In the weeks before Tet, the various civilian and military intelligence agencies, both American and South Vietnamese, knew most of the facts about the enemy but didn’t understand their significance. Because of hostility and rivalry between the agencies, they rarely shared or compared intelligence and were never able to assemble it into a cohesive mosaic. They knew through an ava-lanche of captured documents the enemy’s intentions for 1968, but they did not know that their capabilities were anywhere close to matching these intentions.

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In the New Year’s Eve roundup of ABC News TV correspondents around the world, I predicted heavy fighting in Vietnam in the new year. Documents captured at Dak To recently indicate the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong are now entering what they call the’sprint phase of the revolution,’ I said. Intensification of the fighting seems the intent here of both sides as 1968 begins. Don North, ABC News, Vietnam. It was to be the Year of the Monkey — a year in which we all experienced more history than we could digest.

The week before Tet had been strangely quiet. With nothing else to do, I took a camera crew over to the Phu Tho racetrack in Cholon to produce a little news feature on the crookedest horse race in the world. Widespread drugging of the horses produced some weird results, and often a lame horse could enter the winner’s circle if it could still stand up by the end of the race. A week later, the Phu Tho racetrack was used as a staging center and resupply base for the VC during the Tet Offensive. Even on that quiet Sunday afternoon it was likely the VC had been infiltrating Saigon and the racetrack — chances are that the heavy better in line with me at the parimutuel win-dow that afternoon was an NVA colonel. Arriving back at the ABC bureau I was dispatched immediately to the airport for a flight to Khe Sanh, which was where General Westmoreland was expecting the main thrust of an enemy strike during Tet.

In Khe Sanh on January 30, ABC News cameraman Peter Leydon and I came under a heavy barrage of NVA artillery fire. When we dived into a trench, the lens of our 16mm film camera broke off, forcing us to cut short our stay in Khe Sanh. We returned to Saigon on the Lockheed C-130 milk run that evening.

Because of the broken camera, we thought we would be missing the NVA’s push against Khe Sanh. But flying the length of Vietnam that night, it seemed like the whole country was under attack. As we took off from the Da Nang air base, we saw incoming rockets. Flying over Nha Trang shortly after midnight, we could see fires blazing. We heard about the attacks through radio contact with ground control.

But at 3:30 a.m. on January 31, we were back in Saigon, wheeling out of the Caravelle Hotel in the ABC News jeep with a new camera. Just off Tu Do Street, three blocks from the embassy, somebody — VC, ARVN, police or U.S. MPs, we weren’t sure who — opened up on us with an automatic weapon. A couple of rounds pinged off the hood of the jeep. I killed the lights and reversed out of range. We returned to the ABC bureau to wait for first light.

As dawn was breaking around 6 a.m., we walked the three blocks to the embassy. As we approached the compound, we could hear heavy firing, and green and red tracers cut into the pink sky.

Near the embassy, I joined a group of U.S. MPs moving toward the embassy’s front gate. I started my tape recorder for ABC radio as the MPs loudly cursed the ARVN troops who were supposed to provide embassy security. The MPs claimed the ARVN had D-Dee’d (slang for running away under fire) after the first shots.

Green-colored VC tracer bullets were coming from the embassy compound and the upper floor of buildings across the street. Red tracers stitched back across the street. We were in the cross-fire.

Crawling up to the gate with me was Peter Arnett of the Associated Press (AP), who was glad to have the company of another journalist who wasn’t competing with the AP. Peter had been covering the war for more than five years and had picked up a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. Arnett was a prolific, competitive and fair journalist, often filing more than a dozen stories for the AP every week. In spite of his later problems at CNN that would bring into question his credibility as a reporter of Vietnam-related stories, I believe his eight years of daily reporting from Vietnam are without par in the annals of war correspondence.

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