Don North: An American Reporter Witnessed the VC Assault on the U.S. Embassy During the Vietnam War

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On January 31, 1968, the NVA and VC attacked the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and more than 100 other targets throughout South Vietnam. The assault became known as the Tet Offensive, named after the Vietnamese celebration of the lunar New Year.

When the bloody fighting finally ended 24 days later, the Communist troops had been driven from all major South Vietnamese cities, and U.S. military analysts declared victory. But there was little doubt that the NVA and VC had scored a stunning psychological success.

Because U.S. politicians and commanders had oversold progress in the war as a way to quiet domestic dissent, the savage Tet fighting shocked millions of Americans and widened Washington’s credibility gap on Vietnam. Within weeks, President Lyndon B. Johnson would bow out of his race for re-election. Tet was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War.

But Tet had another long-term consequence. In the years that followed, U.S. military officers would insist bitterly that critical reporting about Tet and the war in general caused the American defeat, that the U.S. news media had betrayed the nation, that reporters had gone from being the Fourth Estate to acting like an enemy fifth column. In turn, the correspondents who covered Vietnam, many of whom now assume highly influential roles in their news agencies, are more distrustful of U.S. military officials than their older or younger counterparts.

Army historians would eventually conclude that the war was lost by poor strategy and excessive casualties, not by disloyal journalists. ‘It is undeniable, wrote Army historian William Hammond in 1988, that press reports were…more accurate than the public statements of the administration in portraying the situation in Vietnam. But by 1968, the charge that the press lost Vietnam had become an article of faith to many Vietnam veterans.

As a reporter in Vietnam for ABC and NBC News, I was there to experience Tet at most of the major battlefields, from Khe Sanh on January 30 to Hue on February 25, as U.S. Marines secured the southeast gate of the Citadel to end the siege of Hue. But it was at the U.S. Embassy at dawn on January 31 that one of the most important engagements of the war took place.

At a greasy car repair shop at 59 Phan Thanh Gian Street just before the VC attacks on Saigon, 19 VC sappers climbed into a small Peugeot truck and a taxicab to begin the short drive to their objective, the U.S. Embassy. Wearing black pajamas and red armbands, they were part of the elite 250-strong C-10 Sapper Battalion. Most of them had been born in Saigon and were familiar with the streets of the crowded city.

Two days earlier, heavy baskets, supposedly containing tomatoes, as well as bamboo containers of rice, had arrived at the home next door to the repair shop. They also contained all the AK-47s, B-40 rocket-propelled grenades and satchel charges the 19 sappers would need for their mission that evening. Shortly after midnight the soldiers were briefed for the first time on their com-bat mission against the American Embassy. There were no mock-ups of the location, no instructions on what to do after gaining entrance to the compound, no word of reinforce-ments or an escape route and no confirmation that this would be a suicide mission.

The embassy assault would be only a part of the sapper battalion’s assignment to spearhead the attack on Saigon, backed up by another 11 battalions, totaling about 4,000 troops. There had been little time for rehearsal. What they lacked in planning would be made up for in the intensity, scope and audacity of the attacks.

The battalion’s mission that morning was to gain control of six objectives: the U.S. Embassy, the Presidential Palace, the national broadcasting studios, South Vietnamese Naval Headquarters, Vietnamese Joint General Staff Headquarters at Tan Son Nhut air base and the Philippine Embassy. The attackers were to hold these objectives for 48 hours until other VC battalions could enter the city and relieve them. The survivors of the attack were to be instantly promoted.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Foreign Affairs, Journalists, Vietnam War