50 years after key Vietnam battles, Mattis seeks closer ties
WASHINGTON (AP) — A half-century after the Tet Offensive punctured American hopes of victory in Vietnam, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is visiting the former enemy in search of a different kind of win: incremental progress as partners in a part of the world the Pentagon has identified as vital for the United States to compete with China and Russia.
Mattis, a retired general who entered the Marine Corps during Vietnam but did not serve there, arrived in Indonesia on Monday where he’ll spend two days before visiting Hanoi for talks with senior government and military leaders.
By coincidence, Mattis will be in Vietnam just days before the 50th anniversary of the communist offensive on Jan. 30-31, 1968, when North Vietnam attacked an array of key objectives in the South, including the city of Hue, a former imperial capital and cultural icon on the Perfume River.
At the time, Mattis was a senior at Columbia High School in Richland, Washington.
The following year he joined the Marine Corps Reserves.
The Tet Offensive gave the North an important boost, even though it ultimately was a military failure.
It collapsed an air of confidence among U.S. leaders that they would soon win a favorable peace agreement.
Looking ahead to 1968, the top U.S. commander in Vietnam at the time, Gen. William Westmoreland, famously declared in a speech in Washington in November 1967 that the war was about to enter a phase “when the end begins to come into view.”
The fighting dragged on for seven more years, fueling U.S. street protests and convulsing American politics, before the North prevailed and the last Americans evacuated in 1975.
The former enemies have gradually set aside their wartime differences, in part out of shared concern about China’s growing military power and more assertive position in the South China Sea. The Trump administration sees Vietnam as a partner in opposing China’s assertion of territorial claims in the South China Sea, including the Spratlys, an island chain where Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei also have claims.
Mattis said he didn’t expect the war to come up in his talks in Vietnam.
“That largely has been made a matter of the past,” he said aboard his flight to Asia.
Despite the passage of time, the legacy of the U.S. war is never far from the surface.