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Old 01-31-2018, 08:46 AM
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Arrow Bloody Vietnam Tet Offensive also points way to a more redemptive future: Richard M.

Bloody Vietnam Tet Offensive also points way to a more redemptive future: Richard M. Perloff (Opinion)
By Guest Columnist 1-31-18 4: 4: 58 AAM
RE: http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/ind...in_vietna.html

CLEVELAND -- It is early morning, Jan. 31, 1968, and fireworks have shattered the ordinarily placid American military command post in Hue, South Vietnam.

Frank Doezema, guarding the compound, sensed it immediately, recognizing the piercing sound of a North Vietnamese AK-47, watching as hundreds of North Vietnamese troops massed in the streets, dashing out, letting loose a burst of fire from the northwest tower, until suddenly a rocket blasted the roof, and he was badly hit, bleeding profusely, his leg nearly sundered, as his friend, the lanky Capt. Jim Coolican, draped him over his shoulder, trying desperately to carry him to safety.

Doezema was a member of a military unit that felt the first ravages of the North Vietnamese onslaught on Vietnamese cities 50 years ago on Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year.

His story is chronicled in Mark Bowden's "Hue 1968," one of the most recent of a multitude of books, articles and videos that have been produced over the years, all trying to come to terms with a pivotal series of battles that produced heavy casualties, devastated Vietnamese cities and changed the course of the Vietnam War.

Ever since the late reporter Peter Braestrup wrote his classic book about Tet in 1977, it has become popular to assume that news media coverage of Tet was a major reason why the United States lost the war, the news dispiriting the public and causing Americans to think all was hopeless. There is a kernel of truth in this view. The news played up North Vietnam's onslaught of South Vietnamese cities, suggesting that the United States and South Vietnam had been defeated when, as historians have documented, American forces beat back the attacks, resulting in a major military defeat for Hanoi.

But the media got a lot right. Their front-line journalism conveyed the horrible realities America troops faced. The North Vietnamese offensive - and ability to break through Allied defenses - was a big deal, totally contradicting the optimistic, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel reports from President Lyndon B. Johnson and Gen. William Westmoreland. The public took notice, deciding the price of casualties was not worth the amorphous victory that a half million troops might bring.

Tet had a pivotal impact on the Vietnam War. After public opinion soured on the war, the debate about Vietnam no longer focused on how to win, but how to honorably extricate ourselves from the mess we had created. The credibility gap between what presidents did and said was sown forever.

The news media did not lose the Vietnam War. Instead, our loss was attributable to the White House's arrogant failure long before Tet to call appropriately on advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as H.R. McMaster, now National Security Adviser, wrote in a 1997 book, and to the American public's refusal to endure an endless war in Southeast Asia with no moral or political justification.

But to those of us who lived through Tet and remember the searing news reports and casualties -- deaths (including Frank Doezema, who was killed on the first day of Tet, and a high school classmate of mine, Dennis Cripe) that never seemed to stop in 1968 -- debate about what the news did or didn't do remains an interesting question, but peripheral to the losses we experienced and still feel. Extracting something meaningful, let alone positive, is a daunting challenge.

Young American soldiers served their country valorously and selflessly, only to face recriminations when they returned. In a similar fashion, Viet Cong activists longed for liberation of their country and fought valiantly for its independence, as Bowden relates. In the absence of an overarching moral or national security justification for Tet and the larger war, perhaps the meaning must come from reconciling these opposites.

This is the resolution that scores of U.S. veterans have sought, making pilgrimages to the land where they once fought - even to rice paddies where brutal battles took place - connecting with North Vietnamese soldiers, in one case finding that a building demolished during Tet is now someone's home containing an obelisk with an inscription in Vietnamese: "In honor of the Vietnamese and American soldiers who died here on February 18, 1968."

Magnanimity like this -- consecrating a place of death where a U.S. soldier killed men from their country -- has moved and liberated American GIs.

Tet will always conjure anger and sadness to those who were there and remember it. But forgiveness offers a redemptive, transformative path for coming to terms not just with Tet, but the entire Vietnam experience, which, some 50 years later, remains a polarizing, fractious part of American public life.

By: Richard M. Perloff is a professor of communication, political science and psychology at Cleveland State University.
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O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
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