Tet Attacks Shattered U.S. Illusions on Vietnam

When the Tet offensive changed everything about the war in Vietnam, I was lounging in a tent, a hooch we called it, drinking a warm can of beer and counting days. I’d extended my tour twice already, and I’d had enough of ‘Nam.

I’d filled in the squares of my short-timer’s calendar with ritualistic flourish. I was going home. There was free love back in The World, and love sounded mighty good for a change.

Those first hours of Tet were awful. You’re thinking you have it made, and suddenly realize you might not. The worst kind of bad luck was making your scheduled flight out of there in the plane’s wrong compartment.

The whole country--at least those parts of the country we considered “ours”--came under simultaneous attack. Down in Saigon, the U.S. Embassy was breached. Up in Hue, regiments of North Vietnamese took the city. Rockets and mortars rained down elsewhere, followed by infantry assaults.

Most of this war had been hit and run, with a few remote and brutal sieges. Always, our foe seemed to melt away into the bush ahead of what we believed was our overwhelming advantage of firepower. Now here they were. And they were coming at us.

I was a Marine sergeant. For my last months in Vietnam, I was assigned administrative duty with Navy, Army and Air Force hospitals. I was there to console the blinded, the burned, the shot and the blown apart. If a wounded Marine couldn’t see or hold a pencil in his hand, I wrote home for him.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. MacFarlane: I am sitting here at your son’s bedside.

The weight of it felt heavy. Everyone knew of protests back home. But I couldn’t allow thoughts of futility, not with all the blood and bandages and staph infections and fear and screaming pain in the night wards. I think I’m clear in my memory when I say I favored words like duty and sacrifice and honor and pride when I wrote of these boys. I’m pretty sure you won’t find many qualifiers in those old letters.

On that holiday of Tet 1968, I was only dimly aware that history had caught up with all of us there. We sensed only that something was very different in the nausea and panic and swirl of rumors that gripped the Danang airfield as we mustered to defend our side of the barbed wire.

What was happening in America confused me, but not our purpose in Vietnam. Later, when I came to understand my country, it was the ragged, tone-deaf pursuit of the war that confused me.

I think I share this lingering whiplash with thousands of other Vietnam veterans. Tet was a hairpin corner in all our lives.

When I speak to young people today, at least those who study history, I discover that Tet goes down as a moment of national enlightenment. The official lie of Washington was pierced by ghostly columns of North Vietnamese regulars.

I cannot argue with that interpretation, much as I wish it otherwise. I wish we had not been asked to swallow so awful a deceit. I saw the toll spelled out in acronyms on the casualty reports: MSW for multiple shrapnel wounds. GSW for gunshot wounds. TA for traumatic amputation. KIA was not a car.

Yes, Tet was a defeat. The North Vietnamese lost soundly. They sustained horrible casualties and, when the smoke cleared, they held nothing. But they proved they existed in numbers that we were led to believe were impossible. The word “sacrifice” belonged to them. They had withstood everything we were willing to throw at them for five years and then counterattack en masse. Tet was like the old days in Chicago when all the dead showed up to vote and carried the election. But the North Vietnamese showed up and weren’t dead after all.

We won back the territory but found the ground was too soft for our liking. A “quagmire,” we called it. Cliches are renewed by truths: We won the battle, lost the war.

Tet was more. It was the moment when we began to put qualifiers and question marks beside words like duty and honor and pride. It was the event that made sages and heroes of the skeptics, and nothing from then on would prove them wrong.

Tet was also less than we could have hoped. The war dragged on, thereafter a delusion, not an illusion. Tet could have, but did not, help us resolve powerful cross-currents in American life. When we look abroad today, we remain cocky in the culture of our ideas but divided about the nature of our responsibilities.

There is, I regret to say, no grand ergo at the end of this essay. If you want to know the meaning of the Tet New Year today, go to the economics section of the bookstore. Volumes on Asian business protocols will tell all about the cultural significance and how to behave on your trade trip.

But back then, yes back then, it was something else. It was thunder in the night. It was the vertigo that comes when the bottom falls away. It was a rocket hitting a bladder full of jet fuel and greasy orange fireballs leaping hot into the sky. It was the smell of red dirt in your face.

“Sarge,” whispered the boy on the perimeter next to me, “are they going to overrun us?”

He was 18. I was 20. Our world was aflame.