For obvious reasons, this would not be an airmobile assault. It had to be executed on the ground, and it could only be supported by a limited number of vehicles. That meant only one company could go in at a time. Gibler chose his the remote areas near Cambodia and Laos, while infiltrating Main Force VC and NVA units into the cities. The infiltrators would spring their surprise on Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year and one of the country’s biggest holidays. Previous years had seen a wary truce during Tet, but not 1968. The Communists expected to be able to overwhelm the ARVN forces, rally the South Vietnamese people to their cause and destroy the Saigon government.

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In devising this offensive, the planners in Hanoi, like their counterparts in Washington, saw what they wished to see. They thought they could go toe to toe with American firepower, and they believed their own propaganda-that the people of South Vietnam were itching to be rid of their ‘imperialist’ American overseers and would welcome their northern countrymen with open arms. As it turned out, they were dead wrong. The Americans rallied quickly and decimated the enemy attackers in a conventional style of battle that played right to American strengths. Moreover, ARVN units, often fighting for their homes and families, were quite effective, and the people of South Vietnam did not even come close to a popular, pro-Communist uprising. In fact, many of them were as determined as ever to reject Northern rule.

In the days leading up to the offensive, Lt. Col. John Gibler, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, studied intelligence reports from his unit’s recent contact with enemy forces and decided something was not quite right. He had a powerful sense of uneasiness about the enemy’s whereabouts and disposition. ‘We knew something was up,’ he said later. ‘We had several contacts in the last few days before Tet, but none of the enemy wanted to join battle. You’d see ‘em, you’d go after ‘em, and they’d fade-and that wasn’t like the enemy we knew.’

Gibler had been a battalion commander since September 1967. In his experience, when the VC outnumbered an American unit, they usually closed quickly to point-blank range, ‘grabbing the enemy by the belt’ so as to neutralize American firepower, and tried to inflict as much damage as possible before breaking contact. Instead of doing that now, however, they would immediately disengage and move east. That prospect alarmed Gibler.

Gibler’s battalion was based at Binh Chanh, a small village about 30 miles southwest of the heart of Saigon. Day after day throughout the fall of 1967 and the early weeks of 1968, his soldiers patrolled a concentric area of operations in the muddy rice paddies, streams, rivers and plantations around the village. These men-who routinely battled leeches, immersion foot, heat, mosquitoes, malaria, booby traps and a resilient, slippery enemy-were only the latest representatives of a unit with a remarkable combat lineage.

The 7th Infantry, one of the U.S. Army’s oldest combat units, traced its history to the Battle of New Orleans, when it fought under the command of Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson. Unit folklore held that the soldiers of the 7th had battled the British from behind cotton bales, earning the nickname the ‘Cotton Balers.’ In fact, the 7th Infantry fought the British from the cover of earthen embankments-cotton bales would have caught fire and were probably only used to hold artillery pieces in place-but the nickname stuck.

In subsequent years, the 7th Infantry played an important and sometimes even a pivotal role in every significant American war. The regiment fought in the Seminole Wars and in smaller engagements against American Indians. During the Mexican War, the Cotton Balers repeatedly served as assault troops, helping to win the battles of Monterrey, Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec. The regiment fought at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Little Bighorn, Big Hole, El Caney, Belleau Wood, the Marne and the Argonne Forest, usually distinguishing itself as a crack infantry unit.

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