Posted on 02/03/2008 4:38:04 AM PST by Clive
Breaking the negotiated annual truce, for surprise, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars launched the Tet Offensive, in the night of 30/31 January 1968, named for the Vietnamese lunar new year. This campaign continued in various forms through September of that year, ending in total military defeat, for the aggressors. And a brilliant propaganda victory, for the same.
Thinking back on the Vietnam War this last week. And while I was doing so, a young leftist friend wrote to me, on an entirely unrelated topic, taunting with a remark about 2008 being, "The last year of the American Empire" -- as if it started and ended with George W. Bush. He does not seem interested in the question: By whose Empire will that vacuum be filled?
My friend does not even think of himself as a leftist, only as a person with an "open mind." We agree on that, but define "open" differently, for to my mind, a skull without a brain inside is completely open. The more brain, or more precisely, the more brain used, the more resistance it can offer to the importation of nonsense.
Forty years have now gone by, which one might figuratively characterize as the 40 years of the Tet Offensive, against Western Civ. The West has done fairly well in the field: we have still not lost a purely military encounter with any of the enemies of the West. Going back farther, the French didn't even lose their battles in Algeria. Rather, Charles de Gaulle decided they were not worth fighting.
The Tet Offensive was a desperate ploy by the Communist enemy in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of his troops were flung simultaneously at more than 100 South Vietnamese towns, and into the heart of Saigon. The Communists announced a general uprising, but that did not occur. The tide was actually turned within a few days by the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies. As they re-took town after town, they discovered massacres the Communists had committed while in possession. The enemy's real object had been to decapitate a whole society.
My friend, Uwe Siemon-Netto, a German Lutheran pastor and also life-long journalist, was there as a reporter. Entering Hué as the smoke was clearing: "I made my way to university apartments to obtain news about friends of mine, German professors at the medical school. I learned that their names had been on lists containing some 1,800 Hué residents singled out for liquidation.
"Six weeks later the bodies of doctors Alois Altekoester, Raimund Discher, Horst-Guenther Krainick, and Krainick's wife, Elisabeth, were found in shallow graves they had been made to dig for themselves.
"Then, enormous mass graves of women and children were found. Most had been clubbed to death, some buried alive; you could tell from the beautifully manicured hands of women who had tried to claw out of their burial place.
"As we stood at one such site, Washington Post correspondent Peter Braestrup asked an American TV cameraman, 'Why don't you film this?' He answered, 'I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda'."
The Tet Offensive ended not only in a huge allied victory in the field -- some 45,000 of the Communist soldiers had been killed, and their infrastructure entirely destroyed. It was victory after an event that showed skeptical South Vietnamese, and should have shown the world, the nature of the enemy our allies were fighting.
Walter Cronkite, the famous news anchor of CBS, led the American media reaction. After a very brief visit to Saigon, in which he got himself filmed wearing flak jackets, he returned to the United States, declaring before his huge prime time audience:
"It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who have lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."
The media turned a tremendous victory into a tremendous defeat. Yet seven more years would pass until an America, which had by then abandoned Vietnam, and a Congress, which had cut off military supplies to the South Vietnamese, watched the helicopters removing America's last faithful servants from a roof in Saigon's old embassy compound. The South Vietnamese Army had surrendered, to another Tet Offensive, as it ran out of ammunition.
We have seen this "Vietnam syndrome" writ large, through the intervening years. We see it today in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Romans, too, won all the ground battles.
David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.>/i>
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"We paid a high price [during the Ted offensive] but so did you [Americans]... not only in lives and materiel.... Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people. ...i>The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory...."
"The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion."
“my friend does not even think of himself as a leftist...”
well, maybe his friend thinks of himself as communist scu&bag.
Gen Giap, in an interview with Morley Safer in 1989, said this:
"We paid a high price [during the Ted offensive] but so did you [Americans]... not only in lives and materiel....Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people. ...
The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory...."
"The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion."
I hate to undermine a valid argument, but the Roman legions did occasionally lose. The battle of the Teutoburg Forest comes immediately to mind.
“As we stood at one such site, Washington Post correspondent Peter Braestrup asked an American TV cameraman, ‘Why don’t you film this?’ He answered, ‘I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda’.”
I heard some snips of the aftermath on the radio, the NVA’s unit radios as the Communists were trying to regroup and then to get out of SVN before their casualties reached 100%. Some were told to hide their weapons and then get the best they could from the Americans to surrender. Some were told to disband, go home to their villages. Then, in the fall America began to stand down. We didn’t chase the enemy out of their last pockets. We backed off and gave them room to resupply and the evacuation stopped and reversed. It wasn’t just the Media that did it to us, though that was a huge part of it, the micromanagers in Washington who were more interested in “sending messages” than in actually winning anything were snatching failure from the jaws of victory.
Prior Military service, it seems, is no guarantee that a guy is fit to be CIC of the US Military.
What American Empire are we talking about anyway? The one that has won wars but rebuilds the country and then leaves it after a short time? If we were a real Empire we would be totally occupying parts of Europe, Central America, Asia and the Middle East.
“As we stood at one such site, Washington Post correspondent Peter Braestrup asked an American TV cameraman, ‘Why don’t you film this?’ He answered, ‘I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda’.”
If I'd been standing there I think I would have hit that camerman into next week.
Why do you keep repeating that lie?
Here's the facts, get educated:
After completing fourteen home-study Army Extension Courses, Reagan enlisted in the Army Enlisted Reserve[18] on April 29, 1937, as a private assigned to Troop B, 322nd Cavalry at Des Moines, Iowa.[19] He was appointed Second Lieutenant in the Officers Reserve Corps of the Cavalry on May 25, 1937, and on June 18 was assigned to the 323rd Cavalry.[20]
Reagan was ordered to active duty for the first time on April 18, 1942. Due to his nearsightedness, he was classified for limited service only, which excluded him from serving overseas.[21] His first assignment was at the San Francisco Port of Embarkation at Fort Mason, California, as a liaison officer of the Port and Transportation Office.[22] Upon the request of the Army Air Force (AAF), he applied for a transfer from the Cavalry to the AAF on May 15 1942, and was assigned to AAF Public Relations and subsequently to the 1st Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California.[22] On January 14, 1943 he was promoted to First Lieutenant and was sent to the Provisional Task Force Show Unit of This Is The Army at Burbank, California.[22] He returned to the 1st Motion Picture Unit after completing this duty and was promoted to Captain on July 22, 1943.[19]
In January 1944, Captain Reagan was ordered to temporary duty in New York City to participate in the opening of the sixth War Loan Drive. He was assigned to the 18th AAF Base Unit, Culver City, California on November 14, 1944, where he remained until the end of the World War II.[19] He was recommended for promotion to Major on February 2, 1945, but this recommendation was disapproved on July 17 of that year.[23] He returned to Fort MacArthur, California, where he was separated from active duty on December 9 1945.[23] By the end of the war, his units had produced some 400 training films for the AAF.[19]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan#Military_service
“As we stood at one such site, Washington Post correspondent Peter Braestrup asked an American TV cameraman, ‘Why don’t you film this?’ He answered, ‘I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda’.”
That’s one of the many things about Tet that pisses me off. It should have been proof of what kind of enemy we were fighting and shut up the “The VC are just fighting to protect their homeland” freaks. We had a golden oppurtunity to justify our presence over there and a bunch of big-headed media morons screwed it up.
We lost politically because we still have traitors like Kerry, fonda, code pink, demorats and other turncoats.
***Walter Cronkite, the famous news anchor of CBS, led the American media reaction.***
I despise that man still today.
In other news...
EL CID is out on DVD! EL CID is out on DVD!
The US continued the war, and continued to support it, through Nixon.
Nixon won re-election is a landslide, with the men largely home and the draft ended, and South Vietnam still free and sovereign and in control of its territory. US air power was still needed to protect them from Russian-backed aggression from the north, but as the easter offensive showed, with that support ARVN was quite sufficient.
The war wasn't lost at Tet. It was lost in the Watergate building.
One of the top 10 US traitors in history IMO.
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