At about 3 a.m., General Kerwin got a call from the JCS, who asked what was going on. ‘I said: ‘To be frank with you, I’m not sure what the hell’s going on. Everybody seems to be unaware. We’re doing the best we can to get you the information. I’ll have to call you back.” Soon after that, he learned that the U.S. Embassy was under attack.

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‘Westy went down there because he thought if we lost that, it would appear that we’d lost the whole damn battle,’ Kerwin recalled. ‘He called me and said to get hold of General Fred Weyand, who had II Field Forces. He said to get the troops down here at this embassy.’

‘So I got hold of Fred on the radio, and by that time Fred had gotten the word. He sent down some troops. From there on out, my main job was to get a tactical picture. So, that was what I did — get the staff really ginned up and get hold of various commanders. I got the picture for Westy because he was down there at the embassy. From then on out, the rest of that day, I slept in the headquarters and never got home.’

Getting the staff organized was a considerable challenge, since many of the officers had a difficult time making their way to MACV headquarters on the 31st. ‘After the battle,’ Kerwin recalled, ‘that led to the establishment of a trailer park at the new headquarters [at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, a few miles to the north]. I said: ‘We can’t have this. Next time we may get a hell of a lot of people killed.’ Of course, that’s a part of combat, but the question was how to get people in hand so we could do something. So I said, ‘Let’s establish a trailer park up there for everybody.’ But of course, that didn’t help us at the time….You just shift as best you can. You tap everybody on the shoulder down in the operations center and say, ‘Get a hold of those guys — tell Khe Sanh I want this and I want that, and so forth.”

As the situation developed that day, General Kerwin recalled, ‘In some places we weren’t quite sure what was going on. It didn’t look too bad — we hadn’t lost anything, I mean anything major. Of course, the battle for Hue developed more and more as time went on, and that turned out to be one hell of a fight. [As for] the embassy, of course, it was just psychological….If we lost that place, if the people inside got killed in our own embassy, that would be one hell of a blow psychologically. But that was not our problem [at MACV headquarters]. It was our job — the whole damn staff — to get information.’

Turning to the Offensive
As Kerwin pieced together the scope of the enemy operation, he updated the MACV commander and the JCS in Washington. In the days that followed, American troops, South Vietnamese forces and a small contingent of other allied units gradually regained the initiative across the entire country. While there were some serious battles in the south, they were not of primary concern. The greatest challenge was keeping the north-south main supply routes open. As long as the allies could keep control of the highway and continue to move troops and supplies, Kerwin believed the situation in the south could be stabilized. Operationally, Westmoreland was most concerned about the attack on the city of Hue and the siege of the U.S. base at Khe Sanh (which Kerwin called Westmoreland’s ‘pet project’). Both were in the northern part of the country. In addition to the Marines already fighting in the north, MACV redeployed the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division from South Vietnam’s central coast. Kerwin recalled that it was a difficult situation, mixing Army and Marines, as well as South Vietnamese forces, on the fly. ‘It could have gone down the tube up there,’ Kerwin said.

The Marines, the Vietnamese forces and the more than 45,000 Army troops that MACV funneled into the area strained both the theater’s tactical control and its logistical support structure in the following weeks. MACV also found itself battling incessantly to ensure that commanders gave the South Vietnamese forces enough air and artillery support so that they could make real contributions to the operation.

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