USA TODAY International Edition
Huê: The end in sight fades away
Tet offensive in 1968 raises doubts about U. S. victory
It’s incredible today that someone can be a camera- toting tourist in Vietnam, where a war lasted 20 years, killed 3 million people ( 58,000 of them U. S. soldiers) and left scars across America that may never heal.
Perhaps the single most significant event of that long war was the 1968 Tet Offensive, a series of surprise attacks by Communist North Vietnamese forces to overthrow the U. S.- backed South Vietnamese government.
The attacks came as U. S. officials were telling the public — growing impatient that the war had slowed to a stalemate — that the end was in sight.
Fighting took place across South Vietnam and the invaders were driven out within a few days. But the worst was in the city of Huê, where the North was defeated after nearly a month of vicious urban combat.
But while the Americans could claim a military victory, the public back home began doubting the war was winnable. The anti- war movement gained prominence.
It’s these military and publicopinion tipping points that Mark Bowden examines in his meticulously analytical and multiperspective book Huê 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam ( Atlantic Monthly Press, 610 pp., eeee out of four).
Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down, the best- selling account of the 1993 battle between U. S. Army Rangers and Somali militia, spent five years researching the Tet invasion. He conducted more than 50 interviews with Vietnamese and Americans who engaged in combat and with others who were reporting on it.
Filmmakers Michael Mann and Michael De Luca plan to develop a TV miniseries based on Bowden’s new book.
Of Huê and Vietnam, Bowden writes: “The Battle of Huê is a microcosm for the entire conflict. With nearly half a century of hindsight, Huê deserves to be widely remembered as the single bloodiest battle of the war, one of its defining moments, and one of the most intense urban combat battles in American history.”
The author uses eyewitness accounts from both sides to guide us through the invasion and its aftermath. The story puts readers inside Marine and Army battalions and the clandestine teams of Northern invaders.
Bowden provides compelling insight into the North’s infiltration of South Vietnamese society and to the North’s planning and execution of the incursion — and how the South’s failure to support the invasion helped defeat it. He details the American military’s reaction — the initial disbelief and denial of commanding officers and the heroism, suffering and deaths of those at the front.
The author also points out that news stories were more accurate than official U. S. accounts, and how respected CBS newsman Walter Cronkite helped change public opinion about the war.
The U. S. began withdrawing troops in 1969. Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the Communists in 1975. The U. S. resumed diplomatic relations in 1995.
In America, Vietnam eludes understanding. Bowden’s excellent Huê 1968, however, gives us the clearest picture yet of what happened.