I was surprised by Tet. While making morning tea in our apartment just north of Bombay VOA announced that there was fighting inside the American embassy compound in Saigon. After a couple days of radio silence we were told of the great American victory - no general uprising, thousands of Viet Cong dead, etc. But the irreducible fact was that it was a nationwide surprise coordinated offensive. How did we not know? Hearts and minds had not been won - not by helicopters, carpet bombing, defoliants, red light districts, and death, death everywhere. - GWC
Why Did No One See the Tet Offensive Coming? - The New York Times
by Sam Oglesby
When the Tet offensive ignited South Vietnam on Jan. 30, 1968, American forces were taken by surprise. Every one of the country’s 44 provinces was hit in a stunning, coordinated attack that changed the course of the war. With so many American resources in Vietnam focused on intelligence-gathering, why was the United States so clueless? My own experience with the United States Agency for International Development might shed some light on this lapse.
The weekend of Dec. 15, 1967, promised to be an interesting one. I had been invited by my French friend, Serge, to accompany him on an inspection trip to a rubber plantation in Hau Nghia province that was part of the Société des Plantations de Terres Rouges network, a huge French holding an hour north of Saigon. For decades Terres Rouges, along with the Michelin chain, had been jewels in the crown of French colonial agricultural exporters. Now with the intensification of the American war in Vietnam, the plantation was in rapid decline, having suffered from physical destruction wrought by herbicidal chemical defoliation — Agent Orange — as well as the bulldozing of large stands of rubber groves that the American military claimed had served as convenient camouflage for Communist insurgents and the North Vietnamese Army. Serge had been tasked with determining whether the plantation should continue operating and, if so, what measures could be taken to reverse its deterioration.*****
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