Beginning of the End

TET! THE STORY OF A BATTLE AND ITS HISTORIC AFTERMATH by Don Oberdorfer. 385 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

One American officer in Viet Nam called it "a piddling platoon action." But to the millions of Americans who saw TV film clips of the daring attack by a Viet Cong demolition squad on the U.S. embassy in Saigon, the Tet offensive of 1968 was something more impressive than that. "What the hell is going on?" CBS Correspondent Walter Cronkite fairly shouted when he first saw footage of the raid. "I though we were winning the war." So did many of his countrymen, who had taken at face value General William Westmoreland's expansive claim, a few weeks before Tet, that "with 1968 a new phase is starting. We have reached the important point when the end begins to come in view."

Indeed it did, although not in the way that Westmoreland meant. As Washington Post Reporter Don Oberdorfer notes in this skillful analysis of the Tet offensive and its aftermath, "The North Vietnamese lost a battle. The United States lost something even more important --the confidence of its people at home."

From a purely military viewpoint, the Tet offensive was a major defeat for the North Vietnamese. More than 67,000 troops were committed to battle in at least 100 cities and villages, in hopes of creating a general uprising that never happened; the Communist assaults on Saigon and Hue were bloodily repulsed. But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers were able to strike at will all over the country and penetrated Allied lines with ease. This was dramatic evidence that Westmoreland's "success offensive" and his claim of imminent victory had been greatly oversold. The impact of Tet in the press and on TV screens directly challenged the comfortable words from Saigon and Washington.

In his rich but raw instant history, Oberdorfer devastatingly exposes the illusions about supposed enemy weaknesses that beset the American military command in 1968. Although U.S. officials in Saigon knew well in advance that a general offensive was being planned, they refused to believe that the North Vietnamese could mount one. The Communist general order of attack was intercepted and then published as a U.S. embassy press release--25 days before Tet began. Still, the order was officially dismissed as "internal propaganda" designed solely to inspire the Communist troops.

The South Vietnamese response, according to Oberdorfer, was hardly more perceptive. President Thieu, for instance, actively believed that the U.S. military had conspired with the Communists to bring about the Tet campaign. He suspected that a Communist success would force a coalition government on Saigon, and thereby speed up the prospect of American withdrawal. When Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker appeared on Saigon television to deny "this ridiculous claim," it was confirmation to many South Vietnamese that the rumors and accusations were true.

To Destroy Is to Save. The extensive television coverage of Tet brought home to many Americans for the first time the bewildering contradictions of a bitter and seemingly unendable war. The summary execution of a Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of Saigon by a South Vietnamese police chief--seen in full color --seemed to dissolve the moral distinctions between friend and foe. "News would travel at 300,000 times the speed of a bullet in flight," writes Oberdorfer. The ultimate irony came from the American major who insisted that "it became necessary to destroy this village to save it." As Oberdorfer amply documents, Tet forced a number of commentators and editors (including those of Time Inc.) who had hitherto supported the war to reexamine their commitment.

Oberdorfer is better at chronicling the litany of futility that was Tet than at analyzing its historical meaning. In a personal afterword, he offers the now conventional wisdom that everybody lost in Viet Nam, and that the U.S. never did understand its foe. He predicts that ultimately "it will be a Vietnamese solution and we will probably never understand how it was reached." By then, he says, "Americans will have lost all interest in the outcome and will wonder why so many of our young men died so far away for a cause so few could name." One doubts that ten years of conflict and involvement will be quite so placidly dismissed.

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