On This Day in History: January 30

The Tet Offensive

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1968 was a fucked-up year. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I was born. And the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army launched a massive offensive against American troops that took them totally by surprise and had CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite saying on live television that the war was unwinnable.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 30, 1968--

You want to know why the U.S. lost in Vietnam? Because Vietnamese were willing to die, and Americans weren’t. Sure, 58,000 Americans did die in the war, but over a million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong (communist rebels who lived in the South but were allied with the North) soldiers got snuffed. It was a 20-to-one kill ratio for the U.S. even before you consider the hundreds of thousands of dead Vietnamese civilians.

Except body counts don’t win wars. Making the other side give up does. The Tết Offensive was so named because it took place during the Vietnamese New Year, aka “Tết.” There was supposed to be a holiday truce, but the NVA and VC used their enemy’s complacency to launch a surprise attack on January 30, 1968. It was the biggest offensive of the war, encompassing locations across South Vietnam. There were three different phases that lasted eight months. By the time it was over about 5,000 Americans (and a similar number of South Vietnamese soldiers) were dead, but the NVA and VC lost closer to 10 times that number.

The attackers imagined the offensive would lead to a popular uprising in the South that would collapse the government, but that didn’t materialize. Rather, the Viet Cong was devastated and ceased to be a serious military threat. The Americans, who were always good at killing, fucked their shit up good because this was their kind of fight. Not running around the jungle in small groups, but a stand-up contest of firepower.

So why did Cronkite say they couldn’t win?

Until that time the American public got a sanitized version of the war from the media. Most reporters hung around Saigon and had to go looking for the war, but this time it came to them. While there were already plenty of Americans against the war, many others believed the North was all but defeated. Then there was this massive attack and their boys were dying by the thousands, and people started saying the fuck are we doing over there?

Militarily, Tết was a failure for the North, but it was a PR win. Cronkite traveled to Vietnam to witness the tenacity of the enemy, reporting on February 27 that “we are mired in a stalemate.” President Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” It spelled the end of his administration and led to the presidency of Richard Nixon. Ugh.

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