“Gimme Shelter” -- Rolling Stones
While Vietnam adopted the Gregorian calendar it 1954, the Chinese based lunar calendar first introduced to this small southeast Asian nation in 1354 still informs its cultural holidays and festivals. By the traditional calendar, the first day of Spring, always on a full moon, marks the new year and Vietnam’s premier holiday. Tết Nguyên Đán (or "Feast of the First Morning of the First Day"), usually shortened to Tet, is a time of happiness and joy. The troubles of the past year are displaced by the hopes of the new one. It is a time for cleaning homes, family reunions, and elaborate feasting. Children and the agéd are gifted money as tokens of luck to follow. Fireworks discharge profusely.
Celebrating Tết Nguyên Đán
Tet fell on 30 January in 1968, and since then, many people of that generation have come to associate the traditional Vietnamese New Year’s Day with sorrow, tragedy, horror, and death. On that night, Communist Viet Cong insurgents and their North Vietnamese allies launched a surprise offensive against military and civilian targets across the whole of South Vietnam. Over one-hundred cities and towns were assailed. United States and South Vietnamese forces were caught unprepared, and the attackers overran several cities. However, the defenders quickly regrouped and initiated a series of punishing counteroffensives. The fighting was brutal, even more so than what Americans had come to expect from this undeclared war. Viet Cong sappers even penetrated the grounds of the US Embassy Compound in Saigon, resulting in firefight exceeding six hours.
The summary execution of handcuffed Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém
by South Vietnam Chief of National Police General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan
on the second day of the Tet Offensive
galvanized anti-war sentiment around the world.
Lém had led a team of saboteurs responsible
for the murders of numerous South Vietnamese civilians.
AP photographer Eddie Adams, a friend of General Loan,
later regretted capturing the shot.
Some of the fiercest fighting of the entire Vietnam war occurred in the former imperial capital of Huế. Viet Cong fighters and North Vietnamese regulars rapidly seized most of this strategically-situated, yet inexplicably under-defended city. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam, buttressed by five battalions of United States soldiers and marines recaptured the city after 26 days of deadly and treacherous house-to-house combat. Atrocities are the hallmark of warfare, and Vietnam War experienced its share, but the Battle for Huế witnessed one of the most horrific war crimes of the entire conflict. During the battle, the Communist occupiers found time to massacre, in addition to PoWs, some five to ten percent of Huế’s civilian population -- men, women, and children alike -- though to be too closely associated with the Saigon government. The number of victims remain uncertain even today, but best estimates place the count at about 4,000.
A wounded American Marine is pulled to safety by a comrade
during the fight for Huế.
As if to prove their Communist adversaries possessed no monopoly on depravity, South Vietnamese "revenge squads" would later scour the debris of the ruined city, butchering those surviving citizens deemed unloyal.
Atrocity begets atrocity, and so it goes.
Atrocity begets atrocity, and so it goes.
.
American and South Vietnam troops inflicted a decisive tactical defeat on the Communist attackers. The Viet Cong in particular suffered devastating losses, severely limiting their effectiveness as a fighting force. The Viet Cong had spent a decade building up cadres of skilled fighters and recruits across South Vietnam. Carefully secreted caches matériel and arms had been accumulated with cunning detail. Now this patiently husbanded reserve of personnel and resources had been squandered on a single roll of the dice. Viet Cong losses could only be replaced by North Vietnam Army regulars infiltrating southward. It would never regain its former formidable strength. In the north, those military leaders who planned and encouraged the offensive, insisting it would inspire a pro-Communist uprising across South Vietnam were unceremoniously forced into retirement.
Saigon's Cholon Quarter during the Tet Fighting
The misfortunate of the Communist forces did not translate into the good fortune of their foes. A Communist tactical defeat became a strategic American defeat. War-weary Americans had been fed a steady diet of reports predicting imminent victory in South Vietnam. Attrition had weakened Communists, insisted President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his military advisors, leaving them virtually inert as a military force. The fury of the Tet Offensive dispelled any remaining faith in that myth, leaving many US observers feeling lied to and manipulated. Over half the 58-thousand American killed in the war lost their lives during or after the Tet Offensive. However much punishment US forces and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam inflicted on the Viet Cong and the North Vietnam Army, the Communists forces remained a potent opponent. Civilian support for American involvement plummeted at home while, in South Vietnam itself, the American failure to anticipate the onslaught aroused distrust of the US military.
In 1995, Mick Jagger reflected on the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in explaining how he and Keith Richards came to write and record one of the best known songs of 1969:
Well, it's a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn't like World War II, and it wasn't like Korea, and it wasn't like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn't like it. People objected, and people didn't want to fight it… .
“Gimme Shelter” -- Rolling Stones
Come on
Oh, a storm is threat'ning
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder yeah!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away yeah
The floods is threat'ning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away
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