In early July 1967, a top-ranking North Vietnamese Army (NVA) general died in a military hospital in Hanoi. For many years after, it was reported that he had been killed by an American B-52 strike. More recently, it has been suggested that he actually died from a heart attack. Regardless of the cause, however, the timing of his death had profound impact on the North Vietnamese decision-making process that led to the Tet Offensive.

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Senior General Nguyen Chi Thanh had been the topranking North Vietnamese military commander in the South. Aside from Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, he was the only other man to hold four-star rank in the NVA. He was also a major political power-for 17 years he had been a member of North Vietnam’s ruling Politburo. He also had been a longtime opponent of Giap’s policy of meeting America’s military might head-on. But now his voice was stilled. Immediately following Thanh’s state funeral on July 6, the Politburo met to consider Giap’s plan to bring the war to a speedy and successful conclusion.

The war had not been going well for the Communists. Thanh’s Viet Cong (VC) and NVA troops in the South had been losing in every encounter with the Americans since taking a bloody pounding in the la Drang Valley in 1965. Thanh thought it was madness to try to compete with superior U.S. firepower and mobility. He wanted to scale back operations and conduct a protracted guerrilla struggle, slowly grinding down the American will to continue. Giap, the victor of Dien Bien Phu, wanted to stage another master stroke, bringing America quickly to its knees. With Thanh now dead, there was no other voice of dissent in the Politburo.

The key to Giap’s plan was the concept of the ‘General Offensive,’ borrowed from Chinese Communist doctrine. Following the General Offensive, in a one-two punch combination, would come the ‘General Uprising,’ wherein the people of the South would rally to the Communist cause and bring down the Saigon government. The General Uprising was a distinctly Vietnamese element of revolutionary dogma.

The success of Giap’s plan depended on three key assumptions: that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) would not fight and would collapse under the initial impact; that the people of the South would follow through with the General Uprising; that faced with an overwhelming shock action, the American will to continue would crack.

The timing of the General Offensive was set for Tet 1968, the beginning of the Lunar New Year: The Year of the Monkey. Tet is by far and away the most important holiday of the Vietnamese year. It is almost impossible for a Westerner to understand its significance. It’s like Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July and your birthday, all rolled into one.

Giap’s buildup and staging of the Tet Offensive was a masterpiece of deception. General instructions were sent to units in the field, but the exact timing and specific unit objectives of the attacks were withheld until the last moment.

Starting in the fall of 1967, Giap staged a series of bloody but seemingly pointless battles in the border regions and in the north of the country near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). On October 29, the 273rd VC Regiment attacked the district capital of Loc Ninh, in the ‘Fishhook’ region northwest of Saigon. On November 23, the 4th NVA Regiment launched a major attack on Dak To. In early January 1968, several NVA divisions began to converge on the isolated U.S. Marine outpost at Khe Sanh, in the northern ARVN I Corps Area, near the DMZ.

All of these actions were part of Giap’s ‘peripheral campaign,’ designed to draw U.S. units out of the urban areas and toward the borders. For the most part, they were carried out by NVA troops, while VC units moved into their Tet jump-off positions, built up their supplies and rehearsed. In the case of the 273rd VC Regiment’s attack at Loc Ninh, captured enemy documents later revealed that the purpose of that battle had been to give the Viet Cong experience in conventional attack formations.

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