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WASHINGTON — 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 war in Vietnam but did not serve there, arrived in Indonesia on Monday where he’ll spend two days before visiting Hanoi for talks with government and military leaders.
By coincidence, Mattis will be in Vietnam just days before the 50th anniversary of the communist offensive launched 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, Wash. 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, 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 Vietnam also has 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. The countries didn’t normalize relations until 1995. It took another two decades before Washington fully lifted a ban on selling deadly weapons to Vietnam. The Vietnamese have largely embraced the new partnership as they’ve sought to diversify diplomatic and security relations in the region, fearing Chinese primacy. Vietnam fought a border war with China in 1979, and bitterness runs deep.
The current crop of top U.S. generals is too young to have served in Vietnam. The last chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have been a Vietnam veteran was Adm. Mike Mullen, who served aboard a Navy destroyer in 1969 that provided fire support for American and South Vietnamese ground forces near Da Nang. The only secretary of defense to have fought in Vietnam was Chuck Hagel, wounded in 1968. He served as Pentagon chief from 2013-2015.
But the war isn’t a relic of history at the Pentagon. An obscure office, the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency, still directs efforts to find and identify remains of Americans killed in Vietnam. Decades of searches still haven’t accounted for more than 1,200 people. An additional 350 are missing in Laos, Cambodia and China, the Pentagon says.
Mattis has shown interest in some of the unfinished business of Vietnam too. Last month, he approved awarding a Medal of Honor to a Marine for valorous actions in a counteroffensive to retake Hue. A Marine gunnery sergeant at the time, John Canley of Oxnard, Calif., had been awarded the Navy Cross for heroic action, including rescuing wounded Marines from Jan. 31 to Feb. 6, 1968.