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TITLE	Vietnam--NVA, VC, and ARVN uniforms.
CREATOR	Abodeely, Joseph
SUBJECT	Arizona Military Museum; Military Museums--Arizona--History
Browse Topic	Military and war Society and culture
DESCRIPTION	Tet was a particularly crushing defeat for the VC. It had not only failed to trigger any uprising but also cost them "our best people" as former Viet Cong doctor Duong Quyunh Hoa later admitted to reporter Stanley Karnow. Yet the very fact of the U.S. military victory -- "The North Vietnamese" noted National Security official William Bundy at the time, "fought to the last Viet Cong" -- was spun otherwise by most of the U.S. press. As the Washington Post's Saigon bureau chief Peter Braestrup documented in his 1977 book, "The Big Story" the desperate fury of the communist attacks including on Saigon, where most reporters lived and worked, caught the press by surprise. (Not the military: It had been expecting an attack and had been on full alert since Jan. 24.) It also put many reporters in physical danger for the first time. Braestrup, a former Marine, calculated that only 40 of 354 print and TV journalists covering the war at the time had seen any real fighting. Their own panic deeply colored their reportage, suggesting that the communist assault had flung Vietnam into chaos. Their editors at home, like CBS's Walter Cronkite, seized on the distorted reporting to discredit the military's version of events. The Viet Cong insurgency was in its death throes, just as U.S. military officials assured the American people at the time. Yet the press version painted a different picture. To quote Braestrup, "the media tended to leave the shock and confusion of early February, /as then perceived/, fixed as the final impression of Tet" and of Vietnam generally. "Drama was perpetuated at the expense of information" and "the negative trend" of media reporting "added to the distortion of the real situation on the ground in Vietnam." The North Vietnamese were delighted. On the heels of their devastating defeat, Hanoi increasingly shifted its propaganda efforts toward the media and the antiwar movement. Causing/ American/ (not South Vietnamese) casualties, even at heavy cost, became a battlefield objective in order to reinforce the American media's narrative of a failing policy in Vietnam. Yet thanks to the success of Tet, the numbers of Americans dying in Vietnam steadily declined -- from almost 15,000 in 1968 to 9,414 in 1969 and 4,221 in 1970 -- by which time the Viet Cong had ceased to exist as a viable fighting force. One Vietnamese province after another witnessed new peace and stability. By the end of 1969 over 70% of South Vietnam's population was under government control, compared to 42% at the beginning of 1968. In 1970 and 1971, American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker estimated that 90% of Vietnamese lived in zones under government control. However, all this went unnoticed because misreporting about Tet had left the image of Vietnam as a botched counterinsurgency -- an image nearly half a decade out of date. The failure of the North's next massive invasion over Easter 1972, which cost the North Vietnamese army another 100,000 men and half their tanks and artillery, finally forced it to sign the peace accords in Paris and formally to recognize the Republic of South Vietnam. By August 1972 there were no U.S. combat forces left in Vietnam, precisely because, contrary to the overwhelming mass of press reports, American policy there had been a success. To Congress and the public, however, the war had been nothing but a debacle. And by withdrawing American troops, President Nixon gave up any U.S. political or military leverage on Vietnam's future. With U.S. military might out of the equation, the North quickly cheated on the Paris accords. When its re-equipped army launched a massive attack in 1975, Congress refused to redeem Nixon's pledges of military support for the South. Instead, President Gerald Ford bowed to what the media had convinced the American public was inevitable: the fall of Vietnam. The collapse of South Vietnam's neighbor, Cambodia, soon followed. Southeast Asia entered the era of the "killing fields" exterminating in a brief few years an estimated two million people -- 30% of the Cambodian population. American military policy has borne the scars of Vietnam ever since.
TYPE	Image
RIGHTS MANAGEMENT	This is the property of the Arizona Military Museum
DATE ORIGINAL	1968 ca.
Time Period	1960s (1960-1969)
ORIGINAL FORMAT	Museum exhibit
DIGITAL IDENTIFIER	22a.JPG
Date Digital	2009
DIGITAL FORMAT	JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
REPOSITORY	Arizona Military Museum 5636 East McDowell Road Phoenix. Arizona 85008
Sort Order	111