Tet Offensive revealed how U.S. arrogance, deceit can backfire

On New Year’s Eve 1968, America partied. Half a world away, American soldiers and South Vietnamese allies relaxed under a traditional New Year’s Truce. Eagerly awaiting deployment to Vietnam in February, I partied in anti-war Georgetown, Washington D.C.

Our enemy neither partied nor relaxed. Joined in their fight to expunge foreigners and reunify Vietnam, the South’s Viet Cong and the North’s army smuggled soldiers and weapons into southern cities under cover of bustling preparations for the Vietnamese new year — Tet — one month later.

During that month, optimism lingered, with government and military leaders assuring impending victory, asserting that we were wearing down our enemy, improving our military ally and fabricating a stable, competent and representative government.

Optimism notwithstanding, American command requested significantly more soldiers and weaponry for 1968… for victory’s sake.

Even to my casually attentive eye, our enemy’s capabilities and determination were impressively evident throughout fall 1967. Military optimism wasn’t convincing. My Army lieutenant colonel father, just returned from his year in Vietnam, had an uncharacteristically guarded optimism. Between his close reading of Vietnamese history and fresh experience on the ground, he respected our enemy as capable and worthy, was dubious that victory was imminent or inevitable.

Jan. 30, 1968, the Tet Offensive erupted, changing everything. Enemy forces brought war from the jungle into more than 100 South Vietnamese cities and towns, astonishing the heart of American power and arrogance.

Fifty years later, there’s danger of spinning Vietnam as a historic aberration. But the same guiding perspectives — exposed by the Vietnam experience, especially Tet — are operative in Iraq, Afghanistan and shadow wars beyond: historical ignorance, arrogance of power, underestimation of the enemy, secrecy, and need for a saving-face exit, without regard for cost.

Truth, in any war, is the first casualty: Delusional or deceitful, official declarations of the clear line between good/evil, us/them, incite fear and its opposite, swagger. It infected news reports and public comprehension.

The Tet surprise spurred media to challenge and shatter official “reality” with stories, photos and footage from the battleground. From the first iconic image of a high-ranking ally commander executing a Viet Cong prisoner, a deluge of disturbing images galvanized and profoundly altered public perception. Waking us up.

Tet’s surprise, and success precipitated our slide toward a darker, uglier America with its fear of losing.

Knowing it wasn’t winnable, strategies were designed to traumatize the Vietnamese people into surrender, to bludgeon and punish them — for not losing. Civility was abandoned, with atrocities, environmental destruction and the deaths of innocents. Begging the question at home and for soldiers: Who are we?

It’s a question we do well to ask ourselves today as we deal with yet-unlearned lessons from TET:

▪ There is tragic cost in historical ignorance. For 2,000 years before 1968, the Vietnamese had determinedly fought invaders from China, France and Japan with several bold and decisive battles beginning on the Vietnamese New Year. Ignorance is deadly.

▪ America cannot win a war with strut and swagger, shock and awe, overwhelming the enemy with muscle, size and weapons. This kind of bravado is fertile ground for demeaning, disrespecting and underestimating our enemy — and losing American lives.

▪ Secrecy fosters a cult of expertise among politicians and military command, who first fabricate a war’s justification, and then conduct it with obfuscation, lies and rising body counts.

Today, our sense of war reality is shaped mostly by scenes of emotional homecomings, the heroic resilience of some disabled veterans and cultural commercials that foster an emotional and uninformed patriotism. We have a concept of war from which many of war’s biggest truths are absent: suicide, PTSD, lasting wounds (both visible and invisible), civilian death and wholesale ecological destruction.

We have forgotten that when conflict comes to war, both sides are well past the point of winning.

By definition, a democratic government can only do what its population agrees to. If the population is either asleep, distracted or hoodwinked, it will not rouse itself long enough to track reality and voice objection, becoming all current and future wars’ most certain guarantor.

Like war, political disengagement, however it’s encouraged, is neither democratic nor spiritually sustainable. This moment presents a hopeful intersection of the 50-year anniversary of Tet awakening America’s conscience, 15 years since the Iraq invasion reinstated our silence and introspective season of spiritual renewal.

We can neither bomb, nor pray the world into peace. Peace requires connecting our spiritual selves to the collective “who are we?” with informed action against injustice, misunderstanding, indifference and the endless wars — condoned by silence — committed in our name.

This story was originally published March 30, 2018 at 7:59 PM with the headline "Tet Offensive revealed how U.S. arrogance, deceit can backfire."