And the general’s blunt admission that the border battles in late 1967 and early 1968 at Song Be-Loc Ninh, Dak To and Khe Sanh were feints to draw American troops out of Saigon and other population centers prior to the Tet Offensive is worth noting, for the contribution it makes to the still unresolved question of NVA and VC motivation in those hinterland contests. Finally, Tra powerfully reinforced our belief that the Communists’ war strategy of attrition mirrored that of the United States at the time. Thus, General Tra’s formulation of Hanoi’s intentions in the war — ‘to fight a long time and cause heavy casualties’ and so make the Americans conclude that ‘the war was unwinnable’ — could have come directly from the American command in Saigon.

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Postscript, December 2001: As is frequently the case in the Communist world, the most serious threat to Tra’s survival came from his own colleagues. When he published his Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B-2 Theater, Vol. 5: Concluding the 30-Year War in 1982, he straightforwardly argued that the Tet Offensive failed to achieve its objectives because leaders in Hanoi allowed their’subjective desires’ to blind them to Communist weaknesses and to American strengths. Given the constraints on freedom of expression in Vietnam, such an act may have been both brave and foolish. For a time, many who followed Vietnamese affairs feared that he would be severely punished — that he would perhaps receive a prison sentence, or even be executed. At the end of the day, however, what the Politburo actually did was considerably less harsh. It forced him to retire from government and placed him under house arrest for three years. Rehabilitated in 1985, he became in his last years a strong advocate for veterans’ causes. Tran Van Tra died on April 20, 1996, at age 77, after a long illness.

In the years between my interview with Tra in 1990 and the general’s death six years later, I was not able to take advantage of his kind offer to help me research the combat history of the war in Vietnam itself. That was a pity. In all historical research, but especially when the topic is military history, the broader the base of sources, the better and more complete the history will be.

The article was written by John M. Carland and originally published in the Decenber 2002 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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