The Tet Offensive Forty Years Later

Forty years. According to some ways of calculating, that is considered to be the length of time for a full generation.

Forty years. According to the Bible, the length of time that Israel wandered in the Sinai Peninsula after escaping Egyptian bondage.

Forty years of the world turning, forty years of global conflicts, the rise and fall of dictators, of military regimes, of negotiations.

Forty years of what came to be a black eye for the American military.

It has been forty years today since the Tet Offensive. It has been largely undiscussed by the American media today, but it has not been forgotten in Vietnam.

Vietnam on Friday marked 40 years since the Tet Offensive with colourful military parades of its veterans and re-enactments of the surprise wave of urban assaults that marked a turning point in the war.

Communist Party leaders and military chiefs watched as former guerrillas and regular soldiers filed past Ho Chi Minh City's Reunification Palace, formerly the presidential palace of the US-backed Saigon regime ousted in 1975.

Youths in black Viet Cong pajamas with models of AK-47 assault rifles and rocket launchers joined the parade, as did women carrying fruit baskets on shoulder poles, recalling the way arms and bombs were smuggled into the city.

"The 1968 Tet Offensive opened a new page in the Vietnam war and struck a blow to the imperialist Americans' will to continue their aggression," said Le Thanh Hai, using the rhetoric of the Communist Party he heads in the city.

"It is one of the most glorious chapters in Vietnam's history."

In a parade of more than 10,000 veterans, service members, and others held today, the celebration was a dual event, marking the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive as well as the founding of the Indochina Communist Party on 3FEB1930.

Sharing the podium with Vietnam's Communist Party leader Nong Duc Manh was Nguyen Thi Binh, signer for the southern Provisional Revolutionary Government, former vice president of Vietnam, and signer of the 1973 Paris peace accords.

Tet has become, in recent years, a center of growing controversy among historians, military analists, and the intelligence community. It is widely conceded, now, that the United States and the South Vietnamese greatly overestimated the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Retired Vietnamese military commanders have admitted in recent years that they were suffering heavy casualties and taking heavy losses in fighting the Americans. Congressional leaders and military commanders clashed on their opinions regarding who was actually winning. Assertions by General William Westmoreland that the U.S. was on the offensive against the communist uprising were met with confusion and doubt by the American public. The American political machine began to downscale operations in Vietnam, eventually leaving the South Vietnamese on their own in 1973. Saigon finally fell to the North in 1975.

One has to wonder, when hearing Senator Harry Reid announcing that the war in Iraq is "lost," and General Peter Petraeus denounced as "General Betray Us," if we are not seeing history repeating itself today.

"Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it."


Once and Always, an American Fighting Man


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Fickle Irony, thy Name is Webb...

It's an amazing thing how our pasts come back to bite us so soundly right square on the ass sometimes. Lord knows I've had things enough from my past come back to haunt my nightmares often enough, things I would have preferred left in the past, buried, forgotten, tucked away safely in their own little compartments where they could do no harm.

The truth of the matter is, the more things we do in the public eye, the more there is to come back to catch us at a later date. And when we say things or do things for no other reason than out of mere political motivation, things done simply to be in contrast with the opposing side, we make of ourselves hypocrites.

Witness the following, and bear ye witness to exactly the sort of political pandering and hypocrisy of which I speak:

The Corner

Friday, August 24, 2007


"The Aftermath of Saigon's Fall Is Rarely Dealt With At All." [Byron York]


An analysis of Vietnam strikingly similar to what we're hearing today, beginning with a discussion of Congress' 1975 decision to cut funding to the South Vietnamese:

This Congress was elected in November 1974, only months after Nixon's resignation, and it was dominated by a fresh group of antiwar Democrats. One of the first actions of the new Congress was to vote down a supplemental appropriation for the beleaguered South Vietnamese that would have provided $800 million in military aid, including much-needed ammunition, spare parts and medical supplies.

This vote was a horrendous blow, in both emotional and practical terms, to the country that had trusted American judgment for more than a decade of intense conflict. It was also a clear indication that Washington was abandoning the South Vietnamese even as the North Vietnamese continued to enjoy the support of the Soviet Union, China and other Eastern bloc nations. The vote's impact was hardly lost on North Vietnamese military planners, who began the final offensive only five weeks later, as the South Vietnamese were attempting to adjust their military defenses.

Read the full article here. The author of this article, not the one today, but the original article? Why that would be none other than Senator James Webb of Virginia. That's right, the same Senator James Webb of Virginia who refused to shake hands with President Bush and berated him about bringing home the troops.

It's almost as if the man was trained under the direct tutelage of a certain Senator from New York who has no political bearing of her own other than to go whichever way the polls lean. Mayhap they're related, for surely this must be some sort of genetic anomaly that causes these people to act as if they have no conscience, no honor, and certainly no valor.

Once and Always, an American Fighting Man

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