CIA: Intelligence Warning of the Tet Offensive South Vietnam (declassified)
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01720R00010008000...
I wonder if Oglesby read the above document. In the document, authors arrive at a different conclusion from Oglesby. Ogleby thinks his cover was blown, but I think he fell for an old trick--his contact told Olglesby he had filed a an intelligence report--a good guess on their part and Olglesby bought in to it. The other angle to the story? The communist, during lunch, detected his "American" French accent.
War was exhausting, why not take a breather since the bombardment and harassment of enemy persist. Tet offensive was there all in move. It paid off for them. It happens. It's good to win sometime.
The most unanswered question of Tet is why didn't VC sappers attack the billets of the most senior US officers in Saigon? Many lived in widely scattered houses in Saigon with an insufficient guard. I believe only Westmoreland had an 8 man squad. Some had only a SV policeman and these "disappeared" on the evening of Jan 30. Small VC sapper units could killed captured some of these officers and paralyzed MACV's reaction to Tet until other officers from subordinate commands made it to Saigon. Later it was found out that VC intel knew where every general lived AND how he was protected.
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In “A Good American” Bill Binney says the NSA preficted it two months before it happened.
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"... fed fabricated “intelligence” by paid informers, ..."
Translation: They told us what we wanted to hear, nicely fitted into our preferred fantasies. We ate it up, swallowed it whole, and doomed ourselves. Doomed from the start, a war made wholly of lies and our own arrogance. It's happening again, right now, as a presidential administration made wholly of lies, ignores truth and promotes its own fantasies. The greatest threat is always from within.
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We didn't all eat it up. I was at UC, and, as at other universities we questioned the basis for the Vietnam War. Those who went to Canada, or got married, or went into grad school, were not old school "draft dodgers"; they were well aware of the lack of any basis to invade Vietnam; they were aware of the history there, with the French plantation owners and Dulles wingnut theories about fighting "them" over there before they could arrive here in their non-existent ships and planes. We knew about Ho Chi Minh and the Paris Agreements; we knew about the French plantation owners who wanted to hang on. The Wall in D.C. is a monument to a foreign policy based on lies and propaganda. We were not stupid; we knew there was money to be made by those who serviced the military; and, we also knew that the theories about Vietnam were hogwash. We didn't think General Ky was a hero; he was a corrupt thief. McNamara lied, as did others; the evil beyond 58,000 dead boys is the cynicism. Vietnam had neither the intention, nor the means to attack the U.S. China did not have the means or intention to start WWIII. This was all ours; and those of who were young knew that.
8
Rumors floated around that COSVN, Central Office South Vietnam, (North Vietnam's southern Pentagon, so to speak), was located somewhere in Hau Nghia province, maybe somewhere in one of the Michelin plantations, or in the HoBo woods, or a little way up the road across the border in Cambodia, always on the move and hard to find by US or ARVN. Was it ever discovered,
Sam Oglesby, even after the war's end, or was it always just that, "rumor?"
I commend to those truly interested in the truth H.R. McMaster’s book “Dereliction of Duty” . This history of the war focuses on the years 1963-1965. It shows in great factual detail ( memos, reports, records of meetings and interview transcripts with Generals, that compels his conclusion that Vietnam was lost through military disfunction at the JCS level, the flawed strategy of McNamara’s “ graduated pressure” theory which was intended to elect LBJ first in 1964 and protect his Great Society legislative agenda thereafter. To accomplish this, McMasters documents, McNamara and his key staffers, including Gen. Maxwell Taylor, who ran the war as Ambassador to Vietnam, kept information from the Joint Chiefs, refused to let their military views ( 500,000 US combat troops were needed on the ground to win- at a time when they were given 20,000 by McNamara) be transmitted to the President, and with LBJ, deceived the American people and the press about the key facts of US military intentions. The disfunction of the military during this time period is genuinely disturbing.
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I recommend Sheehan's "A Bright and Shining Lie". Sheehan was there, reporting from combat areas.
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the first 30 plus pages are gripping in the hands of this gifted writer. the occ is a funeral, an apt locale for the re-telling of vietnam.
I am a teacher- assessment drives education. Intelligence- the gathering and interpreting of it- drives a war. That the United States would pursue a war without wanting the real thing is absurd and beyond. There are parallels to our own day. Trump seems to be that kind of guy. His fake news is our real news. Is our military any better now? They are claiming to be, but the fiasco in Iraq, ships accidentally hitting other ships, politics influencing battles tells another story
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In a few short years, it will be impossible to find any surviving vets or demonstrators able to recall their experience with that war first hand. After the Dems were derailed with demonstrations of the Chicago 7, and the overall mood of the country erupted, the election easily fell into the arms of Nixon who purposefully proclaimed “Peace is at hand” while instead dragging the war out in the most profitable way imaginable. My guess is that all Americans can sigh relief in noting this coming year will be completely different watching the military administer a “bloody nose” to North Korea, so there will be no hard feeling during the upcoming Olympic games in South Korea. Real progress when it occurs is remarkable.
1
They have risen slightly since then but when I left Vietnam in 2015, rubber prices were so low that plantation operators were leaving trees unharvested as the price of rubber did not justify the labor or collection. This is in areas where people work for less than $10/day. It seems ironic that the French considered going back to Vietnam after WWII because of rubber.
1
I was a very junior officer in the MACV HQ 1963-64 and had a wide range of contacts across the services. I don’t think there was a single junior officer in the HQ or out in the field who believed that the “war” was “winnable”. The very ruthless VC were following Mao’s strategies in the countryside, publically executing traditional village leaders and replacing them with their own cadres. Every day. At an increasing pace. The spirit of nationalism was very high on all sides of the Vietnamese population, even among those Vietnamese we knew. (And given the organizational competence of the VC and the North Vietnamese, we couldn’t really be sure that our Vietnamese friends and colleagues weren’t, in fact, VC/NVN agents). We all read Bernard Fall, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, the many works on counterinsurgency from RAND and elsewhere. And, significantly, the Stillwell Diaries which covered Stillwell’s time with Chiang Kaishek and which told a story of corruption and incompetence that we saw mirrored in Vietnam. We knew that the “only way” to beat the VC and NVN was to bring in American troops and firepower...and that the minute we did that, the “war” was “lost”. Tet was a demoralizing shock to us. It also was a galvanizing shock to the North who saw their opportunity to realize their dream of nationalist unification by replacing the decimated VC, a potential rival, with their even more obdurate will.
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Just a thought. Would there a Tet offensive, if we were not there when we had no business or right to be in Vietnam in the first place?
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It is trite to say that military intelligence is an oxymoron, but that is what makes Trump surrounding himself with generals look so scary.
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I saw it, I heard, I felt it... back and forth between Chu Lai and Danang ‘65-66. There were signs... something was rotten.
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Others saw it coming but were ignored by their superiors.
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"Why Did No One See the Tet Offensive Coming?"
The premise of the headline is wrong.
Everyone I knew in Vietnam knew that a major North Vietnamese offensive was in the works months before Tet. No one was unprepared and invaded territory was only briefly held by the Communists. What the U.S. military expected was conventional WWII type battles, which they got, welcomed and won.
It was U.S. civilians who were surprised, not anyone on the ground in Vietnam.
The significance of Tet was the American lies that were uncovered: Tet was a political victory for the Communists, not a military victory. Tet demonstrated that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no path to victory and the Communist's military and insurgents were at least as strong and determined as they had ever been. Tet opened eyes to what was really happening in Vietnam, even though militarily it was a monumental loss for the Communists.
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If Set was a political victory then it was a military victory. The only point of a war is a political one.
These days, Agent Orange is discussed mostly as a chemical that may or may not have caused cancer and birth defects, depending on whom you ask. I like to focus on the intended effect, which is by itself sufficient to condemn the entire war effort. Some genius war planner decided that our enemy in tropical Vietnam was foliage. We declared war on crops, rubber trees, and the rain forest canopy. Who does that?
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They didn't learn anything. In 1971 we were flying gunship interdiction on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Southern Laos near the Cambodian boarder. We had multiple sensors. Just before dawn we found a vehicle leaving tracks in the dirt road. The engine was in the back. It was a diesel. It had a long barrel sticking out the front. We hit it 4 times with high explosive shells. Each time it stopped, spun on its axis, and started again. Clearly armored. All this was on videotape. At the debriefing after the mission, the intelligence officer changed our report of a "tank" to a "tracked vehicle". It seems headquarters in Saigon maintained there were no tanks in Southern Laos, therefore we were not allowed to report a tank. A few weeks later there was an offensive in SVN and surprise, surprise, tanks.
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From reading this article, it is now clear to me why Trump and Tillerson are purging the State Department.
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The American involvement in Vietnam was an ignorant, arrogant repeat of a previous French attempt to regain control of their rebellious colony.
American Intelligence is an oxymoronic name for the misinformed, indecisive American Presidents, the blundering, lying American generals, and the divided American public that never found a reason for the atrocious, destructive war on Vietnam.
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Vietnam became an enduring war so that the dead shall not have died in vain.
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LBJ and Nixon were and always will be war criminals. We will never completely admit this or face the shame . A vibrant democracy needs the constant reminder of the stupid and cruel not so long ago arrogant mass murders committed in our name. Yeah, that's the Great America we all need again.
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Max, thank you for taking the time to comment about the war in Vietnam on this Christmas Day. I spent Christmas day 1967 in Southeast Asia and it seems the war is only mentioned when I visit colleagues who shared my experiences and in the obscure pages of internet postings. However, I must say that Candidate Trump repeatedly called out our stupid wars where we kill a lot of people and spent a lot of money only to see an outcome we do not desire. In my mind, he was not only talking about Iraq but also about our involvement in Vietnam. So, I am comfortable believing that we have a President who finally understands the futility of using force to solve problems better left to diplomats.
All intelligence warning of an offensive was given the blind eye because it went against a larger agenda. Happens all the time. It happened at Arnhem when planners refused to believe panzers were in the area. Such things become a hindrance to long term planning and are thus ignored at the higher level, leaving those at the sharp-end bearing the bloody brunt of what is basically willful criminal incompetence.
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TET was a massive defeat - for the Communists. They did not win one of their objectives, the capture of provincial capitals. The Viet Cong was destroyed. Their attack on the US embassy in Saigon was iconic - 19 men blew a hole in the wall and rushed onto the grounds; none got close to entering the building; all 19 were killed. Whole units of the NVA were wiped out. It would take them years to recover. Had we attacked after the collapse of the offensive, we could have rolled into Hanoi.
But the media back home, with Uncle Cronkite in the lead, said we had lost. They said the war had become unwinnable.
And then, as even more so today, what was real was what was on TV, not the real world.
And so we lost. Whether or not we should have been there in the first place, we wound up losing 57,000 of our best people for nothing.
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Yes but it took nearly two days to overcome those 19 insurgents in the embassy. And of course it's a a tactical defeat for the VC esp, but it demonstrated NVA commitment tenacity presence and resilience,,,we would never have been able to defeat that..THATS what we learned form Tet. The shame is Nixon cynically kept us in there for many more years and many thousands more young Americans came back in body bags. Nixons crimes are far worse than Johnsons-there was never a scintilla of a doubt seven in his mind we could prevail heart he persisted to boost his macho Appeal.
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Long before the count got to 57,000, they were dying so that the already dead shall not have died in vain.
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You repeat the oft used meme that the media somehow cost the United States the war. No.
In basic training almost a generation later we were told this by our Drill Sergeants repeatedly despite it not being approved TRADOC (training and doctrine command) material. This poisonous claim has infected generations of Americans who served afterward- that the war was lost due to a treasonous press and had we only repressed them and tried harder we could have won.
If we would have rolled up North Vietnam like a pastry we would have found another huge swath of ungovernable countryside and millions more people unwilling to trust US administration or the corrupt government located in Saigon.
America lost the Vietnam War the day we became involved propping up a corrupt regime that was predicated upon continuing some colonial fantasy instead of championing a freely elected government determined to serve the interests of the Vietnamese people and nation.
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I don't wonder "why" as I have found sufficient explanation for many fine points of our disastrous war of choice in Vietnam. Helpful was Annie Jacobsen's 2015, "The Pentagon's Brain An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency."
When Kennedy went to war, "real smaht," because of course we were smarter. He hired McNamara from Ford, he hired scientists who created DARPA. They subsequently blessed us with agent orange and other "color" agents less well known, one was a scent chemical sprayed over forests, the idea being that American military dogs could point out jungle resident Viet Cong when they mingled in the cities. It failed. They invented the Strategic Hamlet Program, to move peasants from their villages into little fortified communities so communists could not visit & influence. This trick also prevented access to their ancestor's graves, and created powerful animosity. DARPA determined the Vietnamese peasant would not fight well, because they had no lives worth fighting for.
Rome's greatest statesman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, wrote before Christ, "Endless money forms the sinews of war." So it went for the USA throughout the 60s in many areas of international relations not just Vietnam. America was too rich and too hubristic for it's own good.
The answer to "why" we did not see Tet coming is that the Vietnam war was built on monumental hubris and white colonial racism, and those things cloud judgement. Hubris and racism, that's why.
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In judging the "intelligence" of any nation, we should assign an IQ (intelligence quotient) based on the success or failure of its spy networks and analysis. The fewer wars a nation is conned into, the higher its IQ. Since I was born in 1951, the U.S. has engaged in seven wars. During that time, China has engaged in two, the Korean War and a foolish effort to teach Communist Vietnam "a lesson." Thus, China would have a higher IQ than the U.S. but not anything to brag about. China's IQ would be about 90, while that of the U.S. would about 60. There are no genius government, but there are some with above average IQs. Switzerland would have to be rated about 120, with Sweden and Norway at about 110. Unfortunately, our IQ continues to fall as we learn the wrong lessons from history. As draft-dodger Warpresident Bush said about the lesson of Vietnam: "The only way you lose is if you leave!"
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The Trump presidency has wiped the slate clean of any American pretenses to adult character judgment.
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Every report American or French begs the question, why were the Westerners there in Vietnam in the first place? Now that I am witness to the Iraqi War, I know it was not about 9/11, about Saddam Hussain or his WMD. It was all about oil and keeping our well-oiled war and defense juggernaut moving. As in Vietnam - it was only to gain control over their rich latex! It was not about Communists really! The Vietnamese were having a civil war with both sides trying to gain control of latex with the colonial French starting to lose that control. So if there was a Tet Offensive to gain control over their own land but what was the real intention of Agent Orange and the annihilation of Vietnamese, North or South? We Westerners are hypocrites and sanctimonious. It's just control of other peoples all over the globe and their riches.
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I can only add to voice of others that the build up to Tet was widely reported to Intelligence centers in Saigon. I was stationed in Pleiku, 4th Infantry Division, Military Intelligence. Reports were written months before Tet that there huge materiel moving along the Ho Chi Minh trail along the Laotian/RVB boarder via elephants as well as troops. All ignored.
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A project that is perhaps of interest as an example of early opposition to the war:
https://www.afsc.org/story/vietnam-summer-50th-anniversary
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/5/4/vietnam-summer-evolves-from-p...
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Just remember three things:
1) the Tet offensive was lost by the Viet Cong.
2) we won the war totally, then due to screaming by left wingers, simply
left and LET them win
3) the war was being run by left wing Democrats at the time of the
Tet offensive.
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Whoa...dunno where to start...but consider, The Brits won the American Revolution as well by these metrics...
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You forgot to mention that "winning" the war entailed the obliteration of No. Vietnam, including millions of innocent civilians. Perhaps there were a few million of us who did not think that was a good trade off. Perhaps there were a few million of us who never supported the invasion of a country which had never done us harm. Perhaps there were a few million of us who actually read the history of the country and recognized that Ho Chi Minh was the folk hero who beat the French and then signed Agreements in Paris which we betrayed. Perhaps we were aware that Vietnam had no air force or navy, and no intention ever of invading the U.S. Your statement reflects a level of brutal unconcern about "collateral damage", an opinion based on complete ignorance of the theory of a "Just War". Vietnam was never a Just War; Vietnam was never WWII. Vietnam was country engaged in a civil war; we supported the wrong side. What if the North had supported the slave holding South, rather than holding the Union together for free men? What if we had never instituted the Electoral College, now a perverted basis for gerrymandered voting districts? We wouldn't have an unqualified tweeter in the Oval Office; we might have a former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secty. of State, you know, someone qualified who understands "governance" as a constitutional concept. We wouldn't have a grifter who has accepted laundered money via loans from thieving Russian oligarchs.
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As an invading Imperialist army to U.S. deserved to be defeated by the Vietnamese. As in all wars the bitter consequences are borne by the people and the soldiers on both sides.
The American Narrative is a lie. America was never great.
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Tet should've been the very loud wake-up call to the clueless cretins 'running' that military adventure--'we cannot win this so we're declaring victory and going home'. To everyone's misfortune, they didn't do that.
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"We're not going to win this so we'll bunker-down until our tours end and we can return to the real world."
The better question is why do we fight these wars?
At the height of the war, we had 500,000 troops in country. Seems like an impressive number. But against millions of Vietnamese?
Logically, there is no reason to spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on these endless wars ..... to what outcome?
Meanwhile McNamera was telling the President we could not win. So, he was "fired." Why did Westmorland lie? If he didn't, he would have been fired.
The only thing that ended the Viet Nam war was the protests .....
Folks point to the North Vietnamese saying if the bombing had continued, they would have gone to the peace negotiations sooner. The reality is the North saw the negotiations as simply another way to win.
What is the answer? Hubris? Wag The Dog? Voter's fantasies? The Industrial-Military Complex? All of the above?
Until we understand why, then we are stuck an endless series of rationalizations as to why we're addicted. Why do we believe the "enemy' is less dedicated than we are?
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It wasn't even the protests. It was the near total melt-down of the Army itself, with draftees tossing grenades under the cots of their sleeping officers. The all-volunteer US military was born in Vietnam.
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This says it all; "...had fallen on deaf ears. Barricaded in their compound with the noise of earsplitting generators blocking them from the real world outside and fed fabricated “intelligence” by paid informers, the American intelligence team scorned any effort to provide real information as “tainted” and “French.”
American, white male hubris. Same with Europeans...hubris. Locals, natives were never seen as anything but sub-human. Incapable of rational military planning.
The US High Command got suckered at nearly every turn, on nearly every hill, nearly every paddy. They simply could not comprehend that more and better hardware, and somewhat better trained soldiers couldn't defeat a bunch of rag-tag "farmers" and such. They simply couldn't see the exhibited planned and deftly executed strategy to wear us down.
Just pour more of what we got, on what little they got and it would end in us winning.
How wrong they were...and the Pentagon papers only nails their incompetence to the wall. Wasted time and lives to save face...only to run away with more shame and still lingering consequences then the leaders at the time ever imagined...
There was WW1, the War to End all Wars...which failed...but the Vietnam "War" should be called the War that tainted all that followed.
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The Republicans considered Wilson's League of Nations proposal, to preclude recurrence of WW I as WW II by diplomacy, a terrible idea and blocked US membership in it.
It wasn’t the Americans who “had reached that point of delusion” on the eve of the 19687 Tet Offensive but the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. They weren’t out to score a public relations victory. They had come to actually believe their own propaganda. They expected the Tet Offensive to spark a popular revolt in which the people of South Vietnam would rise up, overthrow the Saigon government and oust the Americans. Nothing of the sort happened or came close to happening. Instead, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army suffered devastating casualties. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese suffered 45,000 killed in action and many time that number wounded. The Viet Cong never recovered from their losses, and the NVA units that managed to escape back into their sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos had to be reconstituted.
Their memoirs show North Vietnamese leaders were amazed when the U.S. news media portrayed the Tet Offenses as an American defeat. General Tran Do, who commanded the North Vietnamese forces at the Battle of Hue, said "In all honesty, we didn't achieve our main objective, which was to spur uprisings throughout the South. Still, we inflicted heavy casualties on the Americans and their puppets, and this was a big gain for us. As for making an impact in the United States, it had not been our intention—but it turned out to be a fortunate result.”
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You still believe, after 50 years of reflection, that no one saw the Tet offensive coming? Were you surprised that no one found any WMD's in Iraq? The problem is not the lack of accurate intelligence, but people in charge, advancing their own personal agendas by ignoring it.
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Why does no one read the classic book The Ugly American? As Oscar Wilde would say, the rage of Caliban seeing himself in a glass. That book was an eye-opener over 50 years ago, and absolutely nothing has changed.
4
The Quiet American by Graham Greene is better.
1
The United States never did anything right in Vietnam.
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It just goes to show that turning USAID employees into back channel informants doesn't work, because the brass doesn't listen to their reports anyway. Better to leave them alone to just do their jobs.
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Again, General Westmoreland was the most disastrous General since Custer to command Union troops.
Well before Tet, someone asked Westmoreland if he was heading the NVA what would he do. He said, take Hue. Yet he denied & played down Hue over Khe Sanh. Westmorland rigged the order of battle throughout the war dispite what CIA analysts were telling him and LBJ.
Westmorland got out played by the NVA, over and over again.
2
Nothing has changed. Like the Roman Empire we have our own Commodus. Instead of fixing our infrastructure, he gives the Treasury away to the billionaires who will hoard it along with the others in the Panama and Paradise papers.
The only exceptionalism of the USA is that like all the other empires in history, it too is being extinquished.
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This could have been describing Iraq in many ways; this is how America goes to war, and this is how you will lose the next one too.
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"Why Did No One See the Tet Offensive Coming?"
That is easy! The Tet offensive caught Average Americans by surprise since at the time they believed the government's version of how the war was executed. US public was led to believe that Viet Cong was beaten to the point that they could not launch any large-scale attack. The US military did not expect the Tet offensive because they believed in the information they were receiving from Vietnamese intelligence collection apparatus in Saigon (who were largely playing on both sides of the street). Sounds familiar?
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The headline asks, "Why did no one see the Tet offensive coming?" asks the wrong question. The key question should read, "Why did the American leaders ignore the reality that the U.S. was losing the war?" For a good understanding of the realities of the situation, people should read "A Bright and Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan, which describes how our political and military leaders refused to listen to any intelligence that did not fit the "we have turned the corner" narrative. The Pentagon Papers also clearly outline the blindness and deceit of those leaders.
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I started my year as a grunt shortly after the Tet offensive. Even then our higher ranking officers were clueless to what was going on. They had no idea where or how many enemy troops were around. They had no idea of what the terrain was like. Safety, comfort and promotion were the goals, not leadership.
I never saw a colonel actually set foot on the ground in the field. The battalion commander would arrive in his helicopter mid-morning each day. Presumably he'd had a nice breakfast in the base-camp officers' mess. He'd fly around high above (out of small arms range) until lunchtime when he'd disappear for an hour or so and then reappear to orbit in the sky until it was time for supper.
If there as any shooting, the helicopter flew so high we on the ground could hardly see it. Safety first!
Since the brass had no idea where the enemy was, they sent us grunts out as bait. Have us blunder around through the nasty terrain, snipers and booby traps in hopes that we'd stir up a hornets nest. Sure a few grunts would get killed or maimed, but that was a low price to pay for precipitating a major firefight.
We didn't have colonels like Joshua Chamberlain, Chesty Puller or Red Mike Edson who actually were with the troops. Our colonels were more like Captain Binghamton. It's no wonder the 'leadership' was caught off guard by Tet.
Our officer corps was terrible then. I hope it's changed now, but I doubt it.
4
There was one officer, Captain Moore, who saved lives at his base camp with a last defensive stand to allow Hueys have a safe LZ. He was supported by a very brave Sargeant who later saved lives in one of the Towers. Unfortunately, if you are led by a failure like Westmoreland, rather than by a leader like Eisenhower or George Marshall, you are crippled by really bad leadership. Eisenhower would have moved Westmoreland back to a base where he could do no harm; or he would have demoted him and then moved him away from troops. Eisenhower did not support bullying troops; he did not support Patton's abuse of men who were suffering from shell shock/PTSD. Eisenhower did not support Montgomery's braggadocio and refused to cede leadership to him. I doubt Eisenhower would have been willing to serve under the current draft dodger in the WH.
1
LtCol - later LtGen - Hal Moore was the commander (in the Ia Drang valley). (Read 'We Were Soldiers Once...and Young.') And Rick Rescorla - born in Wales, later immigrated to the US and volunteered to serve in the US Army - was that sergeant. (Read 'Heart of a Soldier' - outstanding book about Rescorla, who, following his time in the US Army, was chief of security at Morgan Stanley in the World Trade Center during 9/11.)
1
To your question: "Why Did No One See the Tet Offensive Coming?"
One could similarly inquire about the Chinese intervention in the Korean War in 1950.
Or the German Ardennes offensive in 1944 and Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The list goes on and on.
Bad things can happen in war when complacency and/or a lack of imagination sets in. Thank you for the article and for your public service.
www.thewaryouknow.com
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There are no medals given for preventing disasters when they don't happen.
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If enough people keep saying it to each other, even the biggest self-delusion can be taken as fact.
1
So, basically, judging from what qualifies for US "leadership" today, the US government has never been interested in quality information or facts.
I apologize for appearing to call Mr. Oglesby tiresome in my previous comment. I stand by my original point, which was that the Viet Nam War could not be won, regardless of the results of the Tet Offensive. However, Mr. Oglesby's story illustrates an important point: Even if the purpose of the Viet Nam War was not wrong-headed to start with, we still would not have been capable of winning it because of petty bureaucratic in-fighting of our governmental agencies. That message would ring truer today if the wars we are fighting now were not all wrong-headed, too.
1
Apparently no one in the military or in the foreign service had bothered to read "The Ugly American," which had been published 10 years before Tet, or spent an evening watching the movie which predated the attack by 5 years. Apparently, little to nothing has changed in the intervening half-century, and, under the current administration, most certainly will not for the foreseeable future.
3
A more interesting question is whether something like Tet could occur today.
According to the Bild Zeitung of Wednesday the last Soviet exercise involved attacks by bombers on Germany and us (the Netherlands), with the simultaneous occupation of the Baltic states.
Garry Kasparov has warned for Putin ("Winter is coming"), who would have expressed an admiration for Krushev's nuclear games in the 60s. If Kim is in cahoots with him, we can indeed expect all kind of weird events. One scenario: First Putin would let the US tear itself to pieces, with the GOP letting itself be bribed by the tax cut for the rich, permitting Trump to wreck everything. Finally, Kim would take care of the remains, I guess: by another Pearl Harbor or Battle of the Bulge attack similar to Tet?
Of course, this is all nonsense and fake news. In fact, it is the scenario of the game that I intend to bring on the market shortly: I hope to make a lot of money out of it. But where to invest the profits?
The North Vietnamese used the siege at Khe Sanh to deceive Wesrmoreland and Johnson into believing it was Dien Bien Phu 2.0. Johnson had a sand table of Khe Sanh built in the White House basement. Westmoreland spent more time looking in mirrors to make sure he looked like a general than behaving like a knowledgeable commander. LTG Frederick Weyand II Field Force Commander who had a background in military intelligence convinced Westmoreland to take some time off from telling Johnson he wouldn't have no DinBinFoo and being duped by Giap and move a number of units to the vicinity of Saigon in December of '67 or Westy might have been captured. Command presence on the NVA ruse at Khe Sanh enabled the disaster at Hue and other parts of the country. The NVA was fighting a war, the US Military was punching tickets
1
I was 11 years old when Tet happened, and watched it at point-blank range on TV. In those days the TV coverage was up close and nonstop. Walter Cronkite’s face told us this was the end.
In rapid succession we had the Chicago police riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Kent State killings, the Pentagon Papers, the My Lai massacre, the CIA overthrow of Allende’s democratically-elected government in Chile, the publication of the COINTELPRO files detailing the FBI’s misdeeds of 20 years, topped off by the Church Committee’s investigation into and report of the CIA’s evil-doings abroad in the ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s.
I went from a little kid enamored of my country as a world leader because of our role in winning WWII and our space program to a young man thinking that while the average American was perhaps OK our government in D.C. was corrupt and incompetent.
I will say this. The cynical attitude I adopted has served me well as a litigator. But the killing of any faith I had in our national government institutions was probably inevitable in any case.
2
Interesting essay makes valid points, but title does a disservice to young intelligence officer William Binney, who warned superiors that a major offensive was imminent.
2
Not seeing it coming and losing are two vastly different things. Walter Cronkite and other left-leaning "journalists" helped (wittingly or unwittingly) the North Vietnamese turn a self-admitted failure into a resounding propaganda victory that helped break the will of the American people. This corrosive, left-wing influence can be traced from its beginnings H. v. Kaltenborn's reporting from the Spanish Civil War, through Edward R. Murrow, to Walter Cronkite and beyond. It continues to this day.
3
Edward R. Murrow stayed in London during the Blitz and reported on how the Brits were holding strong. He was not a "leftist" journalist; he was a respected man whose opinion was valued; he supported FDR's Lend Lease. Walter Cronkite was a respected journalist who spoke truth to power; he had enough information to know that Vietnam was an internal civil war with no plans to "invade" San Francisco. He had enough honor to know that General Ky was a corrupt thief of material goods, and that Ho Chi Minh was a folk hero who beat the French. If there was any corrosive influence in Vietnam it was the U.S. embassy coddled folk who had no clue what was happening outside their air conditioned quarters. The corrosive influence was, as always, our MIC which always looks to see a way to profit from death, destruction and any possible forever war. Without ongoing wars, how will these Pentagon wide loads get promotions and fat pensions? A good example of the worst kind of leadership is the draft dodger in the WH who ordered a hopeless attack by our Special Ops against a heavily defended site for negligible intel. Obama had scratched that operation, being the thoughtful man he was. Two Scoops Trump ordered it to proceed. Why do we listen to a General who actually talked about a possible "compromise" with slave holders during the Civil War? Slave holders who used human beings as farm animals. There is rot and corruption holding sway in the WH and in Congress.
Tet changed the outcome of the war in the sense that a few weeks after Tet and the N,V.A. retreat from Khe Sahn, Hanoi agreed to a negotiated peace. Tet was the "battle of the bulge" in Vietnam. If the N.V.A had seized the provincial capitals, as they had planned, there would not have been a general uprising of the people as Hanoi had hoped. The short-term capture of most of Hue City showed that. No doubt the news of the capture of the capitals would have caused a political uprising at home that would have caused a U.S. withdrawal.
There was light at the end of the tunnel. By winning the battle of Tet, the US forced Hanoi to negotiate for an end to the war. The propaganda victory of the N.V.A. gave Hanoi a stronger bargaining position. The perfidy of Nixon and Republican party leaders sabotaging the peace talks prolonged the war for seven more years and added 20,000 names to the Wall. That treachery is not a secret; the documents have been declassified but it is largely underreported and unknown.
3
Yes, indeed. The recent reporting of the presently declassified Notes and notations show that President Nixon did whatever he could to frustrate LBJ's efforts at arriving at an agreement with the North Vietnamese. In short, Candidate Nixon's perceived domestic political gains led to his sabotaging the LBJ initiatives.
1
"For decades Terres Rouges, along with the Michelin chain, had been jewels in the crown of French colonial agricultural exporters."
I'm not sure what the point of the article was but it gave a glimpse into the colonialism that motivated the dogged resistance of the Vietnamese.
Decades of outright theft of "latex, the “white gold” so prized in world markets" from a poor country by a wealthy European country, and yet western media were scratching their heads wondering why the Vietnamese didn't "appreciate" our efforts to "save them" from the communists.
2
As throughtout all history, generals always fight " the last war". Vietnam was not Korea, and a lack of understanding the cultural aspects of the Vietnamese themselves, corruption in the Siagon Government, and American over confidence in hoping for an open field conventional battle with the NVA lead to the surprise. On the NVA side, General Giap and Ho Chi Minh, thought the surprise attack would kead to to a popular uprising against the Siagon government. Each side misread the signals from the other side...a tragedy. This is why , today, we need local, on the ground intelligence when fighting ISIS.
1
I didn't know if Tet was known or unknown. But what I do know, everyone by 1967 knew we could not "win".
3
I sorely missed, the Army sorely missed, the USA sorely missed the "Bone Spurred" yugely smart person leading us during the Vietnam war. If only he had been with us, dodging bullets, mortars and rockets like the rest of us, then we would have easily won the war. He wouldn't have listened to these intelligence reports either, because he is so smart.
17
I left Vietnam in June 1967, earlier we were told by the brass that the Iron Triangle was pacified, had been cleared of Victor Charlie. There were just two problems. First, anyone traveling on the Vung Tau highway knew not to do so during darkness. Second, within two months of the pacification announcement the VC blew up one of the largest US ammo dumps in Vietnam. The brass lied to the administration as well as themselves. The contrary evidence was there and they ignored it. It was a piece of my education there; that the war was mismanaged, to the realization that we had done extreme physical, economic and cultural damage and to a decision to focus my future on helping people instead.
5
There are two basic reasons the top brass did not see the Set Offensive coming.
First, in these days the US military preferred to fight the last war, not the current one. In 1967 the NVA and NLF staged an uprising in the countryside so our top generals were ready for it in 1968. The Vietnamese knew this and so had their uprising in the cities. Heck, I was only 18 and I expected an uprising in the cities.
Second, for people like Westmoreland and McNamara this was not simple ignorance. Even with our general disinterest in intelligence, there were indicators out the wazoo. The big boys didn't ignore them, they SUPPRESSED them.
2
I do not know what motivated McNamara or Westmoreland and people like them. I know that they knew they were lying to the American people, and that they were actively suppressing LOTS of intelligence. I cannot imagine they did not know that many more Americans would die because of their suppressing actionable intelligence. And as it turned out they lost the war. .
Hard for many to admit, but, we never had a chance. Winning was never defined and was never our, as in my, goal anyway. Most of us we're there to survive for 13 months and go home in one piece. The Vietnamese were already home and they had no place else to go. They had gone through the Chinese, Japanese, and the French. We had baseball and football, they had the insurgency. We were just one more temporary obstacle in the way of a united Vietnam. Time was on their side as much as was the terrain, the weather, and the ideology. LBJ was no Ho Chi Minh. A Midwestern boy on his own was totally outclassed. When will they ever learn? Seemingly, never!
8
I have no idea. My year in Vietnam, June 1966-67, had an exuberant but peaceful Tet. My duty stations were in Saigon and at Tan Son Nhut. The person who replaced me was shot at, but missed. The strategy designed by SecDef McNamara was doomed to fail. His major concentration was keeping the USSR and China from taking a more active role. I don’t think he was aware of the centuries old animosity of the Vietnamese for China. Nowadays, the Vietnamese buy jetliners from Boeing. What a waste of lives and treasure!
6
we have visited this military blindness of risk since and continued to fail:
1. Iraq in 2003 would welcome our invasion with flowers for our troops.
2. The new Viceroy in 2004 could discharge the Baath Iraq Army and simply send them home.
3. that the Taliban would retreat to Pakistan and never return.
4. that South Korea would be safe if the Korean War bins anew.
Who speaks truth to power today?
4
Actually the assault was much more effective against South Vietnamese civilian targets than it was against US army and air force bases. US Military intelligence fared considerably better and MP units at most of the big bases like Bien Hoa and Long Binh were ready and waiting for the Viet Cong offensive. This is well documented in a number of books, such as Keith Nolan's "The Battle for Saigon: Tet 1968."
4
We did not notice 3 million Chinese soldiers entering Korea a decade and a half earlier either. This happens to insular elites, whether civilian or military.
2
I had always planned to be a career Marine. But as the S-2 in a helicopter squadron in Chu Lai I was astounded to realize that career officers repeatedly put following the rules and agreeing with superiors over knowing the enemy. I quit the Marines as soon as I got back to the USA. For all practical purposes we paid no attention to the available intelligence. On one occasion I told our guys not to fly over a certain village because we were always getting shot at. Of 20 helicopters on a strike mission 16 went around the village. One section of 4 helicopters flew over the village. One bullet hit and killed one of the most respected sergeants in our squadron. I'm still bitter about that.
3
Tell me all about it Henry, as a grunt officer we questioned and were assured by the aviation types that a planned insertion into an LZ near the Song Be River would be dry despite its close proximity to the river. When the helicopters refused to touch down I knew the truth of it, jumped and went into the water up to my neck. The LZ was cold, and so were we after we got off it to dry land. Lol Glad to see you're enjoying yourself down there! Take care.
1
As an intel Officer on the ground for Tet '68, I can tell you that lots of the US Military knew exactly what was happening and they knew it months in advance. Some of the reasons I know this have to do with the fact that we identified nearly all NVA and VC unit locations and tracked all their movements continuously.
Knowing we had the power to crush any offensive, there was reason to wait until they showed their hand. Not telling the press or anyone not cleared is the reason it's called "intelligence". In the final results of Tet it is clear that it was a decisive victory for the US. Unfortunately War can't be fought in the press and particularly one where the over arching reasons were so ill conceived and just wrong.
8
Ron ... Thank you for your service. However, as a retired strategist I disagree that Tet was a victory for the US. As you note, we knew where the VC were and much about VC unit strength. We fought the war, as did the French before us, as a defensive action ... "just do not lose." We had the ability to severely damage VC units before Tet but those in senior command chose not to do so, preferring to allow "them to come to us." Being on defense means one has to win every battle, which turned out not possible.
There were other issues as well. First, a highly corrupt government in South Viet Nam that was focused on major cities and not the countryside. Second, the Army of Viet Nam, while having some highly competent units, was largely a "paper tiger" with many soldiers who did not want to be there (or fight). Third, the VC and North Viet Nam positioned themselves as fighting invading colonial forces (Japan, France, US) and we had no compelling counter-narrative. We never truly had the "hearts of the people," especially those in rural areas who largely were apolitical and wanted mainly to ensure their families were fed and secure.
1
An institution is constructed to perform a certain function in society: it is in the public interest.
An institution comprises individuals who have their own individual interest.
Individual and public interest are often in conflict. The larger the institution, the larger and longer-lasting the conflict.
In the hierarchy of the institution, truth is often at variance with the (career) interest of the individuals. Manipulation of the reality, or what is perceived as reality, becomes a career skill. What does your boss want to hear?
In an organization, it is important that information reaches the top fast, so that reaction times can be minimized. But one should be aware of the filters for the information, and the reaction times of adapting them. Some changes take a new generation.
Individuals may be smart, but institutions may be stupid.
As my mother always said: "the truth cannot be told". This is an exaggeration, of course, but contains an element of truth.
I have begun to read Hue 1968 by Mark Bowden. My desire to learn about the war was sparked by Ken Burn's documentary. I was a freshman in high school in 1968 and until now new very little about the war or the lies that our governmental leaders sowed from JFK, Johnson to Nixon. My ignorance about "my time" as I describe it was profound until now. I was a dumb jock, chasing high school girls and oblivious to my peers dying and what the protests across out country were really about. Thankfully I have learned a lot and Hue seems to reinforce the terrible travesty that was taking place in Vietnam and in the US. Thanks for sharing your story. It is yet another lesson that I am saddened to learn about. I continue to be afraid that our leaders never learn.
1
And the U.S. Embassy appeared to have learned little from their failure to discern political reality on the ground in Vietnam before the Tet Offensive. After Tet I was briefed in Saigon by White House aid Richard Komer who tried to convince me that Vietnam was perfectly safe again and that I could continue recruiting volunteer doctors for a medical project I had initiated. What he showed me was a computer printout showing, he said (and apparently believed to be) the current level of loyalty to the Saigon Government of every hamlet and town in South Vietnam, reported weekly by local commanders. How could that be wrong?
2
The primary cause of willful disregard of the facts was electoral politics. Johnson could not be seen as losing a war and win an election. Thus the military was tasked with creating a fiction of success in Vietnam. Self preservation is the primary task of all politicians. Look at the behavior of Donald Trump.
The specifics recounted are typical of how bureaucracies actually operate. Each subunit looks out for its own interests. The fight between the army and navy is as old as the nation. It should be no surprise that an intelligence unit distrusts information outside its own sources. If fact, outside sources can be seen as a threat to the intelligence unit. Anyone who has worked in a large organization, both corporate and government, has seen these internacene forces in play.
1
i think it was General Weyand who convinced Westmorland to keep American units around Saigon before Tet. Had he not listened to Weyand the result might have been worse. My own Commanding General missed death when five insurgents broke into his fortunately empty hooch. The general wasn’t popular above or below and would later be relieved, but he was spared the ignominy of being killed in his own hooch in the middle of an American base camp. I suspect that many senior officers at the time who were in many cases seasoned and successful commanders from WW2 and Korea were just unable to adjust from line warfare to the type of irregular war pursued by the Vietnamese. Tet was a debilitating tactical defeat for the North and they would take years to recover. What Americans misread in the battle was that they had won some kind of strategic victory, as future events would dictate, it wasn’t the Americans who had won a strategic victory it was the North Vietnamese who had.
1
None of this is a surprise. My brother, who was in intelligence early in the war, told me that the military knew that the war couldn't be won, but that this assessment was ignored.
These articles on Vietnam leave me flummoxed as to why we are still obsessing over a long past mistake made by professional mistake makers in government and elective office.
I was twenty three during Tet, attending graduate school, and just gotten married. Everyone I knew thought the war in Vietnam was a mistake from day one. Full stop.
My friends were all concentrating on avoiding the draft and getting on with life. We couldn't feel responsible for the insanity of our government.
If it was a mistake then, how can it be any different now? The irony of America is that it is a country held in high esteem for many years at the same time it was a habitual mistake maker, particularly in starting wars that didn't need to be started.
When you look to those who benefit from America's wars it is usually the same bad actors, the defense industry contractors, lobbyists, and members of Congress. America's war machine has been it's economic engine for a very long time. There is nothing new under the sun!
4
"These articles on Vietnam leave me flummoxed as to why we are still obsessing over a long past mistake made by professional mistake makers in government and elective office."
Because, as the saying goes, "those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it." If we do not learn from our mistakes, we will continue to make them.
3
On Veteran's Day I listened to a speech(on Cspan) given by a nurse who served in Vietnam. She told of an enlisted woman whose job was intelligence. That woman reported to her Army superiors that her sources had told her about the approaching Tet offensive. Because the soldier was a woman, she was not taken seriously.
1
History is replete with intelligence that was filtered up to decision makers in such a way that expectations were met, when in reality they weren't.
1
The years of lies about how much progress we were making in the war caught up with us. This was truly the beginning of the end to this fiasco. I got drafted after Tet and refused induction, refused to serve unless I was granted Medic training, eventually refusing to wear my uniform once I saw what was coming back from 'The Nam' while stationed at The Burn Treatment Center for our returning service members. I had a Court Martial charged against me, paid a price, but I've never looked back with regrets.
2
Two things that led to Tet were signs that it was inevitable: First, the war was unwinnable, and hanging on with military resources alone was a loser. Secondly, there was not just one war taking place. Each unit in the country had its own little war. My unit's intelligence section was not the next units intelligence section. The war was a mess from start to finish. We were just unwilling or unable, for political reasons, to see it. But it does offer an unending opportunity to analyze it, although we haven't learned anything from that analysis.
2
These first-hand reports from Viet Nam are getting tiresome. In this case, a few military bureaucrats taking notice of VC preparations for the Tet Offensive would have had little or no long-term effect. If we had prepared for the Tet offensive, the VC could simply have delayed it until the American people were even more tired of a war that most of us did not understand, and that most of us who did understand opposed. In strictly military terms, it might have looked like a failure, but it was a success because it demonstrated that the Vietnamese people were unwilling to be subjugated again. It showed the American people that we would need to kill so many people in the name of freedom that we would have to become a different people ourselves. So to me, the intelligence failures in Viet Nam were inevitable, because of the erroneous ideology that got us into war there, and meaningless, because there was never a chance we would win that war.
4
Interesting. In the mid-60s, I had the impression that Le Monde Diplomatique and Agency Presse-France were more reliable sources of information about Vietnam than major American (or British) media outlets and that de Gaulle had a better understanding of the forces in play in Vietnam and their motivations than Kennedy, Johnson, or McNamara did.
Unfortunately the article does little to actually explain "why no one saw the Tet offensive". To spend a lot of time getting to the point of "The United States had reached that point of delusion in the Vietnam War where “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and listening to its own voice..." really adds little to the conversation.
Pearl Harbor, the D-Day Landing, the Battle of the Bulge, Inchon Landing and the Chinese Counter Offensive in Korea were just some of the more recent examples of surprise attacks preceding Tet that in retrospect now seem obvious and predictable.
We might similarly ask why did the military so badly fail to anticipate the post Iraq invasion counter-strike or for that matter the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan.
It is the essence of "surprise" that an opposing force is able to do what seems unlikely or even impossible. Gordon Prange, in his "At Dawn We Slept" about Pearl Harbor, which is equally true about Tet, summed it up best,
"Pearl Harbor resulted from a vast combination of interrelated, complicated, and strange historical factors: on the one hand, bountiful human errors of great variety, false assumptions, fallacious views, a vast store of intelligence badly handled; on the other, precise planning, tireless training, fanatical dedication, iron determination, technical know-how, tactical excellence, clever deception measures, intelligence well gathered and effectively disseminated, plain guts--and uncommon luck."
4
Victory of the USA in Vietnam was never possible despite the use of all sorts of weapons and pesticides.
Facing
A resolute population were mostly disgruntelled , war weary, policy rejecting GI s most of whom had either participated in the anti war public demonstrations or a majority of their friends and relatives who did!
An unconvinced army of Green Card holders and unemployed can never defeat a resolute population led effectively by the party of major public support!
2
The Tet offensive was not foreseen, and the US eventually expelled from Vietnam, because we had failed to heed (and still fail to heed) the wise words issued to us by President Eisenhower as he left office. "Never again should US armed forces set foot on the mainland of Asia." It has proved nothing but catastrophe for ourselves and others every time. We never seem to learn.
3
Victory was not only possible, it was achieved by 1972. The Tet offensive was defeated, though at an unnecessarily high price. The price would have been lower had we listened to sources like this one.
The final catastrophe came not from the failure of counter-insurgency (that we finally learned how to do), but because we betrayed South Vietnam in the face of a North Vietnamese offensive n 1975.
1
It is good to read Sam's piece and learn of his experience. My wife and I visited Viet Nam in 2008, when our oldest daughter was teaching in Can Tho. We were in Hue that February, knowing the 40 years before, the very ground on which we walked was being stained by fire, fury and blood. Shell holes still cratered the walls of the Imperial City, but in some of them, small shoots of green plants gained a foothold on life. Yes, let's reflect on the criminality of ignoring the intelligence, but, as a society, let's choose life, as those plants growing in the walls of Hue symbolize.
The question "Why did those in charge choose to ignore the buildup to the Tet offensive?" is sort of like "Why did our security experts choose to ignore warnings about Saudis learning to take off, but not land?" or "Why didn't those who knew about the imminent Pearl Harbor attack choose to warn the people who were in harm's way?" Slightly different answers to each question, but they all have to do with personal gain and having plausible deniability for putting other people at risk. The problem has always been the people in charge, and Donald Trump is our Commander in Chief. Have a nice holiday.
2
We are still too focused without, when within our own house is ablaze.
Casualties for all combat troops outside the United States will not be one percent of opiod death rate.
We will lose more children to gang violence than casualties abroad.
Public schools are failing.
We have troops in African nations that most Americans don't know exist, and certainly don't know why. We are propping up corrupt regimes with horrible horrible human rights records.
These wars are largely local tribal beefs.
The opposition grabs an international brand maybe to gain experienced fighters.
Were they to do some serious local reform there would be no internal civil war.
We haven't learned a thing in fifty years.
2
Your story reminds me of the need for diplomacy.
I trust that when Congress re-convenes in 2018 that the appropriations for USAID will be increased.
Thank you for your service to our country.
3
Kennedy and Johnson fought a political or diplomatic solution at every opportunity.
The US wanted to draw the N. Vietnamese into a 2nd Deinbeinphu at Khe Sanh with a large US military build up in an isolated area. The hope was that they could draw in large numbers on Northern forces and destroy them. Instead the North acted as if they were going to fall for the trap. So while American forces were far away from the population centers the VC acted against the urban centers and tried to cause an uprising against the South Vietnamese and the US. The Tet offensive was a severe shock to the US but they didn't have nearly the military capacity to defeat the US. The shock was such, especially with the USs constant talk of light at the end of the tunnel, that the US news media and the public took this as a severe defeat.
2
Why Did No One See the Tet Offensive Coming?
For the same reasons that no one saw:
1. Afghanistan coming to be a disaster
2. Iraq becoming to be a disaster
3. Trump coming to be a disaster
4. The 2008 economic crash of the USA came to be a disaster
Nobody plans far enough ahead to avoid catastrophes, and so disasters continue to happen,and will happen over and over again and again.
11
Actually in al the examples, there were many people who forsaw the outcomes but their views were stifled by partisan politics and the interests of Corporate America. This continues today because the majority of Americans remain undereducated and too lazy to actually read up on the realities. The current Trump regime's attacks on the media as "false news" and the GOP's silent acquiesce further underminds the search for reality.
1
The folks who paid the bills were interested in hearing a story they could use to get reelected, and the armed forces were interested in preserving their budgets and the gung-ho, can-do reputation that created support for their budgets. No one wanted to educate the voters about colonialism, nationalism, why Communism was attractive to many people, how anticommunism was often used to fight labor movements, civil rights, and the New Deal, or how the realpolitik approach to Vietnam would be to try and see if Ho was interested in being our Communist, an Asian Tito whose independent existence would drive the Soviets and the Chinese bananas.
Of course, such a figure would have given ideas to other peoples suffering under the sort of right-wing dictatorships we often favored in fact though not in ideology. There was a good deal of truth in what the Communists said about us and the sorts of governments we liked, just as there was a good deal of truth in what we said about them. On both sides, there was much less truth about what we told our own populations about what was going on. So we were stuck; rather than reeducation our people, we had to send 40000 of them to die in a war where any victory was bound to be Pyrrhic.
With enough troops, we could occupy Vietnam and keep terrorism to a minimum. A million or so rich Americans would destroy and pervert the local economy, so that we could not pull out without leaving a situation where the enemy would reemerge.
37
Exactly.
Every time I hear "we lost" , I think "lost what?"
The fact that we are not ruled by Vietnam should remind us that this was not a fight for the very existence of America, but a failure to achieve a foreign policy goal.
That should have provided perspective as to what was at stake, but that lesson has not yet been learned.
2
We knew, on the ground around Hue and DaNang, that an offensive of some sort was coming. Our patrols were showing a change in activity with huge increases in numbers of personnel moving that we came in contact with, and with the new/updated arms, in other words heavily armed NVA in large numbers moving...not looking for contact but movement that indicated digging in for something important. We knew it as grunts, our team leaders and captains reported it from in the field. But our tactics never changed, our preparations never changed...until it was all changed for us.
79
"an offensive of some sort was coming."
When I was in the Army, I was told the same by a fellow who had served as an MP at the big MACV HQ in Saigon during TET.
He said the MPs were told, before TET, to be especially vigilant as 'something big' might be attempted by the enemy.
Did that warning go to all the areas that needed to be informed?
Actually, a couple of high-ups did see the offensive coming. I published an article, "Tet in Retrospect," in the January 2008 issue of Liberty -- unfortunately it can only be accessed today through the copy in the Von Mises Institute's archives. As I recall, the CIA in Saigon and one of Westmorland's top commanders -- I want to say it was the general in charge of I Corps -- gave warnings in advance. And in response to the general's warning to Westmorland, the latter ordered some units to move out of the bush and closer to the towns. This probably prevented a catastrophe.
The real catastrophe for the Americans was of course political and psychological. LBJ, Westmorland, and DOD's propagandists had maintained that the enemy's power of resistance was waning, and that victory was within our grasp. That the NVA-Vietcong could mount such a big operation was an enormous shock to the US public. And then Cronkite made things worse by going on TV and editorializing that the war was basically lost, something that he really had no business doing. In fact, Tet was a big military defeat for the enemy from which the VC in particular never recovered.
Vietnam was a war that should never have been fought. But it was probably winnable, had it been fought somewhat differently. In any case there were a few people, military and civilian, who saw Tet coming.
20
Winnable as long as we permanently kept 20-30,000 troops there like Korea?
What about the South Vietnamese government?
I agree the fighting part could be won, but how much of a commitment would it have taken to win the peace?
These issues were poorly addressed if at all.
2
"Tet was a big military defeat for the enemy.."
One often hears this yet the Tet offensive, as is also stated in this article, was the turning point that led to American realization, correct or not) that the war was being lost and to eventual American withdrawal.
"[the Vietnam war] was probably winnable."
What would an American "win" have looked like today? today? Today Vietnam has a capitalist-based economy and a government that is allied to American resistance against Chinese hegemony. The cost was 3 to 5 million Vietnamese and some 60,000 American dead.
An American "win" in Vietnam would have meant a tinderbox country split into a rogue hard communist North and a colonial capitalist South in the manner of the Koreas. How would that be a better situation for Washington than the present one?
2
Tet was technically a defeat for the VC and the north, but Cronkite got it right, in terms of sentiment, Johnson had lost the American people and much of the military itself. We pursued the war like a dog chasing a car, or it's own tail, and had we stayed it would have been like the dog catching the car, either getting killed or not having a clue what to do next. Though we "prevailed" in Tet, it was a pyrrhic victory at best.
2
Recall that Col Walter Kurtz repeatedly warned the Pentagon of the Tet offensive but was ignored by careerist brass who didn't want to risk their promotions by challenging the leadership.
Oh wait, that was fiction? No, that was the truth. What we were told is the fiction.
35
Some of us at home were not so surprised by Tet, either. We knew all along how wrong the US invasion of Vietnam was and had been protesting since '64. We cheered the inevitable turn of the war to the Vietnamese side--the ONLY Vietnamese side.
13
If I read you correctly, you were cheering on American GI deaths? I admit to being far too young to remember this part of the war, but the horrendous treatment of our returning GI's is directly attributable to people like you.
I agree that the war was wrong, but we were in it, and supporting our troops was the first casualty.
5
I'm glad you felt so good about draftees dying.
4
'The United States had reached that point of delusion in the Vietnam War where “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel” and listening to its own voice was easier and more reassuring than facing the hard reality that “victory” was not possible.'
Another delusion that persisted in the minds of the Americans? That at *any time* between 1954 and 1975, had the entire country, both north and south, been allowed to proceed with an open plebiscite, Ho Chi Minh and/or the Communists would have won the election. There was no time during that period that the side the Americans backed would have won an open election.
33
After 1968 I'm not so sure Uncle Ho would have run for office. Le Duan was the leader in the North by that time.
What's clear however is that no leader in Saigon had much of a following in either the South or the North.
Why does what happened 50 years ago remind me so strongly of our reality today, and no, I'm not even talking about Iraq or Afghanistan. Some hubris, some arrogance in our American character seems to make it normal to just refuse to accept reality. If you don't like climate change, scientific knowledge , etc., just make up your own facts...surely you can...after all, We're Number 1! Witness the recent outlawing of even saying particular words. The refusal to see reality will make us, ultimately, irrelevant to dealing with issues our world must confront.
140
"Some hubris, some arrogance in our American character seems to make it normal to just refuse to accept reality", aka, American Exceptionalism...
No one ever asks whether we should--I mean deserved--to win in Vietnam. Or asked what do we win if we win. Or how do we know we've won if we do.
You can substitute Iraq and Afghanistan and now Yemen.
In a great war film about WWII, "A Walk in the Sun" one of the platoon members rightly speculates about our unending wars with the dying declaration of a final battlefield of absurdity. Tibet.
10
That was a really good movie because of how it portrayed how soldiers actually were, not the John Wayne portrayal, but the Private type of portrayal’s. And as it turned out asked the right questions about war, and strangely enough provided the right answers. Thanks for writing about how that movie actually fit that war. Or for that matter any war.
4
Like the current administration continually bashing ‘fake news’ which doesn’t fit its party line, no one in power during the Vietnam war was going to listen to the truth which didn’t set with their projection of the war.
16
One thing's for certain: the foreign service has not changed one iota.
9
Agreed, worked as a contractor for the State Department for years, not impressed. Arrogance and pettiness characterizes it.
2
Neither has the military.
No one saw because their eyes were open but they weren't seeing. Denial is a universal and timeless shortcoming in many of us.
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This denial wasn't the kind of blatant arrogance one now sees with the Trump administration. LBJ and his cabinet KNEW Viet Nam was unwinnable. They also believed that admitting it was unthinkable, not just politically for themselves, but for the collective myth impossible to give up, that America never lost a war. They were between a rock and a hard place, and simply couldn't acknowledge the truth, even though they knew it in broad outline. Real courage in leadership is a rare thing, and other than Jimmy Carter, who paid for his honesty dearly, I can't think of anyone who had it. Maybe FDR.
This tragic story describes, of course, just one symptom of a now-longstanding problem with decision-making inside the US government -- a problem decidedly not peculiar to either major political party. I saw it first hand inside the government in the 1960s, and it's clear that institutionally we have learned nothing since then.
The bases, I think, are (1) our raw economic and military power, which permits us to make mistakes, continue down their path, and make new ones virtually without end; (2) a vicious combination of paranoia, empire-building, protecting "alllies," and wish to do good, which completely confuses us by setting conflicting goals in a given situation (where even the single goals are usually unattainable!); and (3) the prevailing need to show a "can-do" and/or macho attitude in policy debates -- which is inherent in our military mores but unnecessarily popular among the civilians who are supposed to take a larger view.
Never have I been able even to fantasize how we might emerge from this trap, which is so harmful to us as well as to the entire world. As long as we have the economic and military power to do harm anywhere we please, I expect we will do so. "Benign neglect" is beyond the imagination of whoever sits in power in Washington. Only our own decline, if and when it happens, will stop our blundering.
In this sense, the rising power of a China might be a good thing, even for us.
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Our decline is happening now. Some indicators are the inability to cancel failed military projects, the loss of jobs and stagnant income for the people, the off-shoring of critical manufacturing and increasingly of intellectual tasks including product development, the increasing diversion of tax money to big business, billionaires, and the military at the cost of preserving society with safety nets and education, the turning away from research and science, and the ideology of selfishness. These are partly underground at present but they hollow out the economic, then spiritual, then military strength of the country.
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The privatization and diversion extend inside the military also. They've outsourced many tasks, skill and trades to the point of vulnerability, focusing the increased funding on whiz-bang gadgets and gizmos, the more expensive the better, leaving the human side of the equation with the fuzzy end of the lollipop. A fighting force that doesn't cook, clean and build for itself is always going to find itself highly compromised. How many of us got haircuts from a Vietnamese barber who turned up dead the next day after a VC raid? How many troops got electrocuted in showers built by outside contractors in Iraq? As the song goes "when will they ever learn". It's as if the gov't. is looking for plausible deniability for mistakes and atrocities, while enriching the owners of private prisons, armies, etc.
3
Thomas-you forgot our woefully out of date infrastructure...
There were plenty of indicators that a major operation by the NVA and Viet Cong was coming. Westmorland was under pressure to look as if we were winning. Ignored the indicators. In the end Tet was an overreach by North Vietnam and a major military defeat. However the American news media made Tet into a propaganda victory for North Viet Nam. Walter Cronkite was as responsible as any individual for that propaganda victory.
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Sure. That's why we were defeated. The U.S. military is the strongest in the world.
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Cronkite merely reported that our strategy had failed. Maybe any strategy would have failed. Americans have a short attention span, not suitable for overcoming insurgencies.
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The US military better be the best, we are spending our children's future, our health care, our retirement, our infrastructure, our education, and finally our democracy to support them.
13
I was there. The decision makers in Washington had an objective in mind and it was based upon old thinking and political calculations.
They never got to the point where they respected the enemy's leadership enough to try and understand their game plans.
I was there
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The author writes:
“The United States had reached that point of delusion in the Vietnam War where “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel” and listening to its own voice was easier and more reassuring than facing the hard reality that “victory” was not possible.”
It’s not clear what he means by the “United States” in this context. If he means the citizens of the country then, yes, many believed this.
If he means the government, then no. There’s plenty of evidence to show that by Tet the government knew the war was not winnable.
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McNamara finally admitted this; many, many years and millions of deaths too late. He was a big proponent of the Vietnam War, at the time.
2
Some of us back home weren't surprised either. You don't have to be a military genius to know that the advantage is with people defending their own territory against foreign invaders who don't speak the language. The U.S. is making the same mistake in Afghanistan, with the same results--after 16 years of war, the Taliban controls or contests at least 45% of the country.
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Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency (1966) was written, as it were, in the past tense, grounding his arguments on the assumption that the war in Viet Nam was lost. It's a good book.
But if you think "I don't want to hear it" guided U.S. policy in Viet Nam, just wait till you get a good look at Iraq!
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Fifty years later and we still have not learned most of the lessons we could have learned the lessons of an Ivory Tower bureaucracy.
With the country, this country, divided as it is, I am not looking forward to what may happen right here in the USA.
Let's hope we don't see the same results as we did in Viet Nam, Nicaragua, Iraq, ad naseum. All the waste and suffering because of lousy leadership.
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Why was who surprised?
The American public was surprised because we'd been told just the opposite.
The American military leadership was surprised because they just refused to listen to our signals intelligence analysts who followed units moving and getting ready.
They had detected the offensive preparations, and predicted it. That was unwelcome news, and those who did not welcome it just refused to listen.
"Perhaps there are no intelligence failures. We can always find an analyst who correctly forecasted what was to come. The blame lies with decision makers who fail to heed the intelligence and act. So instead of intelligence failures we have operational failures or failures of leadership.
"At this point we hit an unexpected obstacle: credibility. Several of us went to brief the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. William Peers. I warned him that a multi-division North Vietnamese attack on Dak To would take place at any moment, coincident with attacks throughout the highlands. He shook his head and pointed to our camp on Engineer Hill. “So I’m supposed to believe that some kind of magic allows a bunch of shaky girbs” — acronym for “G.I. rat bastards” — “distinguished more for their spit than their polish and abetted by a civilian, to use a tangle of antennas and funny talk to divine the combat plans of the enemy?” He waved us away. The briefing was over."
https://fortunascorner.com/2017/11/04/tet-offensive-really-surprise/
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According to this, the U.S. military had degenerated dramatically since World War II, where the clever use of radio intelligence and fake radio signalling was an essential part of the D-Day invasion.
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Parts of the US military. Gen MacArthur stood out as clueless from the time he got wiped out in the Philippines until he got wiped out in Korea. Never listened.
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The author's title is of course rhetorical. He answers the question in his essay. Plenty of people did see an offensive coming, but their intelligence data and opinions were rejected by those whose jobs were only ostensibly to provide intelligence. That job was effectively contravened by MACV's desire to support its contention that the war was winnable and being won and the resulting desire of too many in intelligence to curry favor and promotion by confirming it.
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Lovely anecdote, but hardly probative. The South Vietnamese and U.S. governments were well aware that control of the provincial capitals did not evidence control of the provinces themselves. What they failed to adequately detect and account for were the infiltrating Viet Cong among those fleeing the countryside for the relative security of the cities. Tet would have caused far less damage and done less to compromise the citizens' mistrust of their government except for the actions of the VC strike forces that arose within the cities.
4
Years ago, my brother-in-law, several close relatives on my side of the family, and many of my college friends were drafted to Vietnam. Many never came home. But the ones who did return were furious at the brass in Washington for not listening to commanders on the ground who knew we were losing and should have left long before we did. To this day, we are involved in wars that kill and maim so many innocent civilians, and I fear that peace will never happen...ever.
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I think Paul Gallagher has just agreed that the anecdote is probative. The commanders could have known about various infiltrations if they had listened to their own analysts.
All that said, I'm glad we lost. We deserved to lose that and many other wars where we've tried and still try to control other countries, often without even the economic motive that Marine general Smedley Butler blamed for our interference in Latin America in the early 20th century.
18
As long as so many of us can avoid/dodge military or national service, the military will remain as it has become: a sort of rescue or step up for the poorest in our society. No one of importance nor is his or her child in harm's way. It always wasn't like that but ending the draft has "insulated" 95 plus percent of us from it.
1