War

In the beginning was Viet Nam, the alpha and omega of an increasingly tangled American psyche. Thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland, the nation’s optimism and self-image were bogging down. By January 1968, nearly 16,000 Americans had died in Viet Nam; more than 100,000 had been wounded. The number of U.S. troops in that remote, frustrating country hit 500,000 in February. At home, the strain of the war effort was rubbing harder against the certainties of Pentagon planners, as Americans watched nightly televised images of young men engaged in search-and-destroy missions with a stubbornly invisible enemy. Nonetheless, official American confidence was largely unshaken. The Communist enemy was believed by Lyndon Johnson’s White House to be “struggling to stave off military defeat.”

Then came the nightmare of Tet. At dawn Viet Nam time on Jan. 30, 1968, fireworks sputtered in celebration of the lunar new year. Amid the cacophony, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces attacked Da Nang, South Viet Nam’s second-largest city, and seven other major towns, breaking the Tet truce. Within 24 hours they hit 36 of 44 provincial capitals and overran almost all of the former colonial capital of Hue. Communist shock troops penetrated the heart of Saigon to attack the U.S. embassy and presidential palace. They drove General William Westmoreland into a windowless command bunker. “What the hell is going on?” Walter Cronkite wondered aloud as he prepared the evening’s newscast. “I thought we were winning this war.”

The Communists hoped their offensive would spark an uprising against the government of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu. It did not: the invaders were thrown back, suffering disastrous casualties. Yet for the brilliant North Vietnamese commander, General Vo Nguyan Giap, Tet was an important symbolic victory. American confidence in the war effort, and in the leadership that had promised success, was irrevocably shattered. The images of war — always shocking, bleak, agonizingly poignant — took on a darker significance. “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” declared a U.S. major in the battle for Ben Tre, a provincial capital.

The U.S. did not lose the Viet Nam war in 1968, but the year was a series of national traumas. After Tet, Americans suffered in their living rooms as more than 5,000 U.S. Marines held out for weeks after being surrounded at Khe Sanh, a redoubt in the chilly, wet South Vietnamese highlands. The heroism under heavy fire reminded many of the French troops who surrendered in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. But the Marines did not surrender. In March, Westmoreland was replaced as U.S. commander in South Viet Nam by General Creighton Abrams. President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. In the same month, whispers spread of a horrifying massacre of civilians carried out by U.S. troops at a hamlet called My Lai. In May, North Vietnamese representatives landed in Paris to start talks — seemingly endless talks — with U.S. delegate Averell Harriman. In June, the Marines were told to abandon Khe Sanh. The U.S. high command had decided it was no longer a vital outpost.