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Category: Vietnam 1967-1968
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TET

January 31st, 1968 was TET - Below is Verbatim, the letter I wrote home just hours after it hit - right where I was in II Field Force Headquarters. I still have the original letter. This was OCR scanned in.

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"31 Jan 68

Dear Ones

Funny thing happened at my “safe" headquarters last night. I wrote Aunt Arleen a letter before 10:00 PM telling her how I was out of the war now, went to bed, and at 3:05  WHAM! The 122 mm rockets began hitting the headquarters. All the officers who have never heard a shot fired in anger before started running toward the bunkers and ditches with ludicrous results- running into clothes lines, one guy burst through a screen door, several conked heads trying to get into the same bunker, half clothed, shorts with helmets, rifles without shoes etc etc.

By the time the third rocket hit I figured I had better get on the ground floor, at least, since this wooden building isn't very sturdy. So I put on my pants(another rocket hit), I put on my boots(another rocket hit), I grabbed my helmet, camera and pistol and found a pile of sandbags. I got on the side of the barracks right behind the perimeter defense where I could see Bien Hoa airbase and watch the fireworks. There were plenty. I judge about 50-75 rockets hit Bien Hoa, and big fires were started and a couple of planes went up in balls of fire. Every few minutes another one would hit our headquarters, and three of them made rocks and metal rain down on the tin roofs of my billet. One hit in front of the mail shack and the Signal headquarters and blew in all the windows and put holes in the walls. Nothing critical was destroyed, however.·

The last round landed right across the road from me, the sparks flew and the stuff rained down. We took about 10 rounds. Haven't heard incoming rockets since 1951 in Korea when the 7th Cav CP was hit.

All around this area helicopters, gunships, “spooky”ships flares and artillery scrambled. I could even set my camera by flare light.

Then things quieted down while fires burned here and there. I went back to bed about 4:00, fell asleep, then at about 4:45 crack!

The ground attacks began. Tracers were everywhere, spent rounds caroomed off the tin roof and once again everybody scrambled into bunkers. From then on until now(10:30 AM) its been one big war around Saigon, the headquarters, the air bases and the ammo dump.

About 7 I went up to the office(the cooks wern't feeding yet and except for gun ships throwing down rockets off in the distance it looked like it might quiet downbut it didn't. First thing that happened was the armored personnel carrier platoon that was guarding the headquarters made a sweep across the road in front of the head quarters to check out a shantytown. An RPG rocket hit the platoon
leader's PC, wounding him and knocking out the PC. So since then there has been a battle royal going on across the road as Huey Cobras, the newest gunships have been plastering the area. It is so close that when the gunships make their machine gun runs, the cases and links fall down onto the tin roof of the barracks, scaring hell out of everybody.

Then I was standing out between my building and the TOC when the Long Binh ammo dump went up with an enormous explosion as big as a small atomic bomb, with the same mushroom cloud and all. I first saw the shock wave coming at us across the valley, called everybody out to see the huge ball of fire, then the wave hit, shattering windows and knocking things off the shelves, and fluorescent tubes out of their sockets onto the floor

So I decided it would not be a business as usual day after all, and sent all my section back to their barracks and bunkers. On the way the mess hall had opened, we served ourselves(the waitresses all were off for TET(and I suppose, to carry ammo for the Viet Cong.) I had a good breakfast- coffee, cheese omelet, sweet roll, tomato juice-with - all my section, and the mess hall was full, when wham!

The gunships opened up on a section of woods right behind the headquarters, and the explosions rattled the tea cups. It (a shell) just ricocheted off the roof above me) It was amusing to watch the administrative types wearing flack vests and helmets to breakfast. Any way that didn't seem like a very good idea, to crowd into the mess hall, so we dispersed to our various billets.

You may wonder why I am not doing something important, but this headquarters is so big that when the planners are through and the shooting begins we are just in the way. Actually we may help man the TOC and the alternate OP which Gen Ware has just been told to set up-in case this one goes out of action.

The VC are making a desperate bid to hit everywhere-they claymored III Corps headquarters, got 100 men onto the airstrip at Ton Son Nhut, attacked the Embassy (A platoon of the 101st Airborne was landed on the roof of the Embassy at first light and believe it or not it was a ‘hot’ LZ.

An ammo carrying chopper got shot up getting a resupply to the Marine guards. 'The headquarters of  JGS (Vietnamtop staff) is under attack, as are a number of other headquarters. Of course every big district or province headquarters is under attack too, as you have undoubtedly heard, but "the war around the perimeter of IIFFV 

Headquarters is infinitely more interesting right now. If my ears  are right I can hear a 10 ship combat assault coming in now.

When I got back to my room after the 8 AM attack the shock of the explosion had knocked down the small colored picture of David, Becky and Edward which I had stuck in the molding in the wall.

But other than that, no damage done to either me or my few possessions 'The war continues in Vietnam. I think I will go to lunch.

                                                                                                                                             Love s/David"

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So TET officially started.

 

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Category: Vietnam 1967-1968
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Almost as soon as the Shooting phase of TET was over, the larger question - in each command area, like the southern half of Vietnam which was the responsibility of II Field Force - was 'what got hurt - US and South Vietnamese?'

From the hectic tumble of messages that came in the first three days, I had concluded a far different result from the Tet 'offensive' than the frantic Press - who made out as if the whole nation had collapsed and US and Vietnamese military with it.

In my first quick letter home after Tet, I wrote "...this is the biggest blunder the VC could ever have been made. They failed everywhere, militarily, took enormous losses (the reported US casualties and Viet Cong body counts were quite accurate), they failed to win any support in the cities...I think they beat themselves and shortened the war by years"

Of course it did, but the OTHER way - we quit in the end. Why? Because the Vietcong objective was NOT the destruction of US and Vietnamese Forces, even though they tried - but the WILL OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC.

As I have repeatedly said ever since Vietnam, the greatest ally Insurgents have is the US PRESS AND MEDIA.  

While in point of fact, not a SINGLE US Miltiary Army or Platoon was defeated or overrun, the US Press declared TET as a US 'MILITARY' disaster, when it was only a VC POLITICAL victory.

You have to credit the Communists who undertand the American public AND its Press better than they do.

The 'VC TET OFFENSIVE RESULTS BRIEFING'

There were so many places simultaneously hit by the Viet Cong, that it would take more than a few staff officers just scanning incoming messages to get the 'bigger' picture. For the corollary question was 'Who won what and who lost what' from this countrywide series of small attacks.'

So, no surprise to me, I and my G-3 Plans section was tapped to do a rapid study and prepare a comprehensive briefing for General Weyand and the senior commanders and staff in II Field Force. 

It took time - more than a week - to gather all the facts - reports from every US unit, and all the South Vietnamese Units who take longer to report, analyse them, put them all into a fully illustrated - map and charts - briefing.

But when it was done - reflecting exactly what I had concluded two days after TET - that the Viet Cong suffered an overwhelming military defeat - the briefing I gave to General Weyand was so convincing, he wanted General Westmoreland to see it Westmoreland wanted General Wheeler - Chariman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington - to see it (and he took back a book of it I prepared)  which started the most amazing series of briefings by me to every Military AND US Civilian VIP AND the world Press over the next month.

I was dubbed in Saigon by the end of March as "The greatest living expert on the VC TET Offensive"

Before I was done I had briefed US Ambassador Bunker, the Saigon staffs of the Embassy, US AID, USIS (Information Service), Ambassador Laise, the CIA, General Lansdale, biligually to the Senior Vietnamese Government and Military Command, the 7th Air Force Commander General Momeyer - and before I was done he asked me to come back to Ton Son Nhut Airbase and breif it to General Ryan the Air Force Commander of all the Pacific (PACAF). There were 23 Air Force Stars in that room that date. They asked if they could video tape it and take it back to Honolulu. The still classified version.

Westmoreland was so exited about what it showed - and proved - he sat in a second time himself as I briefed it, and when Barry Zorthian, head of Information asked if it could be 'sanitized' enough to be given to the Press, he said yes.

So I had to revise the classified portions, and then to an absolutely packed room (perhaps 100 journalists - and I was sure some Communist Agent 'Press') during one of the "5 O'Clock Follies' - which the press dubbed their daily briefing by MACV, I delivered it yet again - and handled all their questions.

It was the hottest property in the Pacific, and I was the star.

But of COURSE, the Press and Media had already made up THEIR minds - regardless of the facts - that it was  major defeat for the US, preferred to run on television news in the US, repeatedly, the scenes of the Viet Cong getting inside the wire of the US Embassy (never inside the buildings) and declared it a disaster.

But YOU can read the long Unclassified Press Briefing (without maps, but plenty of facts) right here - which, in summary showed that we killed over 12,000 Viet Cong during TET while suffering only 300 killed US soldiers during the same 20 day period.

Just click on the PDF file below and read what the Press Corps got about TET from the US perspective.

http://davehugheslegacy.net/images/PDFs/tetbrief0001.pdf

 

 

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Category: Vietnam 1967-1968
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NEXT ASSIGNMENT ???

All during this period January through April, 1969, and right in the middle of my TET Briefing Road Show I got notifed and the Powers that Be thought I should be assigned to be put on the Faculty, as an Army representative, at the Naval War College.

Big Surprise. It may have come from my long and complex article about the emerging new Spectrum of War - from an Army perspective -  that was accepted and run in the prestigious periodic US Naval Institute Proceedings. The Navy's think book.

So in late March I got Official Orders for the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.

Sounded like a cushy assignment after a year of war. I would lecture Naval War College students.

I spent the next 3 months, long distance to Patsy by mail, going over what she has to check out for our Move there. Housing, schools, what to do with our house.

But then on the 20th of April, I was visited, at II Field Force Headquarters by none other that Major General Roland Gleszer, Class of 1940 West Point, whose son Captain Peter Gleszer had been under my Wolfhound battalion command in Vietnam just months before.

Gleszer wanted to tell me he had been assigned to command the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, and he wanted me for HIS 'G-3'!

Wow, what a switch! War College to another Army War-Fighting Unit.

He got my Army orders changed! He did not know I was from Colorado, but I knew he knew my combat record in Korea, and Vietnam. And when he had been a Tactical Officer at West Point in 1958, and I was an Instructor there, he heard my presentation about 'combat leadership' to a whole class of new Plebes at West Point. Which was cited as outstanding.

So my changed orders were to the 5th Mechanized Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colorado, just outside Colorado Springs.

Back home, but also back into another busy Army command.

Later I wondered if he thought that I had been able to turn his son - who, though also a West Point grad Captain did not look or seem like a cracking combat infantry leader - . While his dad had been just that, as a battalion commander at Normandy. I think Gleszer thought I made son Peter into a combat leader.

And I wondered if Gleszer's wife - Peter's mother -  was grateful I didn't get him killed on the many heliborne combat assaults I sent him out on.

Whatever. My orders required me to report to Fort Carson by August  1st, 1968.

What I knew about Mechanized warfare units you could put on the tip of a bayonet. And I doubted Gen Gleszer knew much more. So once again here comes a steep learning curve assignment. From a boots on the ground Infantry unit in Korea, Airmobile Infantry unit in Vietnam, and a Mechanized Infantry Division in Colorado.

Cest la guerre.

With all that, my combat tour in Vietnam came to an end, and I flew back to America - into as I recall, the Washington DC airport, where Patsy, and all three of my kids - David, Rebecca, and Edward met me. Also relieved that I made it through another year of war virtually unscratched.


To continue with my Military Years click… NEXT, Fort Carson (1)