Loon - Jack McLean [48]
In January 1968, support for the war was still strong in the United States, although cracks were developing. On the evening of January 17, 1968, President Johnson stood before a joint session of Congress and delivered his fifth State of the Union Address:
Since I reported to you last January:
Three elections have been held in Vietnam—in the midst of war and under the constant threat of violence.
A President, a Vice President, a House and Senate, and village officials have been chosen by popular, contested ballot.
The enemy has been defeated in battle after battle.
The number of South Vietnamese living in areas under Government protection tonight has grown by more than a million since January of last year.
These are all marks of progress. Yet:
The enemy continues to pour men and material across frontiers and into battle, despite his continuous heavy losses.
He continues to hope that America’s will to persevere can be broken. Well—he is wrong. America will persevere. Our patience and our perseverance will match our power. Aggression will never prevail.
Those of us in the field wanted desperately to believe the president’s every word.
We still believed in what we were doing.
We still thought that we were stopping Communist aggression.
We still felt that the war could be won.
Although we remained out of the direct line of fire, evidence of the war was all around us. To better observe troop movements from the north, someone decided that it would be a good idea to defoliate the DMZ. One January day, we watched with curiosity as planes that appeared to be crop dusters began to spray the area north of us with a white powdery substance. Within several days, it was all over everything—in our eyes, in our rifles, in our water, on the leaves of every tree that we brushed by on patrols, and on the ground upon which we slept.
Agent Orange.
The defoliant of choice in Vietnam.
Immediately some of us began to itch. Others developed rashes. Over the ensuing years, legions of us would contract diabetes (myself included), have children with birth defects, and suffer all manner of physical maladies that could be traced directly back to the chemical dioxin—the active ingredient in both Agent Orange and napalm.
At half past midnight on Wednesday morning, January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive at Nha Trang. Nearly seventy thousand North Vietnamese troops participated in this broad action that took the escalating war from the jungles into the cities of South Vietnam.
The following day, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese security official, was captured on film executing a Vietcong prisoner, shooting him in the temple at point-blank range. American photographer Eddie Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for the photo. It was to become yet another iconic rallying point for antiwar protesters back home. Despite later claims that the prisoner had been accused of murdering a Saigon police officer and his family, the image called into question everything claimed and assumed about our South Vietnamese allies.
Over the following weeks, nearly every city and military installation in South Vietnam was hit. Even the U.S. embassy in Saigon was penetrated by enemy troops and resecured only after a fierce battle. The offensive carried on for weeks and was the major turning point in the American attitude toward the war. Little remained the same after Tet.
Throughout the Tet Offensive we could hear Con Thien and C-2 getting hit every day. The 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, who took over our former position on the Firebreak, got hit by several battalions of NVA, and held their ground while losing only fifteen men. Choppers were on standby to take us up as reinforcements, but the call never came and we returned to our routines.
The Washout became one of the few marine installations untouched by the Tet Offensive.
Vietnam was not the only Asian country in which the mighty military of the United States was being tested by unconventional