What I Saw During the Tet Offensive
When I arrived in Vietnam in late December 1967, I thought we might be winning the war. Gen. William Westmoreland, the American commander in Saigon, had just given a speech in Washington stating that the end was beginning “to come into view.” As a 25-year-old Army captain assigned to be Westmoreland’s special assistant, I would be handling highly classified intelligence for him, as well as sensitive privacy communications we called the “back channel.”
After my first weeks, the edgy vigilance about enemy action I’d had eased up. One evening in early January, colleagues from the office drove me downtown, along the wide tree-lined boulevards that framed the French colonial architecture of Saigon, to the old Continental Hotel. There, under fans slowly circling above the elegant patio, we looked out on the heavily trafficked square and sipped wine, interrupted occasionally by the rumble of distant artillery reminding us of the war going on outside the city.
The atmosphere at the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam headquarters, or MACV, was intense but orderly. I saw Senator Birch Bayh, a young Democrat from Indiana, meet with Westmoreland, and I wondered if Bayh had been sent to test the general’s political fitness — after all, it had been less than 20 years since Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had been persuaded to run for president. The previous year, Westmoreland had appeared on the cover of Time for the third time, in a photo of him addressing a joint session of Congress. A year earlier, he had been the magazine’s Man of the Year.
Abruptly, for me, within days the relative equilibrium I’d found on arrival began to change. In early January I tried to phone one of my roommates from West Point, who was commanding an infantry company upcountry. I finally reached his first sergeant. He gave me a crisp and brutal report: “Sir, you’re too late. The C.O. tripped a booby trap this morning crossing a stream bed on patrol in the Bong Son Plain area. His last words were, ‘Top, come get me.’”
Not long after that phone call, I was awakened at about 3 a.m. by explosions near my bachelor officer quarters at the Khai Minh Hotel. I grabbed my .45 and ran downstairs in my shorts to help organize a perimeter defense. Helicopter gunships were firing rockets into a cemetery a couple of blocks away. We secured a Military Police jeep (the MPs were responsible for security in Saigon) to establish a line of communication, but a wounded soldier somewhere had grabbed a push-to-talk handset and wouldn’t let go, alternately pleading for help with his injury and describing armed Vietnamese, presumably Vietcong, advancing on his position. A coordinated, large-scale enemy assault had erupted throughout South Vietnam at the beginning of the Vietnamese New Year; the Tet offensive had begun.
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An armed convoy came to my quarters to take me and others to MACV. There were a large number of top-secret documents in my office that needed to be destroyed. I went outside to burn the papers in a special incinerator but had to take cover because of enemy rounds ricocheting off the incinerator, fired at me from across the street near Tan Son Nhut, South Vietnam’s largest airport and the headquarters of the United States 7th Air Force.
Nerves were frayed, even at high levels. One very early morning I received an “immediate” message through the general service network for Westmoreland from Adm. U. S. Grant Sharp, the head of Pacific Command and Westmoreland’s immediate superior. I decided the message was not critical enough to awaken Westmoreland but instead woke the major general who was his operations chief to handle the matter.
As I later learned from Westmoreland’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Walter Kerwin, Sharp discovered I had not immediately delivered his message to Westmoreland and was furious, directing that I be court-martialed. Kerwin called me into his office, asked what I had done with the message, told me of Sharp’s direction and, like a Dutch uncle (Kerwin’s nickname was Dutch), said to make sure I followed Sharp’s preferences in the future.
Tet had put everyone on an acute war footing, but I found that it also relaxed formalities. I showed Westmoreland a classified message concerning the surface-to-air Talos missile, which was to be used to shoot down enemy aircraft. He wrote a note on the message, explained to me its meaning and told me to meet with the commanding general of the 7th Air Force at Tan Son Nhut to coordinate rules of engagement — a mission otherwise way above my pay grade.
There was also a kind of camaraderie that developed under the pressure of Tet and its aftermath. I was impressed by the relationship between Westmoreland and his deputy (and soon to be successor), Gen. Creighton Abrams. The two had graduated the same year from West Point, 1936. Both had distinguished themselves in combat during World War II, Westmoreland under Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Abrams under Gen. George Patton. I saw nothing but mutual regard between the two, observing occasions when Westmoreland would ask something of “Abe,” who would respond in his gravelly voice, with familiarity yet deference for all to see: “Yes, sahr.”
I remember one particular private conversation I had with Abrams. Shortly after Tet, American forces had suffered a combat setback near a region nicknamed the Parrot’s Beak, a bit of Cambodian territory that jutted into South Vietnam toward Saigon. After I asked about the engagement during a customary daily briefing I gave him, Abrams rose from his simple steel desk, picked up a ubiquitous cigar, pulled out a telescoped pointer, squatted down in front of a map board in his office, described the disposition of friendly and enemy forces, and explained why he thought things had not gone well — the sort of careful, thorough response a general officer would give a peer, near-equal or a visiting dignitary, but not a junior officer like me. I had been nervous asking the question, and deeply surprised with his response; by such grace is loyalty cemented.
The intensity of the fighting during Tet also concentrated the chain of command. Signals intelligence indicated a noteworthy movement of the North Vietnamese Army in I Corps, the tactical area immediately below the Demilitarized Zone that included Hue, the imperial city of Vietnam that was largely occupied by enemy forces during Tet. Westmoreland was away, so I woke Abrams and showed him the information. Bleary-eyed, he asked for pencil and paper. Sitting on the side of his bed, he deliberately wrote an articulate operations order that I sent to the Marine commanding general in the area, moving artillery, armored, airborne and infantry units to respond to the threat, stating that he would establish a jump command post and arrive the next day. The occupation of Hue was eventually lifted.
A powerful demonstration of our military might regularly arose out of the Combined Intelligence Center in the basement of MACV headquarters (my office was in an additionally secured area at the rear of the center). Westmoreland and Abrams would be briefed, on large maps showing all information that had been gathered, by senior staff like the brigadier generals in charge of intelligence and the Combat Operations Center. The goal was to determine targets for B-52 bombers flown out of Guam to support ground operations. There were three B-52s, or “cells,” in each strike, in what was called Operation Arc Light. Each B-52 bombed an area half a kilometer wide and a kilometer long; each carried a payload of 80 or more 500-pound bombs, arriving in the silence of the jungle from an altitude of 33,000 feet. To observe the decision-making process and be in the middle of the “brain” directing such firepower across such vast spaces was a humbling experience; it was like watching a Thor toss thunderbolts.
A striking incident occurred a few weeks after Tet. Westmoreland summoned me to his office. I had already seen him that day; such a call at his initiative was unusual. I closed his door and he showed me a message he had written requesting 200,000 or more troops (there were about 500,000 troops in-country then). He told me: “Send it back channel to” Gen. Earl Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Show it to no one else.” I sent the message to Wheeler. After review at the highest levels, the request was denied.
Tensions remained high. At the end of March, I received from the White House an advance copy of the speech President Lyndon Johnson was scheduled to make to the nation on March 31. It did not contain the passage in which he declared he would not run for another term; that he added, secretly, at almost the last minute. I printed copies and went to Westmoreland’s conference room, where he had gathered with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, Abrams and others. Westmoreland asked when the speech would be delivered. I responded with the hour and minute, Saigon time. Abrams barked: “How come you’re always so goddamned positive?”
A few days later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. My wife, Lynda, was working at the State Department, and I learned that Washington was under curfew. I stood in a long line to make a Military Auxiliary Radio System call to her. MARS calls relied on civilian ham operators relaying straight-line shots across the Pacific, tower to tower. Lynda told me she saw downtown Washington on fire from the top of our apartment building on Connecticut Avenue. I asked from the capital of the war zone whether there was anything I could do for her in our nation’s capital. She said: “Yes. Come home.” We heard the ham operators chuckle.
The next month, President Johnson promoted Westmoreland to chief of staff of the Army and named Abrams to replace him. Soon after, I went to Tan Son Nhut to catch a military hop to Danang to command a small unit in I Corps with the 23rd Infantry Division, known as Americal, whose area of operations included My Lai, where Lt. William Calley and his platoon had killed South Vietnamese civilians two months earlier. Pacing in the airport waiting area, I passed a sailor’s transistor radio leaning on an open window sill and heard the announcement that Senator Robert F. Kennedy had been shot.
Shortly after I had arrived in Vietnam, six months earlier, the Army had offered to send me to graduate school on my return in order to teach at West Point. Following the King assassination, I requested approval of my resignation as a commissioned officer. In 1968, an average of 45 Americans died in Vietnam every day. With any luck, in another six months, I would be going home.
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