The guiding assumption of the latter worry is that Tet 1968 was cleverly aimed at our home front even as our forces crushed the enemy in the field. Bay even quotes General Giap, who ran the campaign, to support this contention. Said Giap, "The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion. ...Military power is not the decisive factor in war. Human beings! Human beings are the decisive factor." I figured it is wrong to quote the enemy when he could be defending his reputation after the fact.
My reading of the war holds that Tet was nothing about our home morale. Had we not abandoned South Vietnam in 1974 and 1975, and South Vietnam survived and thrived, nobody would remember Giap's so-called "brilliant" strike at our home morale any more than anybody thinks about Hitler's Ardennes offensive in December 1944 as a brilliant attack that split the Allies and allowed Nazi Germany to survive the war. But since our home morale did decline after Tet and North Vietnam did conquer South Vietnam seven years later, looking back it is easy to see a cause and effect and ascribe that to a deep plan.
It was nothing of the sort. Tet was about South Vietnamese morale and Tet was intended to spark an uprising of the assumed "oppressed" South Vietnamese. We crushed that and two subesequent offensives that year and demonstrated the hollowness of the claim that South Vietnames were eager for Hanoi's "help."
Yet most of my reading on Vietnam was done in college so my understanding may be old. So I pulled out A Better War, a 1999 book by Lewis Sorley that focuses on the post-Tet war, that is sitting on my shelves (along with a few score other books to be read; but suffering from a vicious Christmas flu, I'm home with more time to read) and started reading. My understanding is not obsolete based on newer research. Giap was wrong about strategy, but got lucky. And in 1989 when Bay quotes him, he probably was still fighting foes in Vietnam who believed he sacrificed tens of thousands of NVA soldiers for no good reason.
On page 78, Sorley quotes an enemy assessment of Tet dated March 1968:
Our armed forces failed to adequately perform their role of creating favorable
conditions to induce uprisings by the people in the towns.
On page 73, Sorley quotes the enemy again, in their history of their army, this time in regard to the two subsequent "Tets":
Thus "our main force units in South Vietnam endured continuous waves of vicious combat; they suffered losses, and their combat strength declined." Admitting that the summer and fall offensives of 1968 "did not achieve the military and political goals which they were assigned," the Communist historians nevertheless concluded that they had paid off in another realm because " they rained new blows on the already shaky will of the American imperialists."
That is, in looking back at that year, the North Vietnames assessed their goals as internal to South Vietnam, yet the North won a victory anyway because American morale at home suffered. This is not a deep plan. This is getting lucky.
As for why Giap would insist his plan was brilliant, Sorley writes that in the late summer of 1968, after the Tet and Mini-Tet offensives were turned back and the NVA was gearing up for the Third Offensive, the North Vietnames were debating their strategy:
Douglas Pike, then a political officer in the American embassy in Saigon, believed that the enemy was at that point going through "a period of great doctrinal indecision." Nothing tried to date had brought the expected victory, and factions in Hanoi were advocating a range of adaptations. One, led by Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh, favored negotiated settlement. Another, following Truong Thien, was for protracted war along Maoist lines. General Giap advocated "more of the same," a continuation of the current course of action. Pike, reported Ambassador Robert Komer, "feels in the end the protracted war school will finally prevail."
That was not to be. Instead of conserving their men and resources in the face of our military superiority by dispersing to guerilla war (the Maoist protracted war) or negotiating an end to the war they thought they could not win, Giap won the debate. The North Vietnamese would continue to wage a higher intensity big unit war. So far from a deep plan, Giap's plan was the "stay the course" plan when others in hanoi considered the approach folly. Given human nature, I'm sure that Giap was still defending his course in the face of attacks that held North Vietnam could have won anyway without the bloodshed Giap insisted on. Indeed, a North Vietnames history of the war insists that the NVA killed 43,000 American troops in Tet! (We lost 2,000 KIA.) Why insist on such a battlefield performance if your plan was so deep that enemy casualties were irrelevant when you can hit Walter Cronkite's morale back in the states?
So, it is best to understand Tet 1968 if you think an Al Tet in 2008 will defeat us. Tet was an effort to win on the battlefield. By chance, it hurt our morale at home. And even after South Vietnam stabilized, Tet only looked like an enemy victory because we threw it all away in 1974 when our troops were gone by refusing to support Saigon in the face of a direct conventional offensive by Hanoi that rolled into Saigon in early 1975 behind tanks and armored personnel carriers.
The enemy inside Iraq doesn't have the resources to launch a significant militarily significant offensive next year. Any Al Tet will thus simply be an effort directly aimed at our home morale. And it will rely on our side refusing to help Baghdad after the Al Tet, yet will not have any mechanized regular army ready to roll into Iraq to exploit our absence. And we'll still have 12-15 combat brigades in Iraq still ready to fight, even if Iran rolls the dice and directly intervenes with their armed forces next year to replicate the NVA offensives in 1974 and 1975.
If the enemy is thinking of a Tet without understanding what Tet was, we will have many opportunities to exploit their errors by smashing up anything that exposes itself to hit us.
If we keep our wits about us, of course. We can only hope that such a Tet takes place during summer Congressional recess.
