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40 years later
Remembering the Tet Offensive
By
Caleb T. Maupin
Published Jan 31, 2008 8:23 PM
On Jan. 30, 1968, Vietnam was divided and in the midst of a war for liberation.
The northern part of Vietnam was under the control of a socialist government of
workers and peasants. The southern part of Vietnam remained under the control
of a regime bought and sold to U.S. bankers and capitalists. Peasants in
southern Vietnam remained landless and hungry, and slums and poverty filled
Vietnam’s large urban centers. But all throughout South Vietnam, the
spirit of resistance was flowing.
In North Vietnam, the soldiers wore armbands showing their solidarity with
their southern country folk. The armbands read “Born in the North, Died
in the South.”
The Buddhist holiday of Tet marks the Lunar New Year, and was traditionally
celebrated in Vietnam in late January and early February. In years previous to
1968, the National Liberation Front of Vietnam had signed peace treaties with
the United States to mark the holiday.
The NLF planned an attack on U.S. forces for the Tet holiday, so their people
could celebrate the holiday before the vicious bombings that would come from
the U.S. in retaliation. They knew the U.S. would respond with brutality.
Already the U.S. was viciously bombing Vietnam. By the war’s end, more
bombs would fall on the Vietnamese people than had been dropped in all of the
Second World War. When directly bombing North Vietnamese cities and villages
failed to weaken the Vietnamese resistance, the U.S. began bombing dams,
causing massive flooding and a famine in Vietnam’s agriculture-based
countryside.
Some estimate that as many as 4 million Vietnamese people died as a result of
the bombing campaigns, which Gen. Curtis Lemay proclaimed were done to
“bomb them back into the stone age.” Later, in 1972, the U.S. would
drop 800,000 tons of explosives on Southeast Asia in one year alone.
The Tet Offensive struck 36 of the 43 provincial capitals of Vietnam. In each
city, the attacks were similar. The guerrilla soldiers of the NLF were able to
sneak into villages under the cover of the Tet celebrations. In some cities
they were even able to test explosive weapons under the cover of the holiday
fireworks.
Once inside the cities, with supporters residing within them acting as guides,
they would wage mortar attacks on key sites and do their best to get
control.
The attack on Saigon
Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, was the capital city of the puppet
government of Vietnam. It was also a city in which many Vietnamese people lived
in poverty and longed to resist. The city, which had not been rocked in nearly
20 years, was suddenly the site of a massive insurrection.
NLF guerillas infiltrated and assaulted the U.S. occupiers right within their
own embassy, which had been built up with massive security following a bombing.
The diplomats were forced to barricade themselves inside inner rooms as the
fighting went on, in the equivalent of modern day Iraq’s “green
zone.”
After the fighting had subsided, U.S. troops ordered the slaughter of all
people within the embassy who were “not American.” This included
many Vietnamese people who had been hired to work at the embassy and had had no
part in the rebellion.
The National Radio Station, which the U.S. used to broadcast pro-imperialist
propaganda throughout Vietnam, was also invaded. Guerrillas were able to
liberate much of the station’s $1 million worth of equipment, and destroy
what they couldn’t take with them.
During the Tet Offensive, a Saigon prison was busted into by the National
Liberation Front. In South Vietnam 65,000 people were in prison, most of them
political prisoners. These prisons were known for beatings and torture at the
hand of the puppet forces of the South Vietnamese government. Five thousand
prisoners were set free from the clutches of the U.S. backed regime and joined
the insurrection.
A horrific scene unfolded in the streets of Saigon during the rebellion. A
leader of the police forces of South Vietnam carried out an on-the-spot
execution of an NLF supporter. Police officers walked the man over to Police
Chief Ngoc Loan, who promptly put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger in
front of the lenses of Western television reporters. Soon the picture of this
killing was on the front pages of newspapers and headlined on the evening news
in the Western world. This helped turn many against the war in Vietnam and
strengthened the anti-war movement.
Paper tigers
“Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers,” Mao Zedong
wrote, and he was proved correct by the Tet Offensive and the eventual outcome
of the Vietnam War. All of the countless thousands of U.S. CIA agents and spies
in Vietnam could not predict the Tet Offensive. The Vietnamese were able to
score massive blows against the U.S. occupiers. U.S. forces clearly had
underestimated the strength of the Vietnamese people, who desperately wanted to
be free from the clutches of U.S. imperialism and capitalism.
Eventually, the U.S. was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, as resistance flowed
throughout the U.S. military itself and the streets of the U.S. were filled
with militant youth. Fifty-eight thousand U.S. troops were sent to their death
in Vietnam by the rulers of the U.S. Many more came home to spend the rest of
their lives disabled or homeless.
It’s been 40 years since the Tet Offensive and since Vietnam has
liberated itself from U.S. imperialism and established a socialist government
that has redistributed land to the peasants, raised the life expectancy by 14.7
years and cut infant mortality in half.
All of this would not have been possible without the heroism of countless
millions of Vietnamese people who fought and died for the liberation of their
country—especially those who surged forth, 40 years ago, in the Tet
Offensive.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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