But I digress. Here's another effort to set the record straight:
As the Washington Post's Saigon bureau chief Peter Braestrup documented in his 1977 book, "The Big Story," the desperate fury of the communist attacks including on Saigon, where most reporters lived and worked, caught the press by surprise. (Not the military: It had been expecting an attack and had been on full alert since Jan. 24.) It also put many reporters in physical danger for the first time. Braestrup, a former Marine, calculated that only 40 of 354 print and TV journalists covering the war at the time had seen any real fighting. Their own panic deeply colored their reportage, suggesting that the communist assault had flung Vietnam into chaos.
Their editors at home, like CBS's Walter Cronkite, seized on the distorted reporting to discredit the military's version of events. The Viet Cong insurgency was in its death throes, just as U.S. military officials assured the American people at the time. Yet the press version painted a different picture.
To quote Braestrup, "the media tended to leave the shock and confusion of early February, as then perceived, fixed as the final impression of Tet" and of Vietnam generally. "Drama was perpetuated at the expense of information," and "the negative trend" of media reporting "added to the distortion of the real situation on the ground in Vietnam."
The North Vietnamese were delighted. On the heels of their devastating defeat, Hanoi increasingly shifted its propaganda efforts toward the media and the antiwar movement. Causing American (not South Vietnamese) casualties, even at heavy cost, became a battlefield objective in order to reinforce the American media's narrative of a failing policy in Vietnam.
The struggle to correct the false history of Tet and Vietnam is darned close to being a quagmire in the face of entrenched opponents clinging to a narrative of defeat, but it is a fight that we have to wage without tiring even if it seems like no progress is made. Today, people are dying as the price of the Vietnam-fueled "dissent" over the Iraq War.
One day, the current holders of the false history ot Tet will pass from the scene. Perhaps then the struggle to simply have an accurate history of Tet 1968 will bear fruit. We owe it to future soldiers and Marines who, because of the accepted Tet narrative, will be targetted by enemies in the belief that they can pull their own Tet on America's reporters and people if only they can send enough body bags home to us.
