The War: The General's Gamble

Though ominous harbingers of trouble had been in the air for days, most of South Viet Nam lazed in uneasy truce, savoring the happiest and holiest holiday of the Vietnamese year. All but a few Americans retired to their compounds to leave the feast of Tet to the Vietnamese celebrators filling the streets. Vietnamese soldiers made a special effort to rejoin their families. Relative visited relative, threading through thousands of firecrackers popping and fizzing in the moonless night. The Year of the Monkey had begun, and every Vietnamese knew that it was wise to make merry while there was yet time; in the twelve-year Buddhist lunar cycle, 1968 is a grimly inauspicious year.

Through the streets of Saigon, and in the dark approaches to dozens of towns and military installations throughout South Viet Nam, other Vietnamese made their furtive way, intent on celebrating only death— and on launching the Year of the Monkey on its malign way before it was many hours old. After the merrymakers had retired and the last firecrackers had sputtered out on the ground, they struck with a fierceness and bloody destructiveness that Viet Nam has not seen even in three decades of nearly continuous warfare. Up and down the narrow length of South Viet Nam, more than 36,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers joined in a widespread, general offensive against airfields and military bases, government buildings, population centers and just plain civilians.

The Communists hit in a hundred places, from Quang Tri near the DMZ in the north all the way to Duong Dong on the tiny island of Phu Quoc off the Delta coast some 500 miles to the south. No target was too or too impossible, including Saigon itself and General William Westmoreland's MACV headquarters. In peasant pajamas or openly insigniaed NVA uniforms, by stealth or attacks marshaled by bullhorn, the raiders struck at nearly 40 major cities and towns.

They attacked 28 of South Viet Nam's 44 provincial capitals and occupied some, destroyed or damaged beyond repair more than 100 allied planes and helicopters. South Viet Nam's capital, which even in the worst days of the Indo-China war had never been hit so hard, was turned into a city besieged and sundered by house-to-house fighting. In Hué, the ancient imperial city of Viet Nam and the architectural and spiritual repository of Vietnamese history, the Communists seized large parts of the city—and only grudgingly yielded them block by block under heavy allied counterattacks at week's end.