To the world's media "The Tet offensive" is only a fighting incident in a long continuous war. The casualties from both sides were tabulated, and more details were released, and later were overwhelmed by more non-interrupting news of the war.... However, to the Vietnamese, the Hue massacre was unequivocally considered as a normal casualty of war.
Humanity had suffered tens of millions of losses of lives during the Second World War. Why the free world has particularly paid special attention to the victims of the Holocaust? Because these victims are not the incidents of the War. They are victims of a premeditated system equipped with careful researches and sophisticated disposing instruments. These murderers are the evildoers of the human race. The International War Crime Tribunal of Nuremberg did not just condemn the act as the War Crime but also as the Crime against Humanity.
The first few days of 1968, the city of Hue was a bloody battlefield that spanned 26 days. The impartial ammunitions did not stop at the soldiers only...
But the impartial ammunitions could not explain the death of thousands that were herded outside of the city to be clubbed to death and buried alive in mass graves. These hapless victims are not the victims of war but was rather victims of a series cold-blooded murders.
Who were responsible for this massacre and who were the executioners?
The Communist government of Vietnam, where their members were directly involved in this killing or witnessed the massacre, have the responsibility in answering these questions; not just to the families of the victims but also to the whole Vietnamese people and the World Court.
The Tet Offensive was a huge failure for the North on every count except one. Much of the VC that took part in the “uprising” that virtually no one joined, were killed by US, South Vietnamese, Australian and Allied troops, local militias, the people of Saigon and throughout the South. And that’s the only part of the Communist North’s plan that worked out. The incompetent in Western Governments, military, press and Left radicals did the rest.
The North wanted to eliminate the VC to consolidate their own power. That’s the classic infighting, murderous rivalry and implosion of Communism, folks. They only change through murder, plot, lies, and inertia, outside pressures or collapse. Thirty five battalions of VC attacking hundred of targets simultaneously, all ending with most VC killed or captured. Not one objective achieved. Some Communist success. What would be failure? The VC dying twice?
The VC captured the National Radio station to broadcast the signal to “general uprising” but the power was out. And there was no uprising. Gee, imagine if you staged a rebellion and nobody came? Nope, most people in the South felt about a Communist future the same way as most sane people do with a working economy and some semblance of government, no matter how corrupt. They don’t want it. People get that way with folks who cut off the heads of village elders and school teachers and leave them on pikes. They probably weren't too crazy about the napalm, either. The Vietnamese people sometimes got it from several sides at once.
Yep, the war was often a hideous drag, but not as much as the ‘peace’ was, virtually all unreported, undocumented and anonymous. Thus the biggest movement of refugees in history was of the Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon. Almost three million escaping, with around one million dying in the South China Sea.
Commemorating deceased ancestors and family members who were dead has been a tradition in Vietnam since time immemorial. On the date of their death on the lunar calendar, their living descendants or members of their families hold service in commemoration of them at home or sometimes at pagoda. Offerings -- usually food, fruit, wine along with flowers and incense sticks - are presented to them on the altar. The relatives pray for them and show their love, respect and gratitude prostrating in front of the altar.
The tradition also goes beyond the limit of family members and ascendants. On the 15th day of the 7th month every lunar year, Vietnamese Buddhists conduct rites that are more elaborated at pagodas. The congregation prays for the dead in general, particularly for the dead without offspring, soldiers killed in action, war victims... The rites may last a week or even 15 days in pre-war time.
Such tradition is the same in Hue City, the ancient royal capital of Vietnam. People in this city, however, have more to do with the war dead. In the 5th moon each lunar year (around late June to early July), every Buddhist family in the city holds commemorating services at the family altar as well as in all pagodas with offerings, to pray for innocent civilians killed by the French invaders in the late 19th century. On the 23rd day of the fifth month, the year At Dau (or the Year of the Rooster 1885), the French forces conducted a fierce counter attack against the Vietnam royal army who defended the capital city. Unscrupulous French fire power killed about 2,000 to 3,000 soldiers and residents.
Although the date is the 23rd day of the 5th month, people are free to hold service for the dead on any date to their family's convenience, providing that it is within the 5th month. If you visit someone in Hue during the 5th month, you will certainly be invited to such feasts, probably every day if you have a lot of friends and relatives living in this beautiful city.
Besides the Fifth Month Commemoration, for the last 28 years, Buddhists in Hue have also held services in the first month of the lunar year for war victims in the 1968 Tet Offensive. (Tet is the Lunar New Year celebration in Vietnam).
In the darkness of the 1968 Tet's Eve, North Vietnamese Communist Army units conducted a surprise attack at Hue City, while the two sides were in a truce that had been agreed upon previously. South Vietnamese Army units defending the city were not in good positions to fight as they expected that the enemy would abide by their 4-day cease-fire promise, as they did in the preceding years. On the first day of the new year - the Year of the Monkey - Hue City streets were filled with NVA soldiers in baggy olive uniforms and pithy hats.
The communist cadres set up the provisionary authorities. The first thing they did was call all SVN soldiers, civil servants of all services, political party members, and college students, to report to the "revolutionary people's committee." Those who reported to the communist committee were registered in control books then released with promise of safety.
After a few days, they were called to report again, then all were sent home safe and sound. During three weeks under NVA units' occupation, they were ordered to report to the communist committee three or four times. In the late half of January 1968, the US Marines and the South Vietnamese infantry conducted bloody counterattacks and recaptured the whole city after many days of fierce fighting that forced their enemy to withdraw in several directions.
Meanwhile, those who were called to report the last time to the communist authorities disappeared after the Marines and South Vietnamese Army units liberated Hue. Most of the missing were soldiers in non-combat units and young civilians. No one knew their whereabouts.
In late Feb.1968, from reports of Vietnamese Communist ralliers and POWs, the South Vietnamese local authorities found several mass graves. In each site, hundreds of bodies of the missing were buried. Most were tied to each other by ropes, electric wires or telephone wires. They had been shot or beaten or even stabbed to death.
The mass graves shocked the city and the whole country. Almost every family in Hue has at least one relative, close or remote, who was killed or still missing. The latest mass grave found in the front yard of a Phu Thu district elementary school in May 1972, contained some two hundred bodies under the sand. They had been slaughtered during one-month occupation of an NVA unit. Sand left no sign of a mass grave below until a 3rd-grader dug the ground rather deep for a cricket.
Besides more than two thousand persons whose deaths were confirmed after the revelation of the mass graves, the fate of the others, amounted to several thousands, are still unknown.
The 1968 massacre in Hue brought a sharp turn in the common attitude toward the war. A great number of the pre-'68 fence sitters, anti-war activists, and even pro-Communist people, took side with the South Vietnamese government after the horrible events. After April 30, 1975 when South Vietnam fell into the hand of the Communist Party, it seems that the number of boat people of Hue origin takes up a greater proportion among the refugees than that from the other areas.
Since April 1975, the Vietnamese Communist regime deliberately moved many families of the 68-massacre victims out of Hue City. People in the city however, still commemorate them every year. Because the people are mingling the rites with Tet celebrations, Communist local authorities have no reason to forbid them.
Most Americans knew well about the My Lai massacre of US Army Lieutenant Calley where from 200 to 350 persons were killed. The '68-massacre in Hue however, has not been covered at the same proportion by the English language media. When a Tet Offensive documentary film by South Vietnamese reporters was shown to the American audience of more than 200 US Army officers in Fort Benning, Ga. in November 1974, almost 90 percent of them hadn't been informed of the facts. Many even said that had they known the savage slaughter at the time, they would have acted differently while serving in Vietnam.
The US Navy has a warship named "Hue City." It is not known how many of her sailors realize that the city she carries as a name suffered so much. Would it be a good idea to have a rite once a year in the Tet season on the "Hue City" for the dead whom the US Marines were fighting for in February 1968?
Animosity should not be handed down to younger generations, but our descendants must be taught the truth. War crimes must not be forgotten, and history is not written by one-sided writers.
Accompanied by a sudden artillery and mortar barrage and flares casting a metallic glow, two North Vietnamese battalions stormed across lightly defended bridges and lotus-choked moats into the former Vietnamese imperial capital of Hue before dawn on January 31, 1968.
It was part of nearly simultaneous surprise attacks by Communist military forces against nearly every significant city or town in South Vietnam during the lunar new year, or Tet, holiday. The Tet Offensive, as the nationwide attacks would become known, shocked the U.S. government and public into reconsidering and eventually terminating the U.S. military effort in Vietnam.
Hue was occupied for twenty-five days before the North Vietnamese were ousted. During that time, the troops and the political officers who came with them ruled over large parts of the city. One of the central objectives of the occupation, according to a written plan prepared in advance, was to "destroy and disorganize" the administrative machinery that the South Vietnamese regime had established since Vietnam was divided by international agreement in 1954. The effort to root out "enemy" functionaries, according to the plan, was to extend "from the province and district levels to city wards, streets and wharves." The political officers arrived with a carefully prepared "target list" of 196 places, organized on a block-by-block basis, to be given priority attention, including U.S. and South Vietnamese offices and the homes of the officials who worked there, as well as the homes of those who were deemed to be leading or cooperating with their efforts, including foreigners. Once in charge, the occupation forces set about expanding its target lists with the assistance of local sympathizers.
So many were killed. Le Van Rot, the owner of the most popular Chinese soup restaurant in the city, was the government block chief of his area. Four armed men, two from Hue and two from North Vietnam, came to his shop and arrested him, accusing him of being a spy. They bound his arms behind his back with wire and began to tug him toward the door. When he resisted, one of them put a bullet through his head.
Then there was Pham Van Tuong. He worked part-time as a janitor at the government information office. Four men in black pajamas came to his house, calling on him by name to come out of the bunker where he and his family had taken refuge. But when he did come out, along with his five-year-old son, his three-year-old daughter, and two of his nephews, there was a burst of gunfire. All five were shot to death.
Dr. Horst Gunther Krainick was a German pediatrician and professor of internal medicine who had worked for seven years with teams of Germans and Vietnamese to establish a medical school at Hue University. Krainick stayed in his university apartment after the fall of the city, believing he and his wife would not be harmed. Unknown to them, they were on the original target list. On the fifth day of the occupation, an armed squad arrived and put the Krainicks and two other German doctors into a commandeered Volks-wagen bus. Their bodies were found later in a potato field, all victims of an executioner's bullets.
The same day, North Vietnamese troops came in force to the Roman Catholic cathedral, where many people had taken refuge from the fighting. Four hundred men were ordered out, some by name and others apparently because they were of military age or prosperous appearance. When the group was assembled, the political officer on the scene told people not to fear; the men were merely being taken away temporarily for political indoctrination. Nineteen months later, three defectors led U.S. soldiers to a creekbed in a double canopy jungle ten miles from Hue where the skulls and bones of those who had been taken away had lain ever since. Those killed included South Vietnamese servicemen, civil servants, students, and ordinary citizens. The skulls revealed they had been shot or brained with blunt instruments.
Altogether, South Vietnamese authorities counted about twenty-eight hundred victims of deliberate slaughter during the Tet Offensive in Hue. The fate of some was known immediately. The bodies of others emerged later from mass graves in nearby jungles or the coastal salt flats. Like those taken from the cathedral, they had been shot to death, bludgeoned, or buried alive.
For several thousand years, Vietnamese Lunar New Year has been a traditional celebration that brings the Vietnamese a sense of happiness, hope and peace. However, in recent years, It also bring back a bitter memory full of tears. It reminds them the 1968 bloodshed, a bloodiest military campaign of the Vietnam War the North Communists launched against the South.
The "general offensive and general uprising" of the north marked the sharp turn of the Vietnam War. Today there have been a great number of writings about this event. However, it seems that many key facts in the Communist campaign are still misinterpreted or neglected.
In the mid-80, living in Saigon after being released from the Communist "re-education camp," I read a book published in the early 1980's in America about the story of the 1968 Tet Offensive. It said that the North Vietnamese Army supreme command had imitated one of the greatest heroes of Vietnam, King Quang Trung, who won the most spectacular victory over the Chinese aggressors in the 1789 counter-attack - in planning the 1968 operations.
The book quoted King Quang Trung's tactic of surprise. He let the troops celebrate the 1789 Tet Festival one day ahead so that he could launch the attacks on the first three days of the lunar new year while the Chinese troops were still feasting and not ready to organize their defense.
Those who claimed the similarity between the two campaigns certainly did not know the whole truth, but jumped into conclusion with wild imagination after learning that the North Vietnamese attacking units also celebrated Tet "one day ahead" before the attacks.
In fact, the Tet Offensive broke out on the Tet's Eve - in the early morning of January 30, 1968 at many cities of Central Vietnam, such as Da Nang and Qui Nhon, as well as cities in the central coastal and highland areas, that lied within the Communist 5th Military Region.. The other cities to the south that included Saigon, were attacked 24 hours later at the small hours of January 31. Thus the offensive lost its element of total surprise that every tactician has to respect.
But It surprised me that some in the American media were still unaware of such tragic story.
The story started some 5 months previously. On August 8, 1967, the North Vietnam government approved a lunar calendar specifically compiled for the 7th time zone that covers all Vietnam, replacing the traditional lunar calendar that had been in use in Asia for hundreds of years.
That old calendar was calculated for the 8th time zone that Beijing falls right in the middle. It was accepted in general by a few nations such as China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong and somewhat in Japan and Korea, mostly for traditional celebrations and religious purposes. South Vietnam used this calendar. With common cultural origin, these countries needed not have their own calendar, particularly it has not been used for scientific and administrative activities.
The North Vietnam new lunar calendar differs from the common calendar about some dates, such as the leap months of certain year (1984 and 1987) and the Tet's Eve of the three Lunar New Years: Mau Than (1968), Ky Dau (1969) and At Suu (1985). South Vietnam celebrated the first day of the Mau Than lunar year on January 30, 1968, while North Vietnam celebrated it on Jan 29, 1968.
It was obviously that the North Vietnamese leaders had ordered the offensives to be launched on the night of the first day of Tet to take the objectives by total surprise. By some reason, the North Vietnamese Army Supreme Command was not aware of the fact that there were different dates for Tet between North and South Vietnam. Therefore, most NVA units in the Communist 5th Military Region - closer to North Vietnam - probably used North Vietnamese calendar, and conducted their attacks in the night between Jan 29 and 30, while their comrades farther to the south attacked in the night from Jan 30 to 31.
Many in the intelligence branch of the South Vietnamese Armed Forces were well aware of the reason why the Communist forces launched their attacks at two different dates. Information from sources among NVA prisoners of war and ralliers about the new calendar of North Vietnam should have been neglected by the American side. The information was also available in broadcast from Hanoi Radio.
In military operations, nothing is more important than surprise. So the Communist forces lost their advantage of surprise on more than half of the objectives. Had the Vietnamese Communists conducted their coordinated attacks at the same H-hour, South Vietnam would have been in much more troubles.
The large scale offensive resulted in drastic human and morale losses of the Communist forces. However, the offensive caused an extreme negative effect in the American public opinion and boosted the more bitter protests against the war.
Until lately, the Ha Noi propaganda and political indoctrination system has always claimed the Tet offensive their military victory, and never insisted on their victory over the morale of the American public.. Obviously, Ha Noi leaders won a priceless victory at an unintended objective.
In South Vietnam, on the contrary, the offensive created an unexpected attitude among the people.
After the first few hours of panic, the South Vietnamese armed forces reacted fiercely. There were hundreds of stories of brave soldiers and small units who fought their enemies with incredible courage..
A large number of those who were playing fence-sitters especially in the region around Hue City then took side with the nationalist government.
Several mass graves were found where thousands unarmed soldiers, civil servants and civilians were shot, stabbed, or with skulls mashed by clubs and buried in strings of ropes, even buried alive. A large number of VC-sympathizers who saw the horrible graves, undeniable evidence of the Communist barbarian crimes, changed side.
The most significant indication of such attitude could be observed from the figures of young volunteers. to join the army. After the first wave of Communist attacks, a great number of youth under draft age - below 20 years old - voluntarily enrolled in the army for combat units, so high that thousands of young draftees were delayed reporting for boot camps.
On the Communist side, the number of ralliers known as "chieu hoi" increased about four times. The offensive planners apparently expected the so-called "people upraising," so most secret cells were ordered to emerge. When the attacking units were crushed, cell members had to flee to the green forests. Thus the Tet offensive helped South Vietnam neutralize much of the Communist infrastructure before the Phoenix Campaign got rid of many others.
Unfortunately, such achievements were nullified by the waves of protests in America. As in any other developing countries, nobody takes heed of a speech from a Vietnamese official. But the same thing from an American statesman or even a protester could be well listened to and trusted. So information from the Western media produced rumors that the USA was about to sell off South Vietnam to the Communist blocks.
The rumors were almost absolutely credible to the Vietnamese - particularly the military servicemen of all ranks - because of another hearsay that until now have a very powerful impact on the mind of a great number of the South Vietnamese. There have been no poll on the subject, but it was estimated that more than half of the soldiers strongly believed that "it was the Americans who helped the Communist attack the South Vietnamese cities."
Hundreds of officers from all over South Vietnam asserted that they "saw" NVA soldiers moving into the cities on US Army trucks, or American helicopters transporting supplies to NVA units. In Saigon, most people accepted the allegation that the Americans deliberately let the Communists infiltrate the capital city because the American electronic sensor defense system around Saigon was able to detect things as small as a mouse crossing the hi-tech fences.
Another hearsay among the South Vietnamese military ran that "none of the American military units or installation and agencies - military or civilian - was under Communist first phase of the offensive (February) except for the US Embassy. And only after nearly three weeks did the US Marines engaged in the battle of Hue, in the old Royal Palace" The allegation seemed to be true. The American combat units, however, were fighting fierce battles in phase 2 (May 1968) and phase 3 (September 1968).
Similar rumors might have been of no importance if they were in America.But in Vietnam, they did convince a lot of people. In the military, they dealt deadly blows on the soldiers' morale. Their impacts still lingered on until the last days of April 1975.
The truth in the rumors did not matter much. But the fact that a great numbers of the fighting men strongly believed the rumors turned them into a deadly psychological weapon which very few or maybe none has ever properly treated in writings about the Vietnam War. Most authors studied the war at high echelons, but neglected the morale of the buck privates and the effect of the media in the Vietnam War. No military plan even by top strategists in the White House could succeed if half of the privates believed that they would be defeated before long. So why should they go on fighting?
Information sources concerning the Tet Mau Than are ample to find from the American and South Vietnam side. However, most of materials coming from Hanoi are carefully prepared propaganda that does not reflect the truth. In fact, Vietcong intentionally present the Mau Than event as a civilian "uprising" to oppose the government of South Vietnam. More over, they bluntly deny the massacres and skilfully conceal the names of the perpetrators.
From the memoirs "Victory at Mau Than" (Chien Thang Mau than) by Le Minh printed in Vietnam 10 years ago, it clearly illustrates the chronically deceitful image of Vietcong. Le Minh who ranked Colonel was one of the four top officers in charge of the attack of Hue. The commander in chief was General Tran Van Quang, Le Chuong was Political Commissar and Generals Nam Long and Le Minh were field commanders.
An excerpt from "Victory at Mau Than" shows that the circle of power in Hanoi had carefully plotted out their offensive plan in Mau Than; to attack Hue immediately after the truce agreement that they had signed.
"The preparation tasks for the battle fields are going well until February 67, Headquarters called upon one of us three (Mr. Tran Van Quang, Mr. Le Chuong or myself) to go North to receive the order. Mr Chuong went. I thought the order would include the instruction to overtake Hue in 5 days (as planned by the "Zone Party Committee"), I therefore carry on with what had been planned. A month later Mr. Chuong returns and informs that the new order is to attack Hue simultaneously with the general uprising in whole South Vietnam. The timing was "around Tet". This infers that the attack will be for many days, everything has changed completely, things will have to be planned carefully and differently."
Considering later official documents, it was July 1967 that the Communist Politburo in Hanoi started to plan for the Mau Than offensive.
Another passage of Le Minh's memoirs shows their plan to set-up a puppet government in Hue that consists of their cadres. "To set up government in the whole province of Thua Thien and Hue city; from there we form the People's Democratic and Peace Alliance in Hue. At the moment, there is plan to invite Professor Le Van Hao, Venerable Thich Don Hau and Mrs. Nguyen Dinh Chi and a few other well-known people in Hue."
In addition, Vietcong's top secret documents, were later seized, contradict with Hanoi's alibis. The findings include layout plans for the Tet offensive such as a document prepared by the "Province Party Committee" Binh Tri Thien dated October 1, 1967 (photograph of document included). Apart from plans to attack the document order to assassinate, and by all means kill all "reactionaries groups". These facts reject the cover up themes and reasoning by Vietcong that the victims massacred at Hue were only to settle personal vendettas.
In short, the revelation from Le Minh's memoirs and official Vietcong's documents exhibits the fact that many members of the Communist government in Vietnam owe it to the people the answers to the killings in Tet Mau Than and these war criminals must be brought forward to justice.
Mau Than Revisited
The Tet Mau Than event was a turning point for the war in Vietnam that led to the fall of South Vietnam. From a military tactical viewpoint, the offensive was a complete failure. The Vietcong propaganda used to indoctrinate their fighting force about the "general uprising of the people in the South that would overtake the government" never materialized. Almost all the NVA and Vietcong force were eradicated or suffered major losses. In addition, the local VC underground in the South was forced to expose their cover in order to link up with the main force.
Viet cong's sympathizers such as Duong Quynh Hoa, Do Trung Hieu, Nguyen Dac Xuan, Hoang Phu Ngoc Tuong, Ton That Lap, etcA^? had to escape along with the washed-out NVA. The left over guerrillas who were later uprooted by the Phoenix program would have otherwise facilitated the control of South Vietnam after the April 1975. Incidentally, the NVA were fawned upon by the so called "Ba muoi thang tu" (persons of April 30) who would not hesitate to speak ill of their neighbors to receive favors from the winning Communist. From a strategic viewpoint, the Tet offensive was a major success for the Communist. Thanks to the modernization of media report of the Tet offensive, the anti-war movement in the United States has grown from a few odd young people standing at a street corner to massive demonstrations right on the steps of the White House.
The war seen on television and magazines by the American public has given an impression that the American were losing against the omnipotent NVA and Vietcong guerrillas and were not able to predict the Tet offensive. The repeated negative messages on the media about losses of lives and billions of dollars wasted for the futile of war in Southeast Asia have changed the attitude of the proud and invincible Americans. Thousands of hippies flooded the streets of America with slogan "Make love not war". From there, Pham Van Dong, war time Prime Minister of Vietnam, did not hesitate to grab the opportunity to publicly state that they were winning the war right on the streets of Washington.
The Americans came to Vietnam with a worthy mission - to help protect the South Vietnamese from the aggressive Communist from the North and to setup an outpost for the free world. Ironically, with hundreds of thousands of troops in South Vietnam, the painted picture of Americans in Vietnam was altered from helpers to invaders by the proclamation of the American public that the war was a whole futile campaign. Meanwhile, Ho Chi Minh also conspired to portray the image of the Americans in Vietnam as the aggressors and of his army as the liberators to people of the South from the American invaders. In reality he was after the expansion of Communism. Conversely since the establishment of the proletarian regime in North Vietnam and there has been a general movement by the people of Vietnam against the tyranny of dictatorship during and after the anti-French war. Even today, the lives of Vietnamese are still being tightly clamped down under Communism, as human rights are ruthlessly trampled down more than ever. The thrive for freedom and democracy and respect for human rights by the Vietnamese is continuing and will not stop until the eradication of the Communist tyrants and until life can be meaningfully lived, until democracy and human rights are respected throughout the land.
The Tet offensive should be reviewed especially for those younger than 35 as this group consists of more than 50 per cent of the population and knows very little about what happened outside of the partial information recorded by American and Communist media.
Looking back at the news covered on American media and world wide the picture being seen the most is the picture of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan who shot a Viet cong captured in Saigon; the picture of the American Embassy attacked by Vietcong guerrillas and the picture of the Hue Citadel occupied by Vietcong for almost a month. Ironically, people of the world were not informed about the fact that the Vietcong shot by General Loan had massacred a whole family where the head of the family had been the General's subordinate. People were never informed about the difficulties faced by the security force to defend the American Embassy from the Vietcong's commandos. Nobody paid attention to loss of a whole Marine company of the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) in just an attempt to cross a street to regain the flagpole by the Citadel in Hue. Neither was the decapitation of nine family members of Lieutenant Colonel Tuan in the outskirts of Saigon mentioned. And worse of all, the massacre of Hue, where thousands of unarmed citizens were clubbed to death and buried alive, were treated as minor news and practically escape world's attention.
The examples above just illustrate a few flaws in the world's media as far as the coverage of the Hue massacre and the whole Vietnam war in general. The world' media have reported only half of the truth in the intention to serve some short term political agenda. It is necessary to mention this fact for the following reason:
1- To provide any independent researcher with information so that they do not have to restrict themselves with only lopsided data which will shape inaccurate conclusions.
2- To provide a reason for any scholar to carry out their research based on a more complete selection of historical facts.
3- Due to the lack of historical facts from the Republic of South Vietnam side, it is necessary to provide an accurate edited version by collecting and assessing information from the eye witnesses. We cannot continue to blame others for their partial view of the war if we remain silent. The publication of the "History of the Vietnamese Marine Corps Army of the Republic of Vietnam" was a first effort toward this goal.
4- To identify the essence of the struggle for freedom by our people, the nature of the power elite of Communist Vietnam, the intricacy of our relationship with friends and foes, our national interests versus foreigners interests, the transient nature of foreign intervention through deceptive rhetoric.
5- To remind those involved in the struggle for freedom to be on the constant alert to maintain an objective view on news reported from the media.
In retrospect, people may condemn the Vietcong for violating the truce during Tet. The only period that the general population could find a peaceful time to be with their family. However, worldwide history has shown that agreements were made to be broken and Vietcong were not the only ones doing it. Death and losses during the Tet offensive were tremendous and were inevitable things that happened during wartime. The paramount issue drawn from the Tet offensive was the brutal nature of their campaign and this reflects the barbaric rationality the Communist leaders. The beheading of nine family members, including children, in Hanh Thong Tay (near Saigon) and many similar gory executions are still in the minds of the eyewitnesses. The massacre of thousands of people in Hue was not a result of personal vendettas but was rather a strategy of terror based on the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist determination to eliminate their enemies using "revolutionary violence". The picture of victims trapped in cages floated on rivers, decapitated, organs removed are normal Vietcong practices throughout their guerrilla warfare, to name a few. Or to imprison almost half of the population in the South, immediately after 1975 conquest, as this half are considered as enemy of the state. It is the cruelty of this regime and their fanatic policies that have caused major setbacks to both the mentality of the people and the economic growth of the country.
The damage done since 1975 far outweighed the physical destruction caused by the war. The collective effort and the tenacity of Vietnamese population, under the so called "clear-sighted leadership of the Party", has not helped the country moved forward. The brutality of the policies can be clearly extracted from Ho Chi Minh's assertion " we are willing to burn the whole Annamese cordillera (Truong Son) to liberate the South if need be."
During the period between 1979 and 1981 throughout a number of Human Rights conferences, in concert with the Human Rights activist Ginetta Sagan, the self-reproached anti-war activist Joan Baez and many International amnesty organization around the world publicly criticized the wickedly cruel policies of Communist Vietnam against their imprisonment of all South Vietnam servicemen/women in the so called "re-education camps". "It is a normal treatment that the losers should get from the winners" was the blunt defense used in Communist responses. Such reactionary defense did not gain the brutal totalitarian regime any friends.
It was not necessary to disclose all cruel treatments that Hanoi has bestowed upon its own troops - a doze of its own medicine - but a few incidents during the Tet offensive cannot be overlooked. People never questioned the reasoning behind the second offensive in May 1968 where the offensive side consisted of crippled remnant force from the first offensive back in January. These feeble attacks were promptly overcome and did not create any worldwide attention. By perusing the facts on the battle fields during the Tet offensive the answer would prick out using just common sense: Communist leaders have relentlessly sacrificed the lives of thousands of young men. For those few men that survived the loss of the first offensive wave, their lives again were forfeited in the second offensive wave. As far as Hanoi was concern, it was wise to have to continue to support the crippled demoralized remnant force. Worse than that it was not proper to have this losing force rejoined the newly recruited as their battle stories may affect the fighting spirit of those that had not been there. To kill two birds with one stone. We can now understand why NVA soldiers were chained to their tanks or artilleries and why each "bo doi" (North Vietnamese Infantry man) was given 5000 piastres (Dong) so they could spend once South Vietnam was completely occupied by the North. The mother-of -all wicked strategies: Coercion, Deception and death traps.
Since the era of "Doi Moi" Communist leaders have reiterated the "forget the past" policy. Some American veterans, now politicians, also advocate "forget the past, look forward to the future" slogan. Interestingly, it is hard for history to be forgotten when people are constantly reminded to forget the past. Those that died and were massacred during Tet Mau Than have remained silent. The war invalids from both sides of Vietnam did not have much of a voice either. Materially, properties have unjustly been confiscated and transferred within the corrupted hands under the post '75 slogan "thrive fast, thrive strong toward Socialism" and the Doi Moi slogan "Market Economy under Socialist Direction". Therefore the history that was requested to be forgotten was a convenient history that was applied only to fit the agenda of the Machiavellian totalitarians. Forget not the triumph over the American Imperialist, the leadership role of the Party and the slogan " fight Americans to save our nation" (Chong My cuu nuoc) can now be conveniently disposed - as "we need the American dollars". The fate for the "Forever friendship with our great Soviet allies" rhetoric can also be predicted. "Must we also forget about the free world" where freedom and democracy are the keys to the success in the Global Economy. And Thou shall collaborate with those economic tyrants to slowly change the political system, where freedom and democracy will permeate down to the destitute mass.
The deep wounds of the war have begun to heal for its participants. The review of Mau Than is not meant to regurgitate the ugliness of the war to the later generations. Looking back at Tet Mau Than, as a historical reference of a period in the war, to reflect and compare it with contemporary facts so a solution can be arrived for the future. What conclusions can one draw from based on the solicitous open arm policy toward the Americans today and the determination to sacrifice lives during the war then. Was the lives sacrificed, under the leadership of Communist Vietnam, in vain? Is there a difference in the image of an American teaching English, assisting in animal husbandry in Vietnam back then and the image of an American returning to Vietnam today to provide humanitarian in response to the much Communist implorations? Those South Vietnamese that had received training in the US were accused of being agents of CIA. Meanwhile those receive training from the same source today are considered as front runners of the revolution.
In conclusion, the mentioning of Tet Mau Than and the war instigated by Communist Vietnam is not more than a reminder of the ruthlessness of the Communist villains. More than half a century has passed since the Second War ended and the Jewish Holocaust has been frequently mentioned by world's media and the search for the war criminals are still continued. These exercises are preventive methods for any future atrocity recurrence, a sound reasoning. The toll of the war, labeled liberation of South Vietnam, which was really the result of Communist expansion was tabulated to close to 3 millions dead and injured according to the latest statistics from Hanoi. These statistics did not include those killed during the Land Reform (1954), the misadventure into Cambodia in the late 70's and those that died at sea in search of freedom (Boat people exodus) and those that died in concentration camps as well as those living corpse that were released from the gulags. Not to mention the dispersion of the population in a Vietnam classified as the one of the poorest and most backward country in the world.
The intensity of damage caused by the Communist in Vietnam exceeds the toll of the Jews killed by the Nazi as the destruction in Vietnam has spanned more than two generations. The Vietnam war ended near a quarter century ago, Tet Mau Than happened 30 years ago, the wickedly cruel Communist government is still here, the Communist ringleaders are still here; though their outer appearance is now "Doi Moi", no more "non coi, dep rau" (tire sandals, expedition helmet). General Le Kha Phieu a cunning, longstanding Communist member and just got elected as the First Secretary of the Communist party of Vietnam. Recently, in December 1997, Ton That Lap, the Hue massacre informer, led a group of performers to Canada and Australia to polish the image of the regime.
It is the utmost importance that our generation and the future generation aware is made of the Communist brutality during Tet Mau Than.
The city of Hue is one of the saddest cities of our earth, not simply because of what happened there in February 1968, unthinkable as that was. It is a silent rebuke to all of us, inheritors of 40 centuries of civilization, who in our century have allowed collectivist politics-abstractions all-to corrupt us into the worst of the modern sins, indifference to inhumanity.
What happened in Hue should give pause to every remaining civilized person on this planet. It should be inscribed, so as not to be forgotten, along with the record of other terrible visitations of man's inhumanity to man which stud the history of the human race.
Hue is another demonstration of what man can bring himself to do when he fixes no limits on political action and pursues incautiously the dream of social perfectibility.
What happened in Hue, physically, can be described with a few quick statistics. A Communist force which eventually reached 12,000 invaded the city the night of the new moon marking the new lunar year, January 30, 1968. It stayed for 26 days and then was driven out by military action.
In the wake of this Tet offensive, 5,800 Hue civilians were dead or missing. It is now known that most of them are dead. The bodies of most have since been found in single and mass graves throughout Thua Thien Province which surrounds this cultural capital of Vietnam.
Such are the skeletal facts, the important statistics. Such is what the incurious word knows any thing at all about Hue, for this is what was written, modestly by the word's press. Apparently it made no impact on the world's mind or conscience. For there was no agonized outcry. No demonstration at North Vietnamese embassies around the world.
In a tone beyond bitterness, the people there will tell you that the world does not know what happened in Hue or, if it does, does not care
The Battle
The Battle of Hue was part of the Communist Winter-Spring campaign of 1967-68. The entire campaign was divided into three phases:
Phase I came in October, November, and December of 1967 and entailed "coordinated fighting methods," that is, fairly large, set- piece battles against important fixed installations or allied concentrations. The battles of Loc Ninh in Binh Long Province, Dak To in Kontum Province, and Con Tien in Quang Tri Province, all three in the mountainous interior of South Vietnam near the Cambodian and Lao borders, were typical and, in fact, major elements in Phase I.
Phase II came in January, February, and March of 1968 and involved great use of "independent fighting methods," that is, large numbers of attacks by fairly small units, simultaneously, over a vast geographic area and using the most refined and advanced techniques of guerrilla war. Whereas Phase I was fought chiefly with North Vietnamese Regular (PAVN) troops (at that time some 55,000 were in the South), Phase II was fought mainly with Southern Communist (PLAF) troops. The crescendo of Phase II was the Tet offensive in which 70,000 troops attacked 32 of South Vietnam's largest population centres, including the city of Hue.
Phase III, in April, May, and June of 1968, originally was to have combined the independent and coordinated fighting methods, culminating in a great fixed battle somewhere. This was what captured documents guardedly referred to as the "second wave". Possibly it was to have been Khe Sanh, the U.S. Marine base in the far northern corner of South Vietnam. Or perhaps it was to have been Hue. There was no second wave chiefly because events in Phases I and II did not develop as expected. Still, the war reached its bloodiest tempo in eight years then, during the period from the Battle of Hue in February until the lifting of the siege of Khe Sanh in late summer.
American losses during those three months averaged nearly 500 killed per week; the South Vietnamese (GVN) losses were double that rate; and the PAVN-PLAF losses were nearly eight times the American loss rate.
In the Winter-Spring Campaign, the Communists began with about 195,000 PLAF main force and PAVN troops. During the nine months they lost (killed or permanently disabled) about 85,000 men.
The Winter-Spring Campaign was an all-out Communist bid to break the back of the South Vietnamese armed forces and drive the government, along with the Allied forces, into defensive city enclaves. Strictly speaking, the Battle of Hue was part of Phase I rather than Phase II since it employed "co-ordinated fighting methods" and involved North Vietnamese troops rather than southern guerrillas. It was fought, on the Communist side, largely by two veteran North Vietnamese army divisions: The Fifth 324-B, augmented by main forces battalions and some guerrilla units along with some 150 local civilian commissars and cadres.
Briefly the Battle of Hue consisted of these major developments:
The initial Communist assault, chiefly by the 800th and 802nd battalions, had the force and momentum to carry it across Hue. By dawn of the first day the Communists controlled all the city except the headquarters of the First ARVN Division and the compound housing American military advisors. The Vietnamese and Americans moved up reinforcements with orders to reach the two holdouts and strengthen them. The Communists moved up another battalion, the 804th, with orders to intercept the reinforcement forces. This failed, the two points were reinforced and never again seriously threatened.
The battle then took on the aspects of a siege. The Communists were in the Citadel and on the western edge of the city. The Vietnamese and Americans on the other three sides, including that portion of Hue south of the river, determined to drive them out, hoping initially to do so with artillery fire and air strikes. But the Citadel was well built and soon it became apparent that if the Communists' orders were to hold, they could be expelled only by city warfare, fighting house by house and block by block, a slow and costly form of combat. The order was given.
By the third week of February the encirclement of the Citadel was well under way and Vietnamese troops and American Marines were advancing yard by yard through the Citadel. On the morning of February 24, Vietnamese First Division soldiers tore down the Communist flag that had flown for 24 days over the outer wall and hoisted their own. The battle was won, although sporadic fighting would continue outside the city. Some 2,500 Communists died during the battle and another 2,500 would die as Communists elements were pursued beyond Hue. Allied dead were set at 357.
The Finds
In the chaos that existed following the battle, the first order of civilian business was emergency relief, in the form of food shipments, prevention of epidemics, emergency medical care, etc. Then came the home rebuilding effort. Only later did Hue begin to tabulate its casualties. No true post-attack census has yet been taken. In March local officials reported that 1,900 civilians were hospitalized with war wounds and they estimated that some 5,800 persons were unaccounted for.
The first discovery of Communist victims came in the Gia Hoi High School yard, on February 26 ; eventually 170 bodies were recovered.
In the next few months 18 additional grave sites were found, the largest of which were Tang Quang Tu Pagoda (67 victims), Bai Dau (77), Cho Thong area (an estimated 100), the imperial tombs area (201), Thien Ham (approximately 200), and Dong Gi (approximately 100). In all, almost 1,200 bodies were found in hastily dug, poorly concealed graves.
At least half of these showed clear evidence of atrocity killings: hands wired behind backs, rags stuffed in mouths, bodies contorted but without wounds (indicating burial alive). The other nearly 600 bore wound marks but there was no way of determining whether they died by firing squad or incidental to the battle.
The second major group of finds was discovered in the first seven months of 1969 in Phu Thu district-the Sand Dune Finds and Le Xa Tay-and Huong Thuy district-Xuan Hoa-Van Duong-in late March and April. Additional grave sites were found in Vinh Loc district in May and in Nam Hoa district in July.
The largest of this group were the Sand Dune Finds in the three sites of Vinh Luu, Le Xa Dong and Xuan 0 located in rolling, grasstufted sand dune country near the South China Sea. Separated by salt-marsh valleys, these dunes were ideal for graves. Over 800 bodies were uncovered in the dunes.
In the Sand Dune Find, the pattern had been to tie victims together in groups of 10 or 20, line them up in front of a trench dug by local corvee labour and cut them down with submachine gun (a favourite local souvenir is a spent Russian machine gun shell taken from a grave). Frequently the dead were buried in layers of three and four, which makes identification particularly difficult.
In Nam Hoa district came the third, or Da Mai Creek Find, which also has been called the Phu Cam death march, made on September 19, 1969. Three Communist defectors told intelligence officers of the 101st Airborne Brigade that they had witnessed the killing of several hundred people at Da Mai Creek, about 10 miles south of Hue, in February of 1968. The area is wild, unpopulated, virtually inaccessible. The Brigade sent in a search party, which reported that the stream contained a large number of human bones.
By piecing together bits of information, it was determined that this is what happened at Da Mai Creek: On the fifth day of Tet in the Phu Cam section of Hue, where some three-quarters of the City's 40,000 Roman Catholics lived, a large number of people had taken sanctuary from the battle in a local church, a common method in Vietnam of escaping war. Many in the building were not in fact Catholic.
A Communist political commissar arrived at the church and ordered out about 400 people, some by name and some apparently because of their appearance (prosperous looking and middle-aged businessmen, for example). He said they were going to the "liberated area" for three days of indoctrination, after which each could return home.
They were marched nine kilometres south to a pagoda where the Communists had established a headquarters. There 20 were called out from the group, assembled before a drumhead court, tried, found guilty, executed and buried in the pagoda yard. The remainder were taken across the river and turned over to a local Communist unit in an exchange that even involved banding the political commissar a receipt. It is probable that the commissar intended that their prisoners should be re-educated and returned, but with the turnover, matters passed from his control.
During the next several days, exactly how many is not known, both captive and captor wandered the countryside. At some point the local Communists decided to eliminate witnesses: Their captives were led through six kilometres of some of the most rugged terrain in Central Vietnam, to Da Mai Creek. There they were shot or brained and their bodies left to wash in the running stream.
The 101st Airborne Brigade burial detail found it impossible to reach the creek overland, roads being non-existent or impassable. The creek's foliage is what in Vietnam is called double-canopy, that is, two layers, one consisting of brush and trees close to the ground, and the second of tall trees whose branches spread out high above. Beneath is permanent twilight. Brigade engineers spent two days blasting a hole through the double-canopy by exploding dynamite dangled on long wires beneath their hovering helicopters. This cleared a landing pad for helicopter hearses. Quite clearly this was a spot where death could be easily hidden even without burial.
The Da Mai Creek bed, for nearly a hundred yards up the ravine, yielded skulls, skeletons and pieces of human bones. The dead had been left above ground (for the animists among them, this meant their souls would wander the lonely earth forever, since such is the fate of the unburied dead), and 20 months in the running stream had left bones clean and white.
Local authorities later released a list of 428 names of persons whom they said had been positively identified from the creek bed remains. The Communists' rationale for their excesses was elimination of "traitors to the revolution." The list of 428 victims breaks down as follows: 25 per cent military: two officers, the rest NCO's and enlisted men; 25 per cent students; 50 per cent civil servants, village and hamlet officials, service personnel of various categories, and ordinary workers.
The fourth or Phu Thu Salt Flat Finds came in November, 1969, near the fishing village of Luong Vien some ten miles east of Hue, another desolate region. Government troops early in the month began an intensive effort to clear the area of remnants of the local Communist organization. People of Luong Vien, population 700, who had remained silent in the presence of troops for 20 months apparently felt secure enough from Communist revenge to break silence and lead officials to the find. Based on descriptions from villagers whose memories are not always clear, local officials estimate the number of bodies at Phu Thu to be at least 300 and possibly 1,000.
The story remains uncompleted. If the estimates by Hue officials are even approximately correct, nearly 2,000 people are still missing. Re-capitulation of the dead and missing
After the battle, the GVN's total estimated civilian casualties resulting from Battle of Hue 7600
Wounded (hospitalized or outpatients) with injures attributable to warfare -1900
Estimated civilian deaths due to accident of battle -844
First finds-bodies discovered immediately post battle, 1968 -1173
Second finds, including Sand Dune finds, March-July, 1969 (est.) -809
Third find, Da Mai Creek find (Nam Hoa district) September, 1969 -428
Fourth Finds-Phu Thu Salt Flat find, November, 1969 (est.) -300
Miscellaneous finds during 1969 (approximate) -100
TOTAL YET UNACCOUNTED FOR 1946
[1] SEATO: South East Asia Treaty Organization.
[2] PAVN: People's Army of Vietnam, soldiers of North Vietnam Army serving in the South, number currently 105,000.
[3] PLAF: People's Liberation Armed Force, Formerly called the National Liberation Front Army.
Communist Rationale
The killing in Hue that added up to the Hue Massacre far exceeded in numbers any atrocity by the Communists previously in South Vietnam. The difference was not only one in degree but one in kind. The character of the terror that emerges from an examination of Hue is quite distinct from Communist terror acts elsewhere, frequent or brutal as they may have been.
The terror in Hue was not a morale building act-the quick blow deep into the enemy's lair which proves enemy vulnerability and the guerrilla's omnipotence and which is quite different from gunning down civilians in areas under guerrilla control. Nor was it terror to advertise the cause. Nor to disorient and psychologically isolate the individual, since the vast majority of the killings were done secretly. Nor, beyond the blacklist killings, was it terror to eliminate opposing forces.
Hue did not follow the pattern of terror to provoke governmental over-response since it resulted in only what might have been anticipated-government assistance. There were elements of each objective, true, but none serves to explain the widespread and diverse pattern of death meted out by the Communists.
What is offered here is a hypothesis which will suggest logic and system behind what appears to be simple, random slaughter. Before dealing with it, let us consider three facts which constantly reassert themselves to a Hue visitor seeking to discover what exactly happened there and, more importantly, exactly why it happened. All three fly in the face of common sense and contradict to a degree what has been written. Yet, in talking to all sources-province chief, police chief, American advisor, eye witness, captured prisoner, hoi chanh (defector) or those few who miraculously escaped a death scene-the three facts emerge again and again.
The first fact, and perhaps the most important, is that despite contrary appearances virtually no Communist killing was due to rage, frustration, or panic during the Communist withdrawal at the end. Such explanations are frequently heard, but they fail to hold up under scrutiny. Quite the contrary, to trace back any single killing is to discover that almost without exception it was the result of a decision rational and justifiable in the Communist mind. In fact, most killings were, from the Communist calculation, imperative.
The second fact is that, as far as can be determined, virtually all killings were done by local Communist cadres and not by the ARVN troops or Northerners or other outside Communists. Some 12,000 ARVN troops fought the battle of Hue and killed civilians in the process but this was incidental to their military effort. Most of the 150 Communist civilian cadres operating within the city were local, that is from the Thua Thien province area. They were the ones who issued the death orders.
Whether they acted on instructions from higher headquarters (and the Communist organizational system is such that one must assume they did), and, if so, what exactly those orders were, no one yet knows for sure.
The third fact is that beyond "example" executions of prominent "tyrants", most of the killings were done secretly with extraordinary effort made to hide the bodies. Most outsiders have a mental picture of Hue as a place of public executions and prominent mass burial mounds of fresh-turned earth. Only in the early days were there well-publicized executions and these were relatively few. The burial sites in the city were easily discovered because it is difficult to create a graveyard in a densely populated area without someone noticing it. All the other finds were well hidden, all in terrain lending itself to concealment, probably the reason the sites were chosen in the first place.
A body in the sand dunes is as difficult to find as a seashell pushed deep into a sandy beach over which a wave has washed. Da Mai Creek is in the remotest part of the province and must have required great exertion by the Communists to lead their victims there. Had not the three hoi chanh led searchers to the wild uninhabited spot the bodies might well remain undiscovered to this day. A visit to all sites leaves one with the impression that the Communists made a major effort to hide their deeds.
The hypothesis offered here connects and fixes in time the Communist assessment of their prospects for staying in Hue with the kind of death order issued. It seems clear from sifting evidence that they had no single unchanging assessment with regard to themselves and their future in Hue, but rather that changing situations during the course of the battle altered their prospects and their intentions.
It also seems equally clear from the evidence that there was no single Communist policy on death orders; instead the kind of death order issued changed during the course of the battle. The correlation between these two is high and divides into three phases. The hypothesis therefore is that as Communist plans during the Battle of Hue changed so did the nature of the death orders issued. This conclusion is based on overt Communist statements, testimony by prisoners1 and hoi chanh, accounts of eyewitnesses, captured documents and the internal logic of the Communist situation.
Thinking in Phase I was well expressed in a Communist Party of South Vietnam (PRP) resolution issued to cadres on the eve of the offensive:
"Be sure that the liberated ... cities are successfully consolidated. Quickly activate armed and political units, establish administrative organs at all echelons, promote (civilian) defence and combat support activities, get the people to establish an air defence system and generally motivate them to be ready to act against the enemy when he counterattacks..."
This was the limited view at the start - held momentarily. Subsequent developments in Hue were reported in different terms. Hanoi Radio on February 4 said: "After one hour's fighting the Revolutionary Armed Forces occupied the residence of the puppet provincial governor (in Hue), the prison and the offices of the puppet administration... The Revolutionary Armed Forces punished most cruel agents of the enemy and seized control of the streets... rounded up and punished dozen of cruel agents and caused the enemy organs of control and oppression to crumble..."
During the brief stay in Hue, the civilian cadres, accompanied by execution squads, were to round up and execute key individuals whose elimination would greatly weaken the government's administrative apparatus following Communist withdrawal. This was the blacklist period, the time of the drumhead court. Cadres with lists of names and addresses on clipboards appeared and called into kangaroo court various "enemies of the Revolution."
Their trials were public, usually in the court-yard of a temporary Communist headquarters. The trials lasted about ten minutes each and there are no known not-guilty verdicts. Punishment, invariably execution, was meted out immediately. Bodies were either hastily buried or turned over to relatives. Singled out for this treatment were civil servants, especially those involved in security or police affairs, military officers and some non-commissioned officers, plus selected non-official but natural leaders of the community, chiefly educators and religionists.
With the exception of a particularly venomous attack on Hue intellectuals, the Phase I pattern was standard operating procedure for Communists in Vietnam. It was the sort of thing that had been going on systematically in the villages for ten years. Permanent blacklists, prepared by zonal or inter-zone party headquarters have long existed for use throughout the country, whenever an opportunity presents itself.
However, not all the people named in the lists used in Hue were liquidated. There were a large number of people who obviously were listed, who stayed in the city throughout the battle, but escaped. Throughout the 24-day period the Communist cadres were busy hunting down persons on their blacklists, but after a few days their major efforts were turned into a new channel.
Hue: Phase II
In the first few days, the Tet offensive affairs progressed so well for the Communists in Hue (although not to the south, where party chiefs received some rather grim evaluations from cadres in the midst of the offensive in the Mekong Delta) that for a brief euphoric moment they believed they could hold the city. Probably the assessment that the Communists were in Hue to stay was not shared at the higher echelons, but it was widespread in Hue and at the Thua Thien provincial level. One intercepted Communist message, apparently written on February 2, exhorted cadres in Hue to hold fast, declaring; "A new era, a real revolutionary period has begun (because of our Hue victories) and we need only to make swift assault (in Hue) to secure our target and gain total victory." The Hanoi official party newspaper, Nhan Dan, echoed the theme: "Like a thunderbolt, a general offensive has been hurled against the U.S. and the puppets... The U.S.-puppet machine has been duly punished. The puppet administrative organs... have suddenly collapsed. The Thieu-Ky administration cannot escape from complete collapse. The puppet troops have become extremely weak and cannot avoid being completely exterminated."
Of course, some of this verbiage is simply exhortation to the faithful, and, as is always the case in reading Communist output, it is most difficult to distinguish between belief and wish. But testimony from prisoners and hoi chanh, as well as intercepted battle messages, indicate that both rank and file and cadres believed for a few days they were permanently in Hue, and they acted accordingly.
Among their acts was to extend the death order and launch what in effect was a period of social reconstruction, Communist style. Orders went out, apparently from the provincial level of the party, to round up what one prisoner termed "social negatives," that is, those individuals or members of groups who represented potential danger or liability in the new social order. This was quite impersonal, not a blacklist of names but a blacklist of titles and positions held in the old society, directed not against people as such but against "social units."
As seen earlier in North Vietnam and in Communist China, the Communists were seeking to break up the local social order by eliminating leaders and key figures in religious organizations (Buddhist bonzes, Catholic priests), political parties (four members of the Central Committee of Vietnam), social movements such as women's organizations and youth groups, including what otherwise would be totally inexplicable, the execution of pro-Communist student leaders from middle and upper class families.
In consonance with this, killing in some instances was done by family unit. In one well-documented case during this period a squad with a death order entered the home of a prominent community leader and shot him, his wife, his married son and daughter-in-law, his young unmarried daughter, a male and female servant and their baby. The family cat was strangled; the family dog was clubbed to death; the goldfish scooped out of the fish-bowl and tossed on the floor. When the Communists left, no life remained in the house. A "social unit" had been eliminated.
Phase II also saw an intensive effort to eliminate intellectuals, who are perhaps more numerous in Hue than elsewhere in Vietnam. Surviving Hue intellectuals explain this in terms of a long-standing Communist hatred of Hue intellectuals, who were anti-Communist in the worst or most insulting manner: they refused to take Communism seriously. Hue intellectuals have always been contemptuous of Communist ideology, brushing it aside as a latecomer to the history of ideas and not a very significant one at that.
Hue, being a bastion of traditionalism, with its intellectuals steeped in Confucian learning intertwined with Buddhism, did not, even in the fermenting years of the 1920s, and 1930s, debate the merits of Communism. Hue ignored it. The intellectuals in the university, for example, in a year's course in political thought dispense with Marxism-Leninism in a half hour lecture, painting it as a set of shallow barbarian political slogans with none of the depth and time-tested reality of Confucian learning, nor any of the splendor and soaring humanism of Buddhist thought.
Since the Communist, especially the Communist from Hue, takes his dogma seriously, he can become demoniac when dismissed by a Confucian as a philosophic ignoramus, or by a Buddhist as a trivial materialist. Or, worse than being dismissed, ignored through the years. So with the righteousness of a true believer, he sought to strike back and eliminate this challenge of indifference. Hue intellectuals now say the hunt-down in their ranks has taught them a hard lesson, to take Communism seriously, if not as an idea, at least as a force loose in their world.
The killings in Phase II perhaps accounted for 2,000 of the missing. But the worst was not yet over.
Hue: Phase III
Inevitably, and as the leadership in Hanoi must have assumed all along, considering the forces ranged against it, the battle in Hue turned against the Communists. An intercepted PAVN radio message from the Citadel, February 22, asked for permission to withdraw. Back came the reply: permission refused, attack on the 23rd. That attack was made, a last, futile one. On the 24th the Citadel was taken.
That expulsion was inevitable was apparent to the Communists for at least the preceding week. It was then that Phase III began, the cover-the-traces period. Probably the entire civilian underground apparat in Hue had exposed itself during Phase II. Those without suspicion rose to proclaim their identity. Typical is the case of one Hue resident who described his surprise on learning that his next door neighbour was the leader of a phuong (which made him 10th to 15th ranking Communist civilian in the city), saying in wonder, "I'd known him for 18 years and never thought he was the least interested in politics." Such a cadre could not go underground again unless there was no one around who remembered him.
Hence Phase III, elimination of witnesses.
Probably the largest number of killings came during this period and for this reason. Those taken for political indoctrination probably were slated to be returned. But they were local people as were their captors; names and faces were familiar. So, as the end approached they became not just a burden but a positive danger. Such undoubtedly was the case with the group taken from the church at Phu Cam. Or of the 15 high school students whose bodies were found as part of the Phu Thu Salt Flat find.
Categorization in a hypothesis such as this is, of course, gross and at best only illustrative. Things are not that neat in real life. For example, throughout the entire time the blacklist hunt went on. Also, there was revenge killing by the Communists in the name of the party, the so-called "revolutionary justice." And undoubtedly there were personal vendettas, old scores settled by individual party members.
The official Communist view of the killing in Hue was contained in a book written and published in Hanoi:
"Actively combining their efforts with those of the PLAF and population, other self-defence and armed units of the city (of Hue) arrested and called to surrender the surviving functionaries of the puppet administration and officers and men of the puppet army who were skulking. Die-hard cruel agents were punished."
The Communist line on the Hue killings later at the Paris talks was that it was not the work of Communists but of "dissident local political parties". However, it should be noted that Hanoi's Liberation Radio April 26, 1968, criticized the effort in Hue to recover bodies, saying the victims were only "hooligan lackeys who had incurred blood debts of the Hue compatriots and who were annihilated by the Southern armed forces and people in early Spring." This propaganda line however was soon dropped in favour of the line that it really was local political groups fighting each other.
The Hue Massacre Under the Eyes of Foreign Reporters
AN EFFICIENT SLAUGHTER
(Vietnam a History, Stanley Karnow, Viking Press, NY, 1983, p. 530-531)
The Communists executed hundreds of civilians during their Tet offensive, but the slaughter was particularly marked in and around Hue, where estimates of those put to death range from 200 to 400 British Journalist Stewart Harris, who opposes U.S. policy in Vietnam and declares that "my instinct is not to sustain it by writing propaganda," recently visited Hue' and vicinity to investigate the executions. Last week he reported his findings in the Times of London:
The North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong executed many Vietnamese, some Americans and a few other foreigners during the fighting in and around Hue. I am sure of this after spending several days in Hue investigating allegations of killings and torture. I saw and photographed a lot for myself, but inevitably I relied on many civilians and soldiers, Vietnamese, Americans, Australians and others. All seemed honest witnesses, telling the truth as they believed it.
On a lovely sunny afternoon in the green valley of Nam Hoa, about ten miles southwest of Hue, I was with Warrant Officer Ostara, an Australian adviser with the South Vietnam army standing on the sloping sides of a recently dug hole. In the bottom were rush mats over sheets of plastics. Ostara drew them back and I saw two bodies, dead Vietnamese, with their arms tied behind their backs just above the elbows. They had been shot through the back of the head, the bullet coming out through the mouth. The faces would have been difficult to recognize, but the day before 27 women from the village walked out three miles carrying mattocks to dig for their missing husbands and sons, having heard about this patch of disturbed earth near the roadside. Ostara told me that the enemy had come through on their way to Hue. They had taken 27 men. Some were leaders and some were younger strong enough to be porters or even ancillary soldiers.
"Men were simply condemned by drumhead courts and executed as enemies of the people," said Bob Kelly, the senior province adviser in Thua Thien province. "These were the leaders, often quite small men. Others were executed when their usefulness ceased, or when they didn't Cooperate they were shot for their trouble. Some of my staff were badly mutilated, but I am inclined to believe this was done after they were killed. Their hands were tied and they were shot behind the head I helped to dig one body out, but I have been told by Vietnamese whom I respect that some people were buried alive."
Lieut. Gregory Sharp. an American adviser with the Vietnam 21st Ranger Battalion, told me that his men had come across about 25 new graves in a cemetery five miles east of Hue on March 14. From half a dozen of the graves the heads were sticking up out of the sandy soil and, according to Sharp, "there wasn't much left of them-buzzards and dogs, I suppose. Some had been shot in the head and some hadn't. They had been buried alive. I think. There were sort of scratches in the sand in one place, as if someone had clawed his way out." At Quan Ta Ngan three Australian warrant officers saw seven men in one of three graves they found. The seven. I was told, had been shot one after the other, through the back of the head, hands tied.
Soon after arriving in Hue' I went in a Jeep with three Viet Nam officers to inspect sites where the bodies of executed men were said to have been found. We went first to Gia Hoi high school in District Two, east of the citadel. Here 22 new graves had been found, each containing between three and seven bodies. It is still a horrifying place. The officers told me that the bodies had been tied and, again. Most had been shot through the head, but "some had been buried alive."
There are about 40,000 Roman Catholic Vietnamese in Hue'. What happened to them? About three-quarters of the Roman Catholics in Hue' live in Phu Cam, on the southern outskirts of the city. They resisted strongly when the enemy came in, and some were executed. Four Viet Nam priests were taken away and three foreign priests were killed. Two French priests were actually given permission by the Viet Cong to return to Phu Cam and help the sisters-and then they were shot on the way back. Another French priest was executed, perhaps because he was chaplain to the Americans.
Summing up all this evidence about the behavior of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army in Hue one thing is abundantly clear and ought to surprise no one. They put into practice, with their usual efficiency the traditional Communist policy of punishing by execution selected leaders who support their enemies. In Hue, as elsewhere, they were unable on the whole to capture and execute the more important officials, because these men were careful to protect themselves in heavily fortified compounds, defended by soldiers and police. In Hue, as elsewhere, the more defenseless "little people' were the victims-the village and hamlet chiefs, the teachers and the policemen. Already most of these positions have been filled again, and I find it impossible to write adequately about the courage of men who succeed the executed.
The world renown historian, Stanley Karnow, and an authority in the Vietnam War History has revealed many details of the Tet offensive and the Hue massacre.
Five months before, as they began to prepare for the assault planners and their intelligence agents inside the city compiled two lists. One detailed nearly two hundred targets ranging from such installations as government bureaus and posts to the home of the district chief's concubine. The other contained the names of "cruel tyrants and reactionary elements," a rubric covering civilian functionaries, army officers, and nearly anybody else linked to the South Vietnamese regime as well as uncooperative merchants, intellectuals and clergymen. Instructions were also issued to arrest Americans other foreigners except for the French-presumably because President de Gaulle had publicly criticized U.S. policy in Vietnam.
Vietcong teams, armed with these directives, conducted house to house searches immediately after seizing control of Hue, and they were merciless. During the months and years that followed, the remains of approximately three thousand people were exhumed in beds, coastal salt flats, and jungle clearings. The victims had been shot or clubbed to death, or buried alive. Paradoxically, the American public barely noticed these atrocities, preoccupied as it was by the incident at Mylai-in which American soldiers had massacred a hundred Vietnamese peasants, women and children among them. Revisiting Vietnam in 1981, I was able to elicit little credible evidence from the Communists clarify the episode.
Captured in the home of Vietnamese friends, Stephen Miller of the U.S. Information Service was shot in a field behind a Catholic seminary Dr. Horst Gunther Krainick, a German physician teaching at the local medical school, was seized with his wife and two other German doctors and their bodies were found in a shallow pit. Despite their instruction to spare the French, the Communists arrested two Benedictine missionary, shot one of them, and buried the other alive. They also killed Father Buu Dong, a popular Vietnamese Catholic priest who had entertained Vietcong agents in his rectory, where he kept a portrait of Ho Chi Minh -telling parishioners that he prayed for Ho because "he is our friend too." Many Vietnamese with only the flimsiest ties to Saigon regime suffered as well Pham Van Tuong, a part-time janitor at a government office, was gunned down in his front yard along with his two small children. Mrs. Nguyen Thi Lao, a cigarette vendor, was presumably executed because her sister worked in a government bureau. Anyone resisting arrest was promptly killed, but those who surrendered to the Communists often fared no better. Five South Vietnamese officers, who emerged from their hiding place without a fight, were taken to a high school playground and each shot in the head. Many people disappeared after submitting to Vietcong promises of a quick release, as one woman later recalled: "The Communists came to our house and questioned my father who was an elderly official about to retire. Then they went away returning afterward to say that he had to attend a study a study session that would last only ten days. My mother and I were worried because the Communists had arrested his father in just that way in 1946. Like his father my father never came back."
"The Vietnam Experience"
(Clark Dougan & Stephen Weiss, "The Vietnam Experience 1968", Boston Publishing Company, Boston, MA, p. 36)
The full story of what happened in Hue between January 31 and February 25,1968, may never be known. But the preponderance of evidence, including the testimony of many survivors, indicates that Communist forces did in fact carry out systematic assassinations. The most persuasive case is that made by reporter Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post in his authoritative work, Tet! Following up rumors of large-scale executions behind enemy lines, Oberdorfer made three visits to Hue-one during the battle, another just after, and a third in December 1969 "to reconstruct the experiences of the Hue people". Their pseudonymous accounts of the fates of relatives, neighbors, and friends-some of which have been recounted in this chapter- left no doubt in Orberdorfer' mind that mass executions have been carried out by the communists.
"Aftermath" chapter of the "Battle for Hue"
(Keith William Nolan, "Battle for Hue", Presidio Press 1983, p. 183-184)
Soon after the battle, the South Vietnamese government initiated Operation Recovery, a 90-day relief and reconstruction effort aimed at the entire I Corps, but focused primarily on Hue. It brought food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention to that city's estimated 116,000 refugees (out of a population of 140,000). By the end of the year, life in Hue was relatively back to normal. As Major Swenson noted, "My final duties as liaison officer entailed taking visitors to Task Force X-RAY through the city on a guided tour. The city was not destroyed in the Tet Offensive. It was damaged, but still beautiful."
The war had finally come to the people of Hue - and they paid the price. As Hue pulled itself out of the mess, one bloody sidelight of the battle was uncovered, something worse than refugees and cross-fire deaths: the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had massacred many of the people of Hue during their occupation. Over the years, the evidence was collected in bits and pieces; the discovery of mass graves, captured communist documents, statements by prisoners of war. It was learned that with the typical cold-blooded efficiency of the Communists, the VC had gone into Hue with lists of so-called Enemies of the People. Those marked included government officials, city administrators, intellectuals, teachers, college students, soldiers, foreigners - and their families - all those suspected of being potential enemies of the communist cause. There was one other category: all those who could identify the VC infrastructure now that it had surfaced for the Tet Offensive. That could include any innocent bystander. The people were rounded up and some were executed in the city. When the fight was obviously being lost by the VC, they marched their political prisoners outside the city to different sites and killed them. Some were buried alive. Great pains were taken by the Communists to conceal their work, and it took a year for the allies to put the pieces together. The South Vietnamese government finally recovered three thousand bodies in mass graves around Hue. Another two thousand people were still unaccounted for.
The 1968 Hue Massacre: Lessons Learned
For the last half century, Vietnamese are the most ill-fated people.
During the Second World War the Vietnamese were caught in the power struggle between the French and the Japanese and the toll was the starvation of more than a million people. From 1946 to 1975 many more became victims of the Anti-French war followed by the Vietnam conflict.
Besides the incidental victims of the war, many lives were needlessly sacrificed for the so called "Communist Revolutionary", namely:
1.The Land Reform in the 50' s.
2.The Viet cong terrorism in the 60' s, where Mau Than massacre was at its height.
3.The Viet cong cruel policies have caused many people to suffer and die in concentration camps throughout the whole country. Coupled with those who lost the lives (Boat People) at sea in search of freedom.
In the wake of the demise of Communism, Ha Noi had to confess and accepted its mistakes about the Land Reform policy and had to end its brutal policy in South Vietnam during the first years after 1975.
But, in the issue of respecting human lives, social equality, and keeping their promises, the Communist regime is found at where it was 30 years ago. This is the reason why people continue to be oppressed and terrorized.
By that very reason, to understand and to remember what actually happened in the Mau Than massacre will help contribute toward the effort of bringing the serious mistake of the past to the light - in hope to prevent such mistakes from recurring.
Having found out the criminals that were responsible for the Mau Than bloody massacre, will not only do console to the victims' soul, but will also prevent those who are in charge of governing Vietnam from repeating these crimes.
May this document be a contribution to the effort of keeping any individual from using the name of a doctrine, a political party or a government as a convenience to violate the basic Human Rights. It is the essence of the ill-attitude of the disregard for Human Rights that easily leads to the crimes against humanity: A Crime that the Communist Party of Vietnam must admit to have committed in the past half century, especially those of the Mau Than Massacre.
Misreporting That Doomed Millions
On July 26, 1977, a man who was until recently a member of what passes for a legislature in Hanoi testified before a subcommittee of our House of Representatives. He had just flown to Washington from Japan, after having fled from Vietnam by fishing boat. He abandoned his family and risked his life in a small boat on the open seas, because, he said, he felt impelled to tell the world about the tragedy that had befallen his country, South Vietnam.
This man, Nguyen Cong Hoan, had previously been a member of the National Assembly in Saigon prior to the Communist takeover of the South. He had been opposed to the Thieu government, opposed to the war and sympathetic to the Communists. The Communists had rewarded him by selecting him as one of the members of the legislature in Hanoi. He became a member of the privileged class, but he soon became disillusioned and alarmed by the Communist policies and practices.
The much feared but generally unreported Communist bloodbath was carried out in his province, Phu Yen, in the early days of the takeover, he said. He estimated that 500 people were killed in the early stages and 200 since then. He said that so many of his friends and acquaintances had been arrested that he could not count them. One such acquaintance, a communist sympathizer, was arrested simply because he had received a letter from abroad, even though he immediately reported it to the local authorities. All the private schools had been closed, and all the religions were being persecuted. The most serious violation of human fights, he said, was the constant threat to human life. Anyone could be killed at any time for the most improbable reunion.
For example, a Buddhist monk who had been an adviser to the Vietcong was executed as a CIA agent because he had received a letter of appreciation from the American Consul- ate for having helped in the search for American MIAs.
Mr. Hoan said that as much as the Vietnamese hate war, they are now ready to continue the struggle for many more years to try to liberate themselves from "the most inhuman and oppressive regime they have ever known."
Just before Mr. Hoan testified, Congressman Donald Fraser's subcommittee had heard testimony from Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and from Charles Twining, a State Department expert on Cambodia. Mr. Holbrooke officially confirmed what has long been known about the incredible suffering of the Cambodian people under the Communists. Mr. Twining, who said that he had interviewed thousands of escapees from Cambodia, said that the policy of the Cambodian Reds is to kill everyone with a seventh grade education or more. He said be had never heard of a single trial. People were simply taken away and murdered, usually by administering a blow on the back of the bead with a club. Mr. Twining said that the number of deaths from disease and starvation was a large multiple of the number killed by the Communists directly. Many of those deaths could have been prevented if it had not been for the harsh and inhumane policies of the new rulers of Cambodia.
They Gave Their Lives In Vain
Over 50,000 Americans gave their lives to prevent this disastrous development in Southeast Asia. We spent billions of dollars to honor a commitment to defend the freedom of the Vietnamese people. We owe those who gave their lives in vain at least an honest effort to understand why we failed to achieve our objective.
One reason was that there were in Vietnam too many people like Nguyen Cong hoan who did not understand what a Communist victory would mean. Hoan, an educated man, has said that he honestly thought that things would be better under the Communists than they were under Thieu. He could learn only from bitter experience.
But another reason for our failure has been laid out for all to see in a new book about the performance of the American news media in the Vietnam war, and specifically about its handling of a crucial turning point in the war, the Tet offensive.
The book is called Big Story. It is the work of Peter Brae- strop, who was a reporter for the Washington Post in Saigon at the time of the Tet offensive in 1968, and who previously was a correspondent for The New York Times. In this richly documented work, Braestrap shows how the military defeat suffered by the Vietcong and the American media into a political defeat for the United States transformed North Vietnamese in the period January 31 to March 31, 1968.
After the communist takeover in April 1975, James Reston of The New York Times wrote proudly that American correspondents and cameramen had forced the withdrawal of American military power from Vietnam. Braestrup has taken one of the key periods in the war and has shown just how the power of the media offset the power of our arms.
Ben Tre: Did Being Destroyed Save It?
One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an anonymous American major by AP correspondent Peter Aroett. Writing about the provincial capital, Ben Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: "'it became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a U.S. major says."
Braestrup says of this much used and abused sentence: "Arnett's quote passed quickly into the overheated rhetoric of the Vietnam debate back home. It was cited, paraphrased, reshaped, misattributed, and used for years as an all-purpose description of the war . . . Senator Albert Gore restated it: 'A military victory can only be achieved by the destruction of what we profess to seek to save.' Abe applied it to the battle of Hue: 'Marine officers concede that it may be necessary to rip apart, destroy the beautiful Citadel in order to save it.' Drew Pearson used it: 'In other words, to save Vietnam we must almost destroy it.' The New Republic reworked the quote and attributed it to Major Brown: 'Helicopter and bomber attacks on Ben Tre were directed by Maj. Chester L. Brown of Erie, Pennsylvania, who said to the Associated Press that 'it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it' and 'a pity about the civilians.'"
Perhaps no words did more to change attitudes about the war than this single sentence, born out of Tet. The AP headquarters loved the Arnett story. Their in-house publication, AP Log, said: "One of the most graphic of the week's stories was Arnett's account of the destruction of Ben Tre 'to save it,' and his photos added to the story's impact..."
But was it true? William Touhy of the Los Angeles Times wrote a story six weeks later in which he said: "Only 25% of the city-rather than the reported 80%-was actually destroyed by the Vietcong attack and the Vietnamese artillery and U.S. air strikes that followed. And the U.S. advisory group doubts that the (Arnett) statement was actually made in that form. 'It sounds too pithy and clever to have been made on the spot,' says one U.S. civilian advisor. 'It just rings wrong.'"
Arnett refused to tell Braestrup whom the alleged major was who made the statement, claiming that he is still in military service. He said: "So I will keep my silence until I run into him again and get his clearance."
Braestrup says The Washington Post was considering running Touhy's debunking of Arnett, but Lee Lescaze, one of their two men in Saigon, (Braestrup was the other) recommended against it on the ground that there was a great deal of damage done and "whether it is less enormous than first thought seems a quibble."
Was Our Embassy Taken?
Many Americans still think that the Vietcong at the height of the Tet offensive occupied the American Embassy in Saigon on January 31, 1968. That is what both our wire services, which provide the news to most of our news- papers, radio and TV stations, reported. In their early reporting, both the AP and UPI had the Vietcong occupying the supposedly attack-proof embassy building. The AP reported that the enemy occupied parts of the building for six hours and that they had to be driven out by paratroopers who landed by helicopter on the roof of the building. The UP! Had the Vietcong reportedly occupying five floors of the embassy. They referred to a six-hour battle through "carpeted" offices.
The fact was that there were neither Vietcong nor carpets in the embassy offices. Nineteen Vietcong sappers broke into the embassy grounds in the early hours of the morning. Their mission was to blow up the building. Not one got inside the building, and by 9:00 A.M., 17 of them had been killed and 2 had been captured. Damage to the building was minimal, and the ambassador was back at work in his office before noon.
Top officials in both Saigon and Washington so informed the press, but the newsmen, reflecting their distrust of their own government and perhaps a willingness or even eager to believe the worst, wrote their stories in a way that cast doubt on what the officials said. The impression lingered on that the embassy had been occupied, and though the record was eventually corrected, the psychological damage done by the initial horror stories was immense.
Building Up the Vietcong
Braestrup shows that another tendency of the media was to exaggerate the strength and accomplishments of the Viet- cong. The little men were often made ten feet tall. They were bold and daring, unafraid to die. They were every- where. Their planning was presented as being faultless and they were supposed to have weapons as good as ours, and their techniques were even better.
The main trouble with all this was that it simply was not true. While their attacks were bold, the fact was that in Saigon they failed in virtually all of their missions.
A common theme of stories in The New York Times was sounded by Tom Buckle), on February 2, 1968. He wrote: "Despite official statistics to the contrary, no part of the country is secure either from terrorist bombs or from organized military operations . . . Most important, after years of fighting and tens of thousands of casualties, the Vietcong can still find thousands of men who are ready not only to strike at night and slip away, but also to undertake missions in which death is the only possible outcome."
Charles Mohr reinforced this the next day, blowing up the Vietcong achievements, saying: "The courage and motivation of the guerrilla units that struck Saigon, Dad Nang, the provincial capitals and many other towns and installations were important factors in the havoc they created... The attacks also showed excellent planning and valuable support by communist agents within the towns and cities."
Braestrup notes that Mohr ignored the holiday laxity of South Vietnamese leaders which had contributed to the enemy successes, and he left out the fact that the attacks on key installations in Saigon, whose planning he lauded. Had, for the most part, been failures.
The Times played up a story that claimed that the Vietcong were so good with mortars that they could often hit their target with a single round and then slip away before the helicopters could seek them out. The headline was: "Foe Giving Warfare Lessons With Simple Mortar." Braestrup noted that mortars were not precision weapons and that even in daytime when the crew was firing at a visible target direct hits were rate. Lie notes that the Vietcong usually fired at night and in a hurry and that they wasted most of their rounds in their hit and run attacks.
Braestrup points out that for all the noisy firing, not a single allied air base had to suspend operations, and that even Khe Sanh which was under siege for 77 days continued to receive big C-123 transports on its airstrip. "Few news- men noticed," he adds dryly.
Braestrup says that "there were few hints in Times analyses or battlefield reporting that the foe was anything but shrewd, tenacious, ascetic, infallible, and menacing."
One of the devices of our newsmen was to subtly impute greater presence to the Vietcong than was actually the case. For example, on the CBS Evening News of February 16, 1968, the viewers were informed that North Vietnamese truck convoys, operating at might, were unloading their cargoes at Communist-held entrances in the wall of the Citadel of Hue, the heart of the city. Accurately, the trucks were stopping and unloading well short of the city of Hue, but the CBS report gave the impression that the enemy control was far greater than it actually was.
NBC aired a captured Vietcong propaganda film purporting to show how they operated. The Vietcong claimed the film was made in the town of Cu Chi. NBC said: "It's doubtful these scenes were actually filmed in Cu Chi, since the is not an enemy stronghold now and U.S. officials insist it was not last year when this f'dm was produced." Braestrup notes matter of faculty: "There was nothing for U.S. officials to 'insist' upon; Cu Chi was a garrisoned district capital in Hau Nghia province less than two miles from the U.S. 25th Division base camp, which was established there in 1966.
Don Webster of CBS on March 4, 1968, proclaimed that "the enemy now has weapons every bit as good as the Americans." He said, the enemy "was attacking with new boldness and daring" and that Vietnam was a much more dangerous place than ever before." Braeamp notes that this statement about weapons was true only if Webster meant just small arms, and he said the "boldness and daring" had already noticeably decreased by the time Webster spoke.
Of Time magazine, Braestrup says that it presented the Tet attacks as demonstrations of "Giap's genius," the communists' "split-second timing" and "resiliency of communications and command, the quality of their weapon and their ability to strike at will anywhere in Vietnam. News- week also gave the impression of a "foe without setbacks or flaws." However, he does give Newsweek credit for an independent post-mortem of the enemy's performance at Tet. In this, Newsweek noted communist failures that caused their inability to reinforce their initial gains. Key bridges were not blown, they failed to capture the Saigon radio station, and they failed to commit major units, letting the momentum of the early attacks die.
However, Newsweek insisted that the attack was no failure despite these mistakes. It said: "Despite the fact that the communists did not achieve most of their objectives, their offensive was far from a failure ... it caught the (allies) by surprise and made a mockery of numerous allied claims that the enemy was too weak to stand up and fight..." Braestrup comments that the latter was a journalistic straw man, since Westmoreland and Wheeler had been promising more enemy initiatives and hard fighting, not claiming that he was too weak to fight.
Civilian Destruction and Deaths
Braestrup notes that the correspondents in Saigon were shocked by the fact that the war had come close to them. The dramatic picture was the one showing destruction and the pathos of refugees. The mini was that the world was given a picture of death and destruction in the cities that did not reflect reality. "All Vietnam," Braestrap says, judging from the film shown at home, "was in flames or being battered into ruins and all Vietnamese civilians were homeless refugees." He says this was not the case even in Hue, where the fighting lasted three weeks. Had reality been anything like what the American people were given to believe, "urban recovery could never have occurred."
In placing the blame for the destruction and deaths, our newsmen, Braestrup found, tended to blame the allies. The Vietcong tended to be exonerated.
An important mutation of this tendency was the lack of media interest in the massacre by the communists of civilian in the city of Hue during their three-week occupation of that city. Most newsmen showed no interest in the announcements in late February and March of the discovery of mass graves of tour-dared civilian on the outskirts of Hue. The first news of the massacre broke on February 11, 1968, when the mayor of Hue charged that 300 civilians had been executed by the Communists and buried in a mass grave south of the city.
The AP covered the story in seven paragraphs. The Washing- ton Post ran a six-paragraph story--on page 11. The New York Times put the story on page one, but devoted only three paragraphs to the massacre.
On February 28, the UPI put out a story about the discovery of 100 bodies in a common grave near Hue, and on March 3, the UPI reported that survivors of this atrocity reported that the victims had been forced to dig their own graves and were shot as they begged for mercy.
On March 6, William Ryan of the AP did a story about Hue. He noted in passing that "about 1,000 civilians have died." He said that the enemy forces had executed many of them and that mass graves had been found. Neither the Times nor the Post used this story, and Ryan was not enough interested to visit the graves.
On March 9, the U.S. Embassy issued a press release putting the number of murdered civilians at 400, saying that prisoners had admitted under interrogation that their commanders ordered the execution of almost 400 civilians around Hue. This attracted little media attention.
Stewart Harris for The Times of London wrote the first story with any detail on the massacre. The New York Times printed it on page 4 on March 28, 1968. Harris had actually taken the trouble to look at some of the graves and see the mutilated bodies. He reported for the first time that some of the victims were said to have been buried alive. However, Harris used a very conservative figure for the number executed-only 200.
Nothing more was said for a month.
On May 1, The New York Times reported that the United States Mission had upped its estimate of the number killed to 1,000 civilians. This story reported that indications were that nearly half of the victims had been buried alive and that many had been beaten unconscious before being buried. Only the first three paragraphs of this story were carried on page 1, under a one-column headline.
The Washington Post put this story on page 19, using a UPI dispatch.
That seems to have been the end of reporting on the Hue massacre until late in 1969, when the AP put out a story about the continuing search for bodies, revealing that the tell was up to more than 3,000. The Times carried this story on page 3, on November 13. On November 25, they carried another AP story reporting that a captured North Vietnamese document stated that they had "eliminated" nearly 2,900 people at Hue, including 2,720 civilians.
The story carried the suggestion that this information was being released to counter the growing furor over the allegation that U.S. troops had massacred 125 civilians at My Lai.
The Washington Post took notice of a study by a USIA official, Douglas Pike, "The Vietcong Strategy of Terror," in December 1969, in which he discussed his Findings on the Hue massacre, exposing the calculated policy that lay behind it. Pike reported that 2810 bodies had been found and 1,946 persons were still missing. The New York Times did not mention this study until May 17, 1970, and then only briefly. This was a few days after Tom Wicker, a columnist for The Times, had written that careful research had revealed that the executions had taken place "in the heat of battle and as the revenge of an army in retreat," not as deliberate policy. This was the exact opposite of Pike's carefully researched findings.
Braestrup advances several possible reasons for the media's lack of interest in the massacre. The best clue, however, is this statement: "In a sense, newsmen and their editors may have been as mentally unreceptive to reports of the Hue massacre as was much of the U.S. public later to reports in 1969 of the My Lai massacre." Stewart Harris, who wrote about the massacre for the London Times, was opposed to U.S. policy in Vietnam, and Time quoted him as saying of that story: "My instinct is not to sustain it (the war) by writing propaganda."
In November 1969, when the story of the My Lai massacre by American troops broke, the suspicion of atrocity stories and the reluctance to write "propaganda" vanished. In the space of six weeks The New York Times carried so many stories on My Lai that the listing of them required nearly three and a half pages of small type in the Times annual index.
Recently Reed Irvine, chairman of AIM, discussed this contrast with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the chairman of The New York Times, and Sydney Gresen, executive vice president of The Times. Mr. Gruson said that My Lai was given so much attention because it was an important story for the American people. Mr. Sulzberger turned to him and said quietly, "But what he is saying is that it was important because we made it important."
A Disgraceful Performance
In summing up his detailed study, Braestrup concludes:
"Rarely has contemporary crisis-journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality. Essentially, the dominant themes of the words and film from Vietnam . . . added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies. Historians, on the contrary, have concluded that the Tet offensive resulted in a severe military political setback for Hanoi in the South. To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other-in a major crisis abroad- cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism."
Braestrup asserts, not convincingly, that ideological bias was not a dominant factor in the misrepresentation of the true facts of Tot. He shows that because of the defects in the way the news business works, the original false impressions of a Vietcong triumph got very heavy play, while the evidence that later came in to show the contrary got much less attention. "At Tet," he says, "the press shouted that the patient was dying, then weeks later began to whisper that he somehow seemed to be recovering-whispers apparently not heard amid the clamorous domestic reaction to the initial shouts."
There is reason to believe that ideology played a role in this. Braestrup points out that there was plenty of evidence of the true state of affairs in late February, but in mid-March CBS, NBC and Newsweek were still showing the North Vietnamese troops holding the initiative. NBC and CBS had both aired specials in which their news stars came out in opposition to the war, and Braestrup found that Newsweek had been strongly against the war long before Tet.
And as Edward Jay Epstein has told us, when Jack Fern of NBC approached executive producer Robert Northshield with the suggestion that they ought to do a special on Tet to set the record straight, because it had really been a victory for our side, Northshield refused. Later, when asked why, Northshield explained: "The public perceived it as a defeat, and therefore it was a defeat."
Big Story is a big and very important book. It will have to be read by our military tacticians, as well as by journalists, because it is a major contribution to the study of warfare. It proves the maxim that the pen in mightier than the sword, since the media treatment of Tet turned a military victory into a defeat. It helped bring about the results that Twining and Hoan described in their testimony before the House subcommittee.
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