The narrative that I’ve always heard about the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War was that it was an American military victory and a Viet Cong defeat, but the US media screwed over the soldiers (and others) by wrongfully portraying it as an American defeat.
Now this narrative screams conservative bias - how true is it? And if the media really did do it, how deliberate was it?
It increased the casualty rate among U.S. troops, and this was not taken well stateside. People were already questioning the war, and the new surge in dead and injured G.I.s made it a public relations defeat. We didn’t want to see that.
It wasn’t deliberate misconstrual by the media. They showed the truth.
It was the “living room war” that was different from previous wars. The cost was right up front, for everyone to see. It would be just as wrong to accuse the government, in previous wars, of “covering up” the butcher’s bill. In WWII and Korea, the news cameras weren’t omnipresent, and so the ugliness was not as graphically communicated to the people at home.
What i dont understand is how the facts of Vietnam - LBJ fought, incompetently / Nixon ran away, incompetently - becomes a narrative of pinko democrats betraying our troops.
The media did not lie.
After being told, for around three years, that we were slowly winning the war against a disorganized bunch of rebels, they launched a significant attack, in which we incurred significant casualties at over 100 urban centers, and included actually capturing the U.S. embassy.
The U.S. beat back the Viet Cong operation, (recapturing the embassy in less than eight hours), inflicting even worse casualties on the Viet Cong, but the idea that a group that the U.S. military had reported as being on the verge of defeat could launch such an attack changed the views of many people who began questioning whether we were capable of defeating them.
That’s one thing that the government and military never got. They were always harping on about “kill ratios”, claiming that America because more enemy troops than Americans were dying, and they never understood that most of the American public didn’t give a shit about how many Vietnamese were killed. They only cared about the Americans, and a *lot *of those died in Tet.
My understanding is this was a big reason why LBJ decided not to run again in 1968.
General Westmoreland, in an address to the National Press Club on November 21, 1967:
Two months after making this unfortunate statement, the communists launched entirely by surprise the largest coordinated offensive to date, covering the entirety of South Vietnam. There was heavy street fighting in Saigon, suicide squads were killed on the grounds of the US embassy in the city, killing five Americans. The National Radio Station was occupied by Viet Cong for 6 hours who broadcast the liberation of Saigon and called for a general uprising. An entire NVA infantry division managed to infiltrate its way to and occupy Hue city for 25 days of intensive fighting to recapture it. No less than 155 targets were attacked, every major allied airfield was mortared or rocketed, and 64 district capitals were attacked.
Militarily the Tet offensive was a defeat for the communists, but it demonstrated a number of things: the American public was being lied to about victory being within sight, the communists were clearly capable of mounting major offensives and had the will to sustain horrendous casualties and not quit, which made the American strategy of winning through attrition entirely ineffectual. I use the term strategy very loosely here; attrition isn’t a strategy, it’s the absence of one. Tet was a defeat, but we had been defeating them for three years on the battlefield with no end in sight and the number of American casualties continuing to rise every year.
The “we were winning the war but the media stabbed the American soldiers in the back” narrative rather reminds me of another stab in the back narrative to explain away defeat.
The parallels are striking.
I think anyone who is trying to understand the American role in Vietnam should familiarize himself with the story of “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby”. Though in the US/VN version, there wasn’t any brier patch.
You had a defensive war with poorly defined objectives, no popular support in the US, conscripted troops who didn’t want to be there, many of the officer corps were just there to get a box checked in their personnel records, and rules of engagement that limited what might have been successful tactics. What could go right?
It is said that we won every battle in Nam but lost the war. True depending on how you define winning, losing, battle, and war. But Tet did show that we were not winning the war and keeping score on the battles as we had been wasn’t a useful measure. You measure the winner of a chess game by a checkmate, not the number of pawns sacrificed to set that up.
My personal belief is that the real meaning of the Tet Offensive is still generally misunderstood. Because the side that won the battle was the least involved in it.
There were actually four different groups fighting in the war. The United States was fighting alongside the South Vietnamese government but the two governments were often in agreement. And the same was true to a lesser extent on the opposing side; the enemy consisted of both the North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong guerrilla movement that was based in South Vietnam. While they fighting with the same goal, the two groups were not necessarily in full agreement.
By 1968, Hanoi could foresee the day when the South Vietnamese government would collapse and the Americans would withdraw. But they must have also foreseen the possibility that there would be arguments with the Viet Cong over how postwar Vietnam should be run. The worst case scenario would be the Viet Cong, who had fought an effective guerrilla war against Saigon for decades, might end up doing the same to Hanoi.
So Hanoi must have considered how convenient it would be if the Viet Cong had been reduced in power and the North Vietnamese were the undisputed rulers of Vietnam when the country was united. And in that context, you can see who really benefited when the Tet Offensive had Viet Cong guerrillas come out of hiding and openly fight American and South Vietnamese forces. Hanoi benefited in the short term from the Americans and South Vietnamese who were killed and in the long term from the Viet Cong who were killed.
The above, plus Uncle Walter saying To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. This is Walter Cronkite; good night.
When you lose Cronkite, you lose Middle America.
There seems to be an assumption that a battle has to be either a defeat for one or the either side, or that one narrative or the other has to be true. In reality, both sides can lose a battle, and different observers can build different and equally true narratives.
The Vietcong lost the Tet offensive, because they achieved none of their aims and suffered horrific casualties. Several North Vietnamese leaders have been quoted as saying they thought their cause was doomed after the failures of Tet, that it was their last-gasp attempt and it had come up short. But the Americans also lost Tet, for the reasons others have explained above: the Pentagon had been overselling the extent of progress, and the fact that the NVA was able to execute that level of organized offensive --successful or not – came as a dispiriting shock.
There are enough facts to support the narrative of “Tet proved that the war was still a stalemate,” especially if, as Alessan, points out, people care less about territory gained and enemies killed and measure success as “American soldiers not dying.” But there are also enough facts to support the “stab in the back” narrative, if you define success by defeating the enemy and accept the casualties as the price of that victory. That tends to be the point of view of military types generally, and the most forceful advocates of the position have tended to be soldiers who were there and saw the military progress and advances, and felt their sacrifices were squandered.
The narrative that resonates more with you is going to depend more on your prior assumptions – definitions of “progress,” expectations of success, number of casualties you’re willing to endure for military victory, etc – than it does on the actual facts on the ground.
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The above, plus Uncle Walter saying … When you lose Cronkite, you lose Middle America.
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This is a myth, but an illustrative one.
Johnson did not watch Cronkite on TV that night; he was giving a speech in Dallas. The story of him being disheartened by seeing Cronkite’s editorial did not appear anywhere until 1979, more or less during Cronkite’s farewell tour, and has never been confirmed by anyone close to LBJ. So the idea of Cronkite’s opinion convincing LBJ that he’d lost the country is, on the strictly factual level, probably a myth (and one that usually gets repeated by media types to show how important the media is).
On the other hand, it’s certainly possible to argue that Cronkite’s opinion was given during a period in which LBJ was indeed losing Middle America – the percentage of Americans calling the war “a mistake” went over 50% a few months after Tet. So on a metaphorical level, there is truth to the story of Cronkite-as-belwether.
The facts are the facts … but people make decisions, and tell history, according to the narratives we build in our heads.
[Changed for later]
One thing which I believe is important and should be mentioned here is that, while the U.S. government and military said a lot of very stupid things in public, arguably permanently damaging the government-citizen relationship, and the early wartime leadership was nonexistent, in the end the U.S. didn’t lose. It was only our war to the extent we supported an ally.
That ally also didn’t lose until we cut off aid, but that’s another story.
That is the shameful part. A heavily partisan, post Watergate Congress wouldnt allow the US to sell arms to the South Vietnamese government; even after the North broke the peace treaty.
Didn’t the Tet Offensive essentially destroy the Viet Cong as an effective fighting force, and leave the rest of the fighting to the NVA, making the war fundamentally different from that point forward?
For the most part, yes, which is in accord with my theory.
Arms sales wasn’t really the issue. The United States had sold huge amounts of arms to South Vietnam - and provided South Vietnam with foreign aid money to pay for it.
South Vietnam’s problem wasn’t a lack of equipment; it was a lack of troops willing to fight for the country. The only way those troops were going to appear was if the South Vietnamese government had been willing to make substantial changes (which it was never willing to make) or if those troops were provided by an outside power like the United States.
And there was zero possibility that we were going to send American troops back into Vietnam after withdrawing them in 1973.
Indeed. I remember 1975 very well. The merest suggestion of sending US troops back in was consistently met with a firm “Fuck that.”