military officers when we
landed in Phu Bai, but his commentary several
weeks later marked a turning point in US opinion
regardless of the inability of the North
Vietnamese to hold the cities and towns they had
overrun in Tet.
In fact, when Cronkite
spoke out publicly against the war on February 27,
1968, the marines, backed up by the US First Air
Cavalry division, were just finishing what had
turned into a four-week battle inside the Hue
Citadel - one of the most significant engagements
in US military history. I flew into the Citadel a
couple of times during the battle, picking up flak
jackets and helmets stacked up by the bodies of
dead marines at the
headquarters in the rear of
the Citadel, and sticking with the marines as they
fought block by block - the blocks marked by stone
walls behind which troops from both sides could
conceal themselves.
I remember a marine
waking up one morning, saying, "When I was a kid,
I never thought I'd be in a war like this," before
he fully awakened and another marine asked him, a
minute later, if he knew what he'd said. And I
remember a couple of young marines rushing into
the headquarters of a company commander, with whom
I'd been sticking pretty close on the ground floor
of an abandoned home, saying another marine had
been cut down after rushing a block too far on a
"mule", a springless vehicle used for moving
supplies in the field.
A little later, a
marine sniper said the man beside him had stuck
his head from a balcony and been killed by a
single shot, but the sniper said he'd seen an
enemy soldier and killed him. "I know I got him,"
he said when I asked how he could be sure the guy
had not just been wounded. "He fell like this" -
accompanied by a quick doubling up and pitching
forward.
With marines as they moved up, I
found a marine sprayed by shrapnel, slumped on the
floor of a home. "I was really lucky," he said,
half-smiling to discover he was alive and out of
danger, as he sipped from a newly opened bottle of
whiskey. There were strict orders on looting. "If
you can eat it or drink it, you can have it," the
company commander said tersely. "Leave everything
else alone" - an edict that presumably applied to
the snapshots of a nude young woman the marines
gleefully discovered in a bureau drawer
overflowing with silken scarves and ao dai,
the Vietnamese national dress.
The Tet
offensive was a moving target. The story was
everywhere. As the fighting moved west from the
center of Saigon, I encountered little kids by the
race track, holding sticks, playing soldier, while
the real war went on blocks away. I saw soldiers
in shops and apartments calling in helicopter
strikes, and I saw a couple of mangy dogs, their
ears pinned back, running for their lives down
empty streets, terrified by nearby explosions. The
first Cobra gunships roared in, their guns
blazing, sounding like chain saws, blasting
whatever they saw, to the disgust of a US civilian
official who told me, "That's not winning hearts
and minds."
But what else were the troops
to do? The mission was to drive out the North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Hearts and minds could
wait. JUSPAO, the Joint US Public Affairs Office,
and MACV, Military Assistance Command Vietnam,
proudly flew reporters to the scenes of their
triumphs.
On a flight to Camau, the
southeastern tip of Vietnam, I saw charred enemy
bodies by the landing strip. I was with Don Sider
of Time magazine and a young American woman. Sider
wanted to shield the view. "It's the first time
she's seen dead bodies," he said. Somewhere in the
upper delta, I ran into an American lieutenant
colonel who denied Westmoreland's futile claim
that commanders had been warned of what might
transpire. "All we got was a routine max alert for
Tet," he said.
A week or so into the
offensive, on February 7, while fighting was still
raging in Hue, JUSPAO and MACV staged a flight to
Ben Tre, a charming provincial center in the upper
Mekong River delta that had been hit hard in the
first day or so of the offensive. The flight would
make for an easy dateline for journalists wanting
to show they were getting around the countryside.
The junket was so easy that Joe Fried of
the New York Daily News, who covered the war
mostly from the daily "five o'clock follies" (5pm
Saigon press briefings), was on the plane, looking
uneasy in a neatly pressed correspondent's suit on
a rare venture outside Saigon as we flew over
shell-pocked rice paddies.
JUSPAO and MACV
wanted to show off Ben Tre as a success story.
When we got there, we heard the sound of hammering
and sawing as energetic townspeople began
reconstruction from the rubble of buildings shot
up first by enemy rockets and then by American
helicopters as they drove out the invaders. The
town by now was at peace, licking and healing the
wounds.
As civilian vehicles and street
markets reappeared, in the shadows of balconied
old colonial buildings, bullet-spattered but still
standing, shaded by trees and garlanded with
flowers, we were driven to the headquarters of the
US provincial team. Civilian and military
officials were ready for us, standing in front of
maps and a blackboard on a terrace behind the
headquarters.
An army major, in his role
as military adviser on the provincial team,
described the battle to retake the town. The
fighting had been tough, he wanted us to know, but
the result was a success, Ben Tre was ours. Peter
Arnett, the famous Associated Press correspondent,
grinned sardonically, asking loudly, "You mean you
had to destroy the town to save it?" The major
shrugged, "Well, you might put it that way."
That evening, in Saigon, I got a message
from the Star. The Associated Press was reporting
a US major saying it had become "necessary to
destroy the town to save it". The major had never
uttered those fateful words. The quote was
Arnett's question, not the major's response. Too
bad. In an information war, the quote, as Arnett
had it coming not from his own mouth but that of
the major, at once became a rallying cry for a war
that was now as good as lost in a mushroom cloud
of anti-war protest and popular revulsion.
Donald Kirk covered Vietnam
first for the old Washington (DC) Star and then
for the Chicago Tribune. He also wrote numerous
articles for The New York Times Magazine, The New
Leader and others as well as two books on the
war, Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia,
Thailand and Laos, 1971, and Tell it to the
Dead: Memories of a War, 1975, republished in
expanded form in 1996 as Tell it to the Dead:
Stories of a War.
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