Company A, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry, and the 199th’s reconnaissance troop reached Cholon about 8 a.m. that morning (January 31). Six blocks from the racetrack, an RPG hit the lead APC in the column, killing the platoon leader. Communist troops began to fire down onto the column from the surrounding buildings. The infantry dismounted and continued fighting house to house, exactly as their colleagues in the 2nd Squadron of the 47th were doing in Bien Hoa at that very moment.

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By 1 p.m. Company A had pushed to within two blocks of the racetrack. The VC then withdrew to prepared positions behind the concrete benches at the track. Company A assaulted the position, but was repulsed. At 4:30 it tried again, this time supported by helicopter gunships. The Americans succeeded in taking the track, but the VC troops melted away into the streets of Cholon. Shortly after dark, Companies B and C of the 3rd of the 7th were brought onto the racetrack by helicopter.

The next morning, the troops at the racetrack were reinforced by two mechanized companies (B and C) of the 9th Division’s 2nd Battalion, 60th Infantry, and the 33rd ARVN Ranger Battalion. Using the racetrack as a base of operations, they started working outward to clear Cholon. The VC tried to retake the racetrack later that day, but were beaten back.

The tedious city fighting ground on. By February 3, the South Vietnamese had five ranger, five Marine and five airborne battalions inside Saigon. The Americans had committed seven infantry, one MP and six artillery battalions. On February 5, the ARVN 5th Ranger Group started an operation to finally clear Cholon. For political and prestige reasons, the South Vietnamese JOS requested that the Americans pull out of Cholon and allow the ARVN to finish the job. By the 10th of February, they were requesting that the 3rd of the 7th be sent back in. Later, the 3rd of the 7th Infantry was also awarded the Valorous Unit Citation for its fight in Cholon.

Hue was retaken on February 25. Cholon was finally cleared on March 7. Hoping to save some face, the Communists stepped up their pressure on Khe Sanh, but in a traditional set-piece battle like that, they had no reasonable expectation of overcoming American firepower and air superiority.

About March 20, the NVA units around Khe Sanh began to melt away. On April 1, Operation Pegasus, the ground relief of Khe Sanh, was launched. Enemy opposition was light. A few weeks later, Colonel Tran Van Dac, the chief VC political officer for Saigon, defected. The Tet Offensive was over.

Militarily, the Tet Offensive had been a tactical disaster for the Communist forces. By the end of March, they had not achieved a single one of their objectives. More than 58,000 VC and NVA troops died in the process, as opposed to just under 4,000 U.S. and 5,000 ARVN deaths.

By attacking everywhere at once, Giap had superior strength nowhere. He achieved great surprise, but he was unable to exploit it. Analyzing the battle for the Saigon Circle, General Weyand later concluded that it had actually been a large collection of relatively small independent actions. The assault had been launched piecemeal, and it was repulsed piecemeal.

Giap had been dead wrong in two key assumptions. The people of the South did not rally to the Communist cause. The General Uprising never took place-even in Hue, where Communist forces held an entire city for the longest time. Nor did the ARVN fold. It may have buckled in a few areas, but by and large it fought, and fought amazingly well.

If there was a single big loser in the Tet Offensive, it was the Viet Cong. The guerrillas of the South led the main attacks and they suffered the heaviest casualties. The guerrilla infrastructure, so carefully developed over many years, had been destroyed with a single throw of the dice. From that point on, the war was entirely run by the North. The VC were never again a significant force on the battlefield. When Saigon fell in 1975, it was at the hands of four NVA corps.

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