Word: tet
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...President Ngo Dinh Diem to undertake a program of protected "strategic hamlets," but the program flopped when Diem moved too quickly, ignoring Thompson's warning to make certain that his troops could hold each area. In No Exit from Viet Nam, written after the enemy's 1968 Tet offensive, Thompson indicts President Johnson's excessive buildup and General William Westmoreland's use of unwieldy units to carry out unproductive "search and destroy" missions. Thompson warmly endorses the more limited "spoiler" tactics devised by General Creighton Abrams...
...American generals in Viet Nam, from U.S. Commander Creighton Abrams on down, sedulously forgo the kind of broad statements that Abrams' predecessor, General William Westmoreland, was wont to make-and still occasionally utters (see TIME Essay, page 26). Westmoreland seriously underestimated the adverse effect of the 1968 Tet offensive, which he called a triumph for the U.S., upon public opinion at home. And there are more substantive reasons for their caution. The progress that they see-in the lowered level of the violence, in pacification of the countryside, in turning over the fighting to the South Vietnamese army -does...
...Communist slaughter of civilians was wholesale while the Communists held the old imperial capital of Hué during their 1968 Tet offensive. Working from house to house with specially prepared "blood lists," they rounded up all officials and people suspected of working with the U.S. and Saigon governments. Some were arrested, others shot on the spot. The magnitude of the massacre did not begin to become fully evident until after government troops had retaken the city and uncovered a mass grave with 150 bodies. Their find led to the discovery of more grisly caches: 19 mass graves in and around...
Negligible Propaganda. What triggered the Communist slaughter? Many Hue citizens believe that the execution orders came directly from Ho Chi Minh. More likely, however, the Communists simply lost their nerve. They had been led to expect that many South Vietnamese would rally to their cause during the Tet onslaught. That did not happen, and when the battle for Hue began turning in the allies' favor, the Communists apparently panicked and killed off their prisoners...
...Saigon government, which claims that the Communists have killed 25,000 civilians since 1957 and abducted another 46,000, has made negligible propaganda use of the massacre. In Hue it has not had to. Says Colonel Le Van Than, the local province chief: "After Tet, the people realized that the Viet Cong would kill them, regardless of political belief." That fearful thought haunts many South Vietnamese, particularly those who work for their government or for the Americans. With the U.S. withdrawal under way, the massacre of Hue might prove a chilling example of what could lie ahead...