Year of the Rat

[Redpossum]

Yes, it's the Lunar New Year. Yes, it's the Year of the Rat again. And once again, we remember. Forty years ago; how the time has flown by! At the time, I was 9 years old, and my step-father was serving his second tour in Viet-Nam, this time with 2nd Force Recon Bn.

For those too young to remember, "The Year of the Rat" is a phrase that usually refers to the 1968 Tet Offensive.

The Tet Offensive was, in most ways, the climax of the war in Viet-Nam. Everything before that was build-up, and everything afterwards was just denouement, though we didn't know it at the time.

I know there are wiki-bashers here, but the Wikipedia entry on the Tet Offensive is actually pretty good, as far as listing the events and times and dates, all the numbers and such. And there's a link on that page to the sub-article on the Siege of Hue, which is also fairly good, in its way. The only caveat I would offer is that when Wikipedia refers to the "NLF" they are using this as a politically-neutral acronym for "National Liberation Forces", what we at the time called the Viet-Cong

But what the Wikipedia entry lacks is analysis, and this is the part that most civilians today still fail to understand.

The 1968 Tet Offensive was reported in the US media as a great communist victory, and this was utterly false in the purely military sense. All the major communist objectives failed. The Viet-Cong were virtually eliminated as a fighting force. The population of the south emphatically did not rise up in support of the communists as they were supposed to do. The Siege of Hue was...not a communist victory; the city was trashed. Hard to say if anybody won, but certainly the vietnamese people lost. And of course, the Hue Massacre is another story.

And yet, the communists won an enormous political victory, simply because of the way the events were reported in the US Media. Because American reporters, unaccustomed to covering conventional warfare in what had up to that point been a guerilla war, saw the damage inflicted by the communist attackers, and thought, "OMFG, we got our butts kicked!". So of course that's the way they wrote their stories, and the way it was reported to the American people.

And so the perception of a military victory, though totally false and mistaken, created a political victory.

The other side of this was the painfully incompetent way that US high command handled the initial hours. Reporters were there to see that, they did report it accurately, and many embarrassing stories about ignored warnings would see the light of US media in the aftermath. Westmoreland in particular came out looking like a fool. This part was not illusion.

Oh, and I suppose I should note that, in the terms of classical Maoist insurgency, the Tet Offensive was the communists' attempt to move from Phase 1 to Phase 2.

Right, analysis? Propaganda is crucial. Propaganda and control of the Information War are crucial aspects of a counter-insurgency, particularly as waged by a liberal democracy. This is true because maintaining popular support is absolutely vital to the will to win which is, as Ho Chi Minh correctly noted, the final arbiter of victory in any insurgent war.