Twenty-five years ago this weekend, 60,000 Viet Cong guerrillas and soldiers from the regular North Vietnamese army launched the Tet Offensive, the biggest communist assault of the Vietnam War.
When the raids began on Jan. 30, 1968, Joe Kostyk, then a 19-year-old Marine sergeant and reconnaisance specialist, was sent to the old imperial city of Hue, where the fiercest battles of the offensive soon unfolded.
Fifty miles west, Ken Penn, then a 23-year-old Marine lieutenant from Park Ridge, was ducking into trenches and bunkers during incessant communist artillery and mortar barrages. Penn was one of 6,000 American Marines at Khe Sanh, a remote mountain base cut off a week earlier by 20,000 North Vietnamese.
And Dick Murray was a 20-year-old Air Force flight engineer rousted at 1 a.m. from his barracks in Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon as Viet Cong sappers ran across runways with satchels of explosives to blow up parked aircraft.
Though none of the men knew one another then or now, they were among 500 veterans meeting Friday and Saturday at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel to commemorate the most violent month of the Vietnam war.
The Tet Offensive got its name when communist troops violated a cease-fire they had declared, a cease-fire ostensibly set to celebrate the weeklong observance of Tet, the Chinese lunar new year, which began on Jan. 30 in 1968.
The false cease-fire turned out to be perhaps the communists’ greatest victory against America because it succeeded in turning American public opinion decisively against the war. But in military terms, Tet was the biggest success American troops and the Saigon forces would experience in the 13-year war.
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At the time, 500,000 American military personnel were in Vietnam. Most were personally confronted by the Tet Offensive.
Saigon desk jockeys and bureaucrats in secure headquarters offices were exposed to attack from 6,000 sappers who slipped into South Vietnam’s capital.
American advisers in remote villages had to rally ill-equipped and ill-trained local militias to stave off attacks by fellow villagers who used Tet to reveal their Viet Cong allegiance.
Hue, a city of 140,000 in the far north, was overrun by communist troops. A contingent of 800 American Marine advisers caught there fought desperately for days to avoid death while free-ranging communist troops hunted down and killed 6,000 civilians.
“Vietnam was a different war for almost every American who fought during Tet,” said Penn, now 48, a bank assistant vice president.
“In Khe Sanh, we were ducking in and out of trenches and bunkers during artillery attacks. We were fighting World War I. In Hue and Saigon, where they were fighting house to house, they were fighting World War II. Down in the Delta (in southernmost Vietnam), they were in the rice paddies.”
As the reunion chairman of the Khe Sanh Veterans Inc., a national organization of men who fought at Khe Sanh, Penn organized this weekend’s Tet get-together.
“I got to thinking that this year, being the 25th anniversary of Tet,” Penn said, “the whole Tet experience must hold special meaning to a whole lot of veterans. This was the turning point of the war, after all.”
It might seem strange that veterans would commemorate an event that led to the eventual withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam and the defeat of their South Vietnamese allies.
But when the offensive ended a month after it started, the communists were thoroughly beaten. America lost 1,000 men in the offensive. South Vietnam lost 2,800 men, while 14,000 civilians were killed. But 45,000 communist troops were killed, including virtually the entire leadership of the Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese guerrilla army.
War, however, is as much a political contest as a military one, and Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, was a consummate politician. Knowing his poor and small nation could not ultimately defeat the U.S. militarily, he worked to defeat the will of the American public.
As much as anyone, the American voters were the target in the Tet Offensive and siege at Khe Sanh. Ho wanted Americans to seriously question how long they were willing to pour billions of dollars and the lives of their sons and daughters into Vietnam.
For all the 45,000 communist fighters killed in the offensive, it was a doomed cadre of 19 insurgents who had the biggest role in making Tet a political success in the U.S. for the communists.
At 2:45 a.m. on Jan. 31, 1968, the second day of the offensive, a tiny, beatup, blue and white taxi and a truck pulled up next to a wall surrounding the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The 19 sappers jumped out, blew a whole through the wall with explosives and rushed into the embassy grounds, killing five American guards.
As that fight unfolded, on the other side of the international dateline in the U.S., it was early afternoon on Jan. 30.
Americans heard about the successful invasion of the embassy compound on evening newscasts. The next morning, newspapers were covered with photos and diagrams showing how the 19 raiders broke into the embassy compound and fought for six hours before the last one was slain.
That the embassy, the symbol of American majesty and power, could be so badly compromised in the middle of the capital came as a stunning shock to most Americans. The simultaneous early reports of dozens of major communist assaults on Americans and Vietnamese in virtually every corner of South Vietnam fed U.S. public bewilderment.
Barely two months earlier, giving a televised speech at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., on Nov. 21, 1967, General William C. Westmoreland reassured Americans the war was going well. Westmoreland said the war was about to enter the fourth and final phase of his blueprint to defeat the communists. And he said he thought the enemy was being sufficiently weakened that American troops might be able to begin withdrawing from Vietnam within two years.
“We are making progress,” Westmoreland told Americans. “It lies within our grasp. The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt. With your support, we will give you a success that will impact not only on South Vietnam but on every emerging nation in the world.”
When Tet exploded in Vietnam 10 weeks later, the mood in the U.S. shifted dramatically and irrevocably.
More than 20,000 Americans had died in the war, and the enemy seemed stronger, bolder and more resolved than ever. Americans no longer were willing to accept the Johnson administration’s or the Pentagon’s eternally rosy assessments of the war.
Richard Nixon, who announced his candidacy for the presidency on Feb. 1, 1968, three days into the Tet Offensive, campaigned on a promise of finding an honorable American exit from Vietnam.
It took five more years and more than 25,000 American lives before the U.S. pulled its last combat troops from Vietnam. Two years after that the communists rode into Saigon in triumph.
But the beginning of the end of the war was the Tet Offensive 25 years ago this weekend.
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Friday night at the Blackstone, men like Joe Kostyk, 44, an insurance salesman looking for work, and Dick Murray, 45, and a manager of a Forest Park bowling alley, said they were puzzled by the public reaction to Tet. Murray acknowledged that he remains bitter about a military victory being turned into a defeat.
“It was the politicians and the media who lost the war,” said Murray. “Tet was a great victory, but it was twisted by the media as a loss. The saying among vets goes, `When we lost Walter Cronkite, we lost the war.’ “