attempt to initiate the General Offensive, General Uprising that Le Duan and the other leaders in Hanoi somehow hoped would achieve what the Tet attacks had not achieved months earlier. There had been major engagements since Tet. ARVN and American sweeps had successfully hunted down enemy forces in the Mekong Delta. A combined force of U.S. First Cavalry, U.S. Marines, and ARVN airborne troops reopened Route 9 and lifted the 77-day siege of Khe Sanh. But this was different. The enemy hit 119 targets between May 5 and the end of the month, in what the Americans would call “Mini-Tet.”

General Huynh Cong Than, the NLF commander who had scrambled to get his troops ready for the first attack on Saigon in February, received new “guidance” from his superiors. The General Offensive, General Uprising had never been meant to be a single definitive event, he was now told; instead, it was “a process.” Nor had there been any changes in tactics or armaments or orders since the first assault. He and his men were now to try to do what they had failed to do with far greater numbers three months earlier. “Our assigned mission…called for our forces to penetrate as deeply as possible into the very heart of the city,” he recalled. “At that time this tactic was called ‘bringing the flames of war into the enemy’s own lair.’ In truth, we went into the second wave of the Tet Offensive with the attitude of suicide troops. The fighting…was extremely violent, but our troops could not penetrate any deeper than they had during the first offensive, and in places didn’t even get as far as they had the first time.” Morale among the NLF plummeted.

One hundred and twenty-five thousand more South Vietnamese civilians were driven from their homes. American tanks and American gunships again pounded every structure in which NLF fighters were thought to be hiding. “These weapons create more problems than they solve,” an ARVN officer told a Newsweek reporter. “We cannot go on destroying an entire block every time a Viet Cong steps into a house.”

The North Vietnamese and NLF suffered 36,000 more casualties and failed to capture a single one of their key objectives. But for the United States, May 1968 proved the bloodiest month of the Vietnam War—2,416 Americans lost their lives. If the enemy had suffered such terrible losses at Tet, how could they be taking such a toll on the U.S. forces afterward? Nearly half of those Americans interviewed by Gallup now believed U.S. entry into the Vietnam War had been a mistake.

HEROIC MOTHER

Madame Nguyen Thanh Tung in uniform

Few families made more sacrifices for the NLF cause than that of Nguyen Thanh Tung, one of some 47,000 women honored by the Vietnamese government after the war as “Heroic Mothers.”

She was born in 1930 into a family already fully committed to the revolutionary struggle. The French burned her village just east of Saigon, and killed many of those who lived there. Her mother died at the hands of French captors in 1945. Her father died in the notorious prison on Con Son Island. She had eight brothers. Four died fighting the French. Four more would die fighting the Americans.

Given the chance to go north after the Geneva agreement in 1954, she resolved to stay in the South, instead, ready to resist the Diem regime when called upon to do so. And when that signal came in 1959, she was more than ready. “At the time, we had no arms,” she recalled. “We asked our superiors for weapons, but they didn’t provide them. Our superiors told us, ‘We don’t have arms to give you. Why don’t you steal our enemy’s arms to fight?’ I was upset and asked them, ‘Do you want us to become thieves?’ But as the only woman in my unit, with four older men, I had an advantage in being able to move around. The men usually had to keep hidden. Step by step, I made friends with those in our enemy’s outposts. I made friends with the soldiers’ relatives and found out where their arms were stored, what they looked like, found ways to get them.

“I started to steal arms. I could not steal big guns. I only stole grenades and small guns. At first, I stole two grenades, then two more, then I got four.”

Her responsibilities steadily grew. “Whatever duty was assigned to me, I performed,” she recalled. “I worked as a temporary worker, a street vendor, and disguised myself as a local resident. Wherever my superiors needed me to go, I always tried to blend in to approach our targets.”

Her superiors introduced her to her future husband, Pham Van Tam, a fellow NLF fighter who had also resolved to stay in the South. “I hadn’t wanted to get married,” she recalled. “But they persuaded me, ‘If you focus only on fighting, without reproducing, who will be our future fighters? When we get old, and can no longer fight, the younger generation, your children, will take over the responsibility.”

Husband and wife would have little time together: “Our first son was born in 1956 in a tunnel on the outskirts of Saigon, and I bore our second son in one of the tunnels at Chu Chi in 1958. My husband only heard the news a month later, when he came back from an assignment.” Even the naming of their boys was dictated by the cause they shared. “My older son’s name was Pham Quoc Nam,” she recalled. “The younger one was Pham Quoc Trung. The names we chose came from our decision to stay in the South instead of moving to the North. ‘Quoc’ means ‘Nation.’ ‘Nam’ means ‘the South.’ We named the younger one ‘Trung’ so that he would always remember that no matter what happened, the blood of loyalty ran in his veins.”

Her husband was killed in battle in 1967. She and her two sons took part in the Tet assault on Saigon the following year. Her boys were in the sapper unit that tried to take the offices of Radio Saigon, and when the ARVN surrounded it, managed to escape and then flee the city. “After that we communicated only through letters,” she remembered. “They encouraged me. They always wrote at the beginning of their letters: ‘Our father sacrificed his life, and now we only have you left. Please, take care of yourself, and do your duty. We want to be worthy of being your sons.’ ”

On the eve of Mini-Tet, NLF fighters, all women, plot their attack on the Chu Y Bridge, which connects southern Saigon with outlying districts. The fighting in its vicinity would be among the fiercest in the city.

In May, when the NLF attacked the South Vietnamese capital again as part of Mini-Tet, Nguyen Thanh Tung found herself part of a commando unit that tried for six days to take and hold the Chu Y Bridge, the southern entrance-way to downtown Saigon. “The enemy counterattacked. Some of my colleagues were killed. First, Miss Hong got injured. I was next to her. She shouted, ‘I am hit.’ I crawled over to her and hugged her. She told me: ‘I have finished my assignment. Please fight and get revenge for me. When the peace comes, please go to my village, and take care of my mother.’ I embraced her when she died. Then, Miss Tram was killed. An hour later, I was injured. There is still shrapnel in my leg. There were seven pieces of shrapnel in my head. Four have recently been removed. I still have three fragments of shrapnel. It still hurts, especially when it gets cold.” Still more sacrifices lay ahead.

THE MURDEROUS SPRING

FOR A TIME THAT SPRING, it looked as if Robert Kennedy might be on his way to winning the Democratic presidential nomination. He had conducted a remarkable campaign—frenetic, exhausting, pledging an end to the war and seeming to embody the hope of bridging the growing gulf between white and black Americans. It was an uphill fight—McCarthy’s followers were bitter about his late entry into the race, Johnson loyalists within the Democratic Party shared the president’s antipathy toward him, and white southerners were unforgiving of his civil rights record—but Kennedy won Indiana, Nebraska, and South Dakota. He lost Oregon to McCarthy—the first time any member of the Kennedy family had lost an election anywhere—but on June 4 he scored dramatic victories in South Dakota and California and seemed poised to drive his rival from the race. Shortly before midnight, he declared victory. He called on his fellow countrymen to “end the division, the violence, the disenchantment….We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country. So my thanks to all of you,” he said, “and now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”

Moments later, he was shot by a delusional Palestinian. He died the next day. His body lay in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York for two and a half days, then was carried by slow-moving train to Washington past thousands of mourners, black and white, and finally laid to rest at Arlington.

For those who lived through the “murderous spring of 1968,” the journalist Jack Newfield wrote, there had been a terrible lesson. “Things were not really getting better…we shall not overcome. We had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated. And from this time forward things would get worse. Our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope.”

“People were stunned, and people were scared,” recalled Mogie Crocker’s sister Carol, who was then soon to leave for college. “The people we’d looked up to were being taken away from us. It definitely put those of us who were heading off on our own on a path that felt uncertain.”

The United States now appeared to be more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

By that June, Captain Hal Kushner had been a prisoner of the Viet Cong for six months, hidden away in a remote jungle camp deep in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. “When Martin Luther King was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated,” he remembered, “they said that was part of the struggle of the American people against their government. And that there were riots in the streets. The camp commander actually told us, ‘You can kill ten of us to one of you, but your people will turn against this. We will be here for ten years or twenty years or thirty years—as long as it takes. Unless you kill every one of us we’re going to win this war.’ ”

Philadelphians gather at Union Station to say goodbye, as Robert Kennedy’s funeral train passes by on its way to Washington. Clark Clifford attended the funeral and “wondered again how our nation would survive the most serious challenge it had faced since the Civil War….Perhaps Bobby Kennedy had been the last Democrat who could have united the factions of the party, which was beginning to unravel; but now we would never know.”