I've tried to avoid the toxic fever-swamp that is the GOP convention like I try to avoid bad beer, vegan barbeque, and sleeping with people crazier than I am. But it's really hard to keep out the sickly stench of the hate, paranoia, rage, and fear that seem to rise from off that seething heap of "conservative" pismires like stink off a fresh pile of park dogshit.
I have no sympathy for that niddering throng of past-their-sell-by-date-Eurocentric/Christopathic-morons. Largely because of their weapons-grade stupid rallying whimper:
Make America Great Again!
I hear that and I can't help thinking; seriously, people? Because we're living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape? WTF?
But then I pause for a moment and think about the sort of input we're exposed to in the present Information Age. Ed over at Gin and Tacos had a sort of paranoid-fear moment the other day:
"With the unbroken string of horrible, crazy shit that has cast a pall over the world in the last few months, and without the events in Dallas, in St. Paul, and (the first) Baton Rouge being fully digested and comprehended, there was no part of me able to even take in another story along the same lines. Throw in the major European/Asian terrorist attack of the week and I didn't just ignore the news on Sunday. I actively avoided it."
Yep. Especially if you're a news junkie. CNN and MSNBC and (of course) Fox "News" is full of this shit. If you take their "reportage" at face value you'd begin to believe that we really ARE living in the End of Days. Wars, rumors of wars, fire, murder, headchopping Muslims, cats and dogs living together...
But.
Stop. Think for a moment.
When was the last time your entire town or city was burned by an invading horde of horse nomads?
When was the last time your neighborhood was shadowed by a towering pyramid of the freshly-harvested skulls of your family, friends, and neighbors?
When you consider the sort of fucking ginormous catastrophes that litter human history – famines, plagues, folk-migrations, full-on civilization collapse – we really are living in pretty tranquil times.
That doesn't sell advertising minutes on CNN, though, so you'd never know it. But, really.
It kinda amazes me when I stop and think of CNN covering the Black Death, or the Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe. THAT would have been epic.
That frame for the story helps me keep my perspective.
That, and avoiding fucking CNN like I try to avoid bad beer, vegan barbeque, and sleeping with people crazier than I am.
"...the Paris attacks, broadly laid out, were still for the most part so much like the earlier late 60's, 70s, early 80's Bader meinhoff, Red-Brigade, et al. As an aside, giving a lot of press to these guys also happens to elevate ISIS amongst inactive/unmotivated Islamist...however that works, I have no idea, but for some strange reason it does. If we treat them like criminals perhaps we can lower the charm-appeal, and keep the arm-chair Jihadist inactive/unmotivated.
At least I think we can...to be honest, I'm not even sure anymore.
The world has gone crazy, and it just seems like we're B-lining it to WWIII."
That made me stop for a moment.
Sheer is a smart guy, and not a hysteric. But his concern flashed me back to my morning's trip to the lovely Ramada breakfast room, where the cheap and nasty buffet was underlain by a Faux News continuo of hysteria and panic over all the nightmarish dangers of the world (that were only deterred by Strong White Men, but that's fucking Fox for you...)
There's a lot of this hysteria around. Look at the Trump Silvershirts, roaring about "making America great again" as if the fucker was some sort of Somalia with more Chick-fil-a's instead of the most massive and powerful superpower on the planet.
Look at the other whackaloons of the Right, fulminating about trivial problems like abortion and gay rights and the loss of white privilege and scary islamic jihadis. I hear a lot of this "the world has gone crazy" talk from those people, too. Hell, the entire GOP presidential clown car runs on that shit.
But...seriously? Think hard about the difference between today's world and the world of the medieval period.
Is our world crazier than the world of the Black Death? Crazier than the Albigensian Crusade, or regular Jewish pogroms, or the Inquisition, or the Mongol invasions of Europe? Crazier than the wave of death and civilization collapse that followed the Europeans into Africa after the 1500s and the Americas after 1492? Crazier than WW1, or WW2, or the Thirty Years' War?
Let me put it this way. Think about the average FDChief family in Picardy in 1200AD. What were the sort of things that were likely to spoil their day?
Epidemic disease? Check or hold?
Check.
Famine? Check. Random rape or murder at the hands of outlaws or the neighboring feudal lord's men-at-arms on a raid? Check. Peonage? Check. Poverty? Check. Death from minor injuries or childbirth followed by fatal infection? Check. Massive infant mortality? Check. Powerlessness in a feudal society? Check.
Now look at us. Do we have problems and troubles? Check. Are they anything as horrible or threatening as those?
Hold.
No. Our world today is nothing like the frighteningly uncertain, dangerous, and unpredictable (to the ordinary person) world of the 13th Century. So the world hasn't actually "gone crazy". The troubles and problems the world has - outside the massive problem we've created for ourselves in the form of anthropogenic global warming, pollution, and extinction - are no different from those it has always had; wars and rumors of wars, bad government, sickness, natural disasters...
BUT...in 1200 we didn't know all of that stuff. We would be lucky if we had news from the nearest city. The "outside world" would have been vague rumors and tales from random travelers. Now we get all those various horrors beamed straight into our lives 24/7 by an infotainment industry that has every reason to make us as frightened and whacko as possible.
The raggedy jihadis of IS, the tattered armies of Syria, the unruly clans of Somalia and Mali...these aren't "WW3". They're the same old troubles the world has always had...just all thrown at us like they are some sort of huge cataclysm by our modern electronic devices.
They're not the end of the world, and we should really act like it.
Because people panicked by the end of the world do really, really, reallyfucking stupid things.
Bob Farley at Lawyers, Guns & Money has a link to a Stanford paper titled State revenue and expenditure in the Han and Roman empires (Scheidel 2012).
The entire paper is pretty wonkish but worth reading for a glimpse into half of the supposedly inescapable pairing of this stuff with death back in the day. I'll cook it down here for you into the Clif's Notes version:
The bureaucratic tax-and-spend set-up of Han Dynasty China (a period that extended about 400 years, roughly spanning the 2nd Centuries BCE to CE) included a lot of individual ("poll" or flat taxes per person regardless of income) taxes collected and disbursed by a small army of relatively low-payed local officials. A lot of the money stayed in the place it was collected, a relatively smaller portion went to pay the senior officials both civilian and military, and significantly less went to direct military costs.
The early Roman imperium (from roughly the end of the civil wars period in the 1st Century CE to before the crises of the 3rd), on the other hand, tended to try and capture more easily-extracted revenues; things like tariffs and fees on goods and transfers, the profits from imperial enterprises such as mines, and "luxury taxes" on great legacies and the enterprises of the wealthy such as slaves on the huge latifunda.
However, a very much larger proportion of these revenues was spent on "big projects" - public buildings and the like - as well as directed to Rome (the infamous grain dole, "bread and circuses"), and military expenses, as well as a proportionally much higher amount on the pay of the highest levels of officialdom.
Roman senatorial appointments such as the Praetorian prefect and consul-level provincial governors made something like 8 to 18 times what their Han equivalents made. This discrepancy gets smaller but persists at lower levels. A 1st Century BCE Han company commander (who ran an outfit similar to a modern infantry company, about 100-120 troops) was paid between half and two-fifths as much as his 2nd Century CE Roman counterpart (a centurio who ran a smaller outfit, typically about 80 guys at full strength).
The really pointed observation comes in the final section. Here's what Scheidel (2012) has to say about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two systems:
"By funneling resources towards high-level agents, a privileged capital city, and a military that were all far removed from local society, the Roman state weakened the nexus between taxation and spending. In the Han system...geography impeded massive transfer of staples, senior officials were paid less, the military less lavishly endowed and at least in times of stability more constrained by civilian leadership, and the local affairs above the village level were dealt with by formal state agents rather than self-governing urban elites.
This superficially paradoxical combination of greater cellularity and deeper state penetration may have strengthened the institution of the state at the local level. In the long term it may ultimately...explain the permanent dissolution of the Roman empire and the comparatively greater resilience or perhaps rather regenerative capacity of early Chinese state institutions."
You know I've remarked on what I see as some of the similarities of the late-republican United States and late Republican Rome. Well, here's what looks to me like some similarities between early imperial Rome and the early-oligarchic United States; a greatly increased social stratification and disconnection between the proles from whom the taxes are collected from (or who are simply too impoverished to pay more than local and state taxes - let's not forget that the really bullshit part of R-money's "47 Percent" bullshit was that federal income taxes are typically a small portion of what poor and lower-middle-class Americans pay; things like sales taxes, payroll taxes (the Social Security collection that is capped for the truly wealthy), gas taxes, state and local taxes, and property taxes (including the cost included in their rent).
In the place of the narrow Roman political elite we have an increasingly narrow American economic elite that has effectively captured the political process. Outside the truly brain-dead Teatards most Americans not in the two-yacht economy are well aware that the economic and political Game is rigged against them. It doesn't mean that they can or will stop playing. But it does mean that the tie between the citizen and the state is strained and frayed.
Add in the truly toxic Republican rhetoric about "government is the problem", the demonization of any taxation (and a deliberate drive to deflect inquiry into the actual structure and impact of taxation), and exaltation of the march towards open oligarchy as "Freedom!" and you have a system almost crafted to fail under pressure, either into a fractious anarchy or to a Man on Horseback.
I've said this before; my disgust lies not so much in the lies of the Right - after all, they're nothing but whores and whores lie to get paid - but that the rest of us, We the People, are happy to let those lies pass and let them become the language we use to "debate" our lives. At least the Romans had the excuse that they'd never seen this shit happen before.
For some reason I've been recently fascinated with the events of the 1947 Partition of India.
I realize that this wasn't a military campaign or a "battle" per se but there was a tremendous amount of force used in one form or another and, it seems to me, that this event "changed history" (in the sense that it was seems as a vast political and social event at the time and has continued to effect the politics and, it seems to me, pretty much every other aspect of life in the subcontinent area today) as much or more than anything we typically think of as "war".
What would be the interest in the readership here of a "battles" treatment of Partition?
It might have to be in several parts to address the immensity of the subject; one post on the political background of Imperial India and the forces in play,
(the British, both eager to be shed of her expensive Empire and reluctant to retreat to being just a small nation at the northwest edge of Europe , and the various factions within the colony ranging from the Congress through the Muslim League to the Sikhs and the various princely states and ethnic groups looking for advantage - or just safety - in the sudden collapse of a 200-year-old polity...)
another on the actual events of the Partition, and a third on the aftermath and how effects Partition still has on south Asia today...
The Soviet experiment is kind of intriguing and mostly appalling.
It's difficult for an American of 2012 - whose nation is only now beginning to exhume some of the worst aspects of one of the worst periods of governance and social economy (for those of us not in the two-yacht families) in its history - to really understand how for its entire fucking history the polity that is Russia and was the USSR does not have, and never has had, anything remotely approaching a political and economic system that had the sort of responsiveness and approachability that we associate with our own, as corrupt and ridiculous as it is.
Pre-Soviet Russia was an autocracy typified by a vast and brutal clumsiness. When the Soviets overthrew the czar, sadly, they adopted many of the czarist ways. When the Soviets fell they retained much of their economic crudity while devolving back into czarist kleptocracy.
What this has tended to produce is a society and a nation where - though many people have lived decent lives in decent circumstances (as in any society) - the sort of brute-force solutions that often were and are the Russian style can make things very bad for very many very suddenly.
You could extrapolate a lot from the picture at the top; a land that produced a nuclear weapon held together with rivets and assembled by men whose lives came straight out of a novel by Gogol.
(h/t to Lawyers, Guns, and Money that posted this link today)
Completely aside from the utter oddity in the final payment of the Kaiser's punishment coming from the post-reunification, post-denazified, post-a-whole-'nother-world-war Germany, the thing that this strange little news item makes me think of is the almost unencompassable effects that dismal war has had on human history. When you think of what might have been had the European Great Powers not hurled themselves into war through a combination of hubris, stupidity, patriotism, ignorance, and animosity, of the impact the War had on people's lives, and in some ways is affecting them even now...well, perhaps the final payment may even have been a little precipitate.
In human history there have been many great hinges of Fate. But I honestly can't think of one greater or more terrible than the First World War.And as a soldier, I always think about the First World War whenever someone quotes to me Bobby Lee saying "It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it." Now, I'm a military history buff and I understand the pre-industrial context and the tradition of Heroic war that Lee's statement embodies. But I can't imagine anyone but a fool or a madman saying that after the Somme, or Verdun, or Passchaendale, or Chemin des Dames. He was fifty years ahead of his time, but it was 1914 that finally killed off Lee's notions of war and replaced them with Bill Sherman's;
"You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out."
Now those of you who have been with me for a while understand that when you have shared responsibility for these little people it's nearly impossible not to think about them. They pretty much dominate that portion of your life that isn't occupied with work or sleep.
I love my children, but I do not confuse them with "free resources" like air. Instead they are something like food and drink; critical for life but with a debt you incur for needing them.
But for the purposes of this post I am thinking of children in general, rather than mine in particular. So I apologize in advance for those of you who were impatient for the next installment of Pure AdorableTM from little Missy or more Boyish Antics from the Big Peep. You're going to have to be content with the snapshots.
This one is going to be about people having kids in general.
Or, rather, this is about humans as the global apex predator.
Didn't used to be this way, of course. My understanding is that our proto-hominid and hominid ancestors were about where the large apes are in the food chain, a multi-level consumer but also prey for large carnivores.When you think about it, being pulled down and devoured by another animal may be perhaps the oldest and most untameable human fear.How many bad dreams involve being pursued by something fearsome? Why are we so fascinated by the otherwise-predictable deaths involving human keepers or trainers and large animals, especially predators?Why are the stories of toddler dog-maulings so appallingly well reported?
We still think like prey. We still have some of the atavistic reflexes of our distant ancestors the monkey-boys, and dimly fear the death that watches us with inhuman eyes from the shadows under the trees.
But it has really been a long time since we were in danger of predation. The only animal that can prey on humans is human; ecologically, we are our only real population control. For all that we often act like sheep, we're the wolves, or, rather, we're the predator that the wolves WISH they could be. I'll bet if you gave a wolf voice for a day and turned it loose on the works of Man it'd go for our killing technology in a big way. Would a wolf with a cluster bomb unit do the kind of damage to caribou that we do to each other?
The mind reels.
Of course, the sorts of population controls that have probably always killed more humans than other animals still cull us; cold and heat and drought (and the associated starvation and diseases) and the various epidemics from influenzas to plagues. We're never safe from something. But the combination of industrial agriculture, scientific medicine, political stability and general education has done much to broaden the sunny, clear portions of human lives, pushing back the frightening things that made our existences so frighteningly brief and tenuous.We live longer, breed more successfully, and die less agonizingly - generally - than we ever have.
I'm not sure at this point what CAN limit human ability to reproduce. We are pretty fecund creatures, able to pop out about one offspring every year to eighteen months (dear GOD! but still...) from about fourteen years of age to somewhere in our forties or even fifties. Most of us don't, naturally, but the trend since the first human tribes has been a slow increase in population until about the late Middle Ages.
Improvement in things like sanitation, the understanding of the germ theory of disease, inventions as commonplace and simple as chemical fertilizers and vaccinations...all these have made the Earth circa 2010 an extraordinarily safe and healthy place for humans. We've responded by doing what we've always done; finding another human (usually of the opposite sex, but, whatever...) and a flat piece of ground (which we can do without if needs must) and putting Tab A into Slot B and the next thing you know the place is swarming with brats...
Which brings me to my point, which is, that I cannot think of an organism or a species of organisms that thrives without some sort of population control.
Producers need consumers or they will exhaust the non-organic resources - air, water, soil nutrients - and the population will crash. Nastily. All natural populations that don't recieve a thorough culling tend to be designed to boom and crash. So deer, freed from natural predation and turned loose on suburban gardens full of browse, multiply until they become nuisances and, regularly, suffer from apalling die-offs during hard winters. Lemmings run to the sea, voluntarily doing the work that cold and starvation do on the deer. Predators suffer the same effect; too many and the prey is depleted. The predators seek food elsewhere, or die.
So far we seem to be overwhelming any sort of natural controls on our population. Since the dent the Black Death made in numbers back in the 15th Century it's been all uphill for us hairless monkeys. The only systematic control on human numbers appears to be, well, us.
I'm not really talking about predation of the war-and-disease type. I'm thinking about kids.
Kids are work. Often good work, occasionally fun work, typically productive work, but many times grinding, frustrating, repetitive work. Work enough that the stats appear ro show that we're often happier as couples without them. Work enough that when medicine, nutrition and industrialization free people from the need to pop out a half-dozen or so (either to ensure that half will survive or to work the family goat ranch) familes tend to decline in size precipitously. Two kids aren't twice the work of one - they're more like three or four times. Six? Eight? I can't imagine.You'll notice that nearly all the population growth in the past 100 years has been in the "developing world". It's these folks who still need the big families to survive...or are still living in a culture that pushes you to have kids, whether you still "need" them or not.But these kids, their parents, their cultures don't want to be herding goats forever. They want what I have: the sturdy house, the car and the truck, the bank account, the computer and the clean clothes and the fatty foods.
Clean water. I take it for granted here in the rainy Northwest, but clean water - or any water at all - is a huge issue for much of the planet. What would it take to ensure access to sufficient clean water for every person on the planet? How much would it cost, both physically and politically? How likely is it that instead of cooperating to secure it people would, instead, fight over it, expending even more resources in the process?
The point is that all of this stuff fucking costs. It costs in the materials consumed to make it, to maintain it, to heat the house and fuel the car, light up the basement, and storybook the little Girl and soccer ball-and-cleat-and-uniform the big Boy. I am, we are, damn expensive to produce and maintain; one of me could feed and support a dozen or a score of men my age in a Lahore slum or in a village in Shensi. One of my family unit "costs" probably as much as an entire little settlement in the Sudan, or a nomadic encampment in Mongolia.
I would imagine that once the men in Lahore, Mongolia, Sudan and Shensi acquire their own wood-frame homes, cars, computers, washer-driers and little lawns they'll be ready to cut back to my own 2.25 kids (the cats are about a quarter-of-a-kid-pain-in-the-ass...).Some of them.
But where's the safe "stopping" point? What's the top-end human load that the Earth can sustain at my lifestyle? How long? What will that mean for the rest of the creatures on the planet? How do we know?
I'll posit this: we don't. And we won't. We'll find out the limit the hard way - by crossing it.
Because there's another factor at work here.
The simple answer would seem to be to slow down right now. Why not? Let's say that if we all get things down to about five kids per four adults that we will be able to slowly bring most of the world up to some approximation of a Western European/North American middle-class lifestyle. Okay, lower middle class lifestyle. Can we do that? Without strip-mining the planet, I mean? How about just providing every single person on the planet with scientific medical care, clean water, a sturdy home and a reliable supply of food? IS even THAT possible, if we stabilized the human population at today's numbers?
Because there's a real worm in that apple.
I can tell you that I'm a patriotic American, that I love my country, that I'd fight to defend it.
But what if my son had to defend it? Or my daghter? Or both?
I don't have "spares" - I know that's a callous way to describe it, but there it is. If my son dies in war my name dies with him. I have no further biological stake in my home, my state, my nation other than my own intellectual one. A nation whose reproduction drops to near replacement level is in the same position as I would be personally; there's no slack, my neighbor's death really does lessen me. A war, an epidemic, a famine...anthing that hits the public hard could result in a catastrophic drop in the ppulation.
And war here is the particularly menacing prospect. Kids, old people, disabled...these folks can't fight. Nobody yet has found a way to dispense with a man or woman with a rifle, and only the relatively young and relatively fit can fight as infantrymen, tankers, artillerymen.So taking this as a need for ensuring survival, the survival of the various groups and nations would seem to preclude there ever being a "stable" human population on the planet. We can't afford to stop reproducing if another group has excess young people to throw at us to take us down, no?
Thing is, I don't think this is a "solveable" problem; that is, I don't think there's a social or technological way to evade it or do more than defer it. I think that the human population will continue to grow, and that human needs and wants for the ever-more complex and costly goods and services that First Worlders like myself take for granted will grow with it. And that a combination of desire for offspring among some and a fear of being overrun by a competitor that is outbreeding them will prevent anyone from even making a real run at this. I think that we will see ever more people on Earth for the forseeable human future.Some technologic means, a "leap" such as the Green or Industrial Revolutions, might help defer the moment that we begin to overwhelm our natural resources. Or we as a species might figure out a way around this "reproduce-or-fail" trap. I just can't think of anything. I see a narrowing gap between that we have on Earth to sustain us and the number of people - and the way those people live - consuming it.
So I suspect that we're in for a shock when those lines converge. I don't know what that will mean in detail, but in general I suspect that means something bad; some long years of iron and blood, for my children, or their children, or their children's children.I hope I am not here to see it.
Tet(Tổng tiến công và nổi dậy) (First Phase) Dates: January 31-March 28, 1968
Forces Engaged: The total number of troops that fought in the battles that comprised the Tet Offensive is very difficult to pin down, especially since while several units fought at multiple times in different locations many units and even individual soldiers fought everything from firefights lasting minutes or second to sieges lasting days. So the best we can probably do is list the overall numbers of troops in theatre.
U.S. (including foreign allies South Korea, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand): approximately 450,000 troops, including: 9 U.S. infantry divisions (including Marine divisions) 1 U.S. armored cavalry regiment 2 separate infantry brigades 1 ANZAC infantry brigade 2 ROK infantry divisions 1 ROK marine brigade 1 Royal Thai regiment (brigade equivalent) and a large contingent of naval riverine and USAF support. Probably about 5-600,000 troops under GEN Westmoreland of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV)Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF - better known as the "ARVN"): roughly 380,000 total army (12 divisions) and 9,000 marine (2 brigades) ground troops. Support forces included 38,000 RVNN and RVNAF. Many of the engagements were fought during Tet by the "Regional Force" reserves, about 220,000 part-time semi-mobile troops and the local "Popular Force" defense volunteers, 173,000 troops for a total of about 820,000 troops under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu.All together, somewhere between 1.2 and 1.3 million troops.
People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN): Intelligence estimates at the time varied significantly. About 130,000 "regular" North Vietnamese troops were said to be within the Republic of Vietnam in January, 1968 by the RVNAF. These included four full divisions involved in the battles around Khe Sanh as well as numerous individual PAVN regular units involved in the Tet attacks. Probably between 130,000 and 150,000 infantry.As the PAVN had 26 numbered divisions of approximately 10,000 troops per division in 1968, these 236 battalions represented roughly half of the ground force strength of the North Vietnam (the "Democratic Republic of Vietnam" or DRVN).
People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF): the armed "wing" of the Viet Cong rebel forces attempting to take over the RVN. Overall strength at the time of Tet varied from 150,000 to as many as 200-250,000. These soldiers varied greatly in quality as well, from the local irregulars - the propaganda poster VC farming rice by day and ambushing GIs by night - through the "Regional Force" to the chu luc Main Force battalions, virtually indistinguishable from the North Vietnamese regulars.Roughly 330-500,000 troops all arms under the direction of GEN Giap.
The Campaign: To understand the strategic significance of Tet you have to understand the strategic position, and especially the political position, of the U.S. Army and government on January 30, 1968.
Vietnam was, like almost every other French colonial legacy, a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a secret all tied into a neat ball of utter fucking disaster. The French, incompetent at colonial rule as always, had combined this with being incompetent at defending their colony, which fell to the Japanese in 1940. Having shown that they could be defeated by one group of Asians, the French insistence at refusing to release their hold on the Vietnamese - one of Asia's truly irascible fighting peoples - was building a road to mayhem.
The French were handed their ass by their former chattels in 1954, but proceeded to weasel out of just giving the place over to the people who beat them by dividing the place and handing the south half - where most of the French expatriates and the Viet clients had been busy growing rubber prior to decolonization - to a fellow named Bảo Đại, who seems to have been a decent enough guy for a man who spent most of his life as a phony "emperor" of a supine colony.Bảo Đại was promptly defenestrated by one Ngô Đình Diệm when the latter decided to go from "prime minister" to "president" without the bother of getting elected (or having a Frenchman make him one, which was how they'd been doing it recently). Diệm, in turn, called off the plebiscite that would probably have taken the whole camorra over to the regime of Hồ Chí Minh ruling in the North, and the war was on.
We feared Hồ because he was a yellow Red, and because our political class was way too familiar with the whole "Who lost China?" ratissage that had followed the defeat of Chiang and the Nationalists in 1949 and didn't want to be the last one standing when the music stopped playing "The East Is Red". Significant U.S. military involvement in the RVN had begun in 1965. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had become ensnared fighting the commies, but mostly with advisers and Lend-Lease. After attacks in February, 1965 which killed American soldiers at Pleiku and Qui Nhon then-President LBJ send U.S. bombers over the North (in February) and decided in March to commit U.S. maneuver elements which led to the Marine landings at Da Nang in April.On January 1, 1965 16,000 U.S. military were posted within the RVN. By January 1, 1966, the number was 184,000. This would rise to the 450,000 by January 1, 1968.
Between 1965 and 1968 the Johnson Administration was in a bind. It understood that it was faced with a patient and hardened enemy who had no place to "go" if they lost. But it also had a public who had long since forgotten the bloody, inconclusive guerrilla wars against dusky savages like native tribes and Filipinos. For three generations Americans expected total force and decisive victory. The sanguine stalemate in Korea was widely seen as having helped cost the Democrats the 1952 election, and no sane politician wanted to be seen as the next victim of the next Joe McCarthy.
So the U.S. government began to deliberately blow sunshine up the American public's ass.
I know. Hard to believe, isn't it?
Here's the good summary of one such debate from the Wiki entry:
"This prompted the administration to launch a so-called "Success Offensive", a concerted effort to alter the widespread public perception that the war had reached a stalemate and to convince the American people that the administration's policies were succeeding. (T)he news media then was inundated by a wave of effusive optimism. Every statistical indicator of progress, from "kill ratios" and "body counts" to village pacification was fed to the press and to the Congress. "We are beginning to win this struggle" asserted Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey on NBC's "Today Show" in mid-November. "We are on the offensive. Territory is being gained. We are making steady progress." General Bruce Palmer, Jr., one of Westmoreland's three Field Force commanders, claimed that "the Viet Cong has been defeated" and that "He can't get food and he can't recruit. He has been forced to change his strategy from trying to control the people on the coast to trying to survive in the mountains."
Westy himself said in November of '67: "(the communists were) unable to mount a major offensive. I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view."
In a bizarre precursor to Dubya's inane "Bring 'em on." dare, Westmoreland also said "I hope they try something, because we are looking for a fight."They did.
Most historians and the Vietnamese actors themselves admit that the "General Offensive and Uprising" was something of a desperation throw. U.S. engagement - and especially U.S. airpower - had hammered both the field forces and the DRVN economy. The Northern politics surrounding Tet are intriguing. The government of the DRVN was at the time divided into three main parties. "Militants" or hard-liners, led by First Secretary Lê Duẩn, Lê Ðức Thọ, and General Nguyễn Chí Thanh the head of Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), communist headquarters for the South, wanted to attack the Southern government directly and take over through military victory. The "Soviet" party, led by Trường Chinh and Defense Minister Võ Nguyên Giáp,
believed that political agitation and soft power would do the trick. The "centerists", led by President Hồ Chí Minh and later by a Lê Ðức Thọ who defected from the militants, proposed "negotiating while fighting", with the end of a settlement that would eventually lead to northern domination.
The main fighters were Thanh, who wanted a general offensive in the south which would employ all the PAVN/PLAF maneuver units in an attaque à outrance that would bring the oppressed masses in the South out to do a Bastille on their American puppet rulers, and Giáp, who believed that American combat power, particularly airpower, made conventional war prohibitively costly and who wanted to fight the war of the flea.
The internal struggle between the factions resulted in the "Revisionist Anti-Party Affair" (vu an xet lai-chong Dang) in the summer of 1967. The militants used the Party apparatus to arrest hundreds of soft-liners and pro-Soviet members of the communist government. Giáp, hero of Dien Bien Phu, was too big to take down but was isolated and forced to follow the dictates of the militants. These dictates were codified in Resolution 14 of the party Central Committee in October, 1967, which laid down the goals for Tet: rejection of negotiations, abandonment of "protracted (guerrilla) warfare", and an offensive in the towns and cities of South Vietnam.Ironically, Thanh drew up the plans for Tet in April, May and June of 1967 and then went to a booze-up in July, got plowed and died of a heart attack. Giáp took over the implementation of the plan.
The Plan: Basically, the idea was to demonstrate along the borders to draw the dangerous American maneuver forces, artillery and air support away from the mainly coastal cities in January before opening the initial attacks all across the country but largely in the two major cities of Saigon and Hue. Attacks would include most of the urban areas of South Vietnam and attacks on major allied bases. Giáp considered a major demonstration against the Marine base at Khe Sanh necessary in order to protect his supply lines and divert American attention.Giáp considered the strategic objective of Tet to be weakening or destroying the power base of South Vietnam through popular revolt fomented by military victory. There has been much speculation since 1968 about two "conspiracy theories" concerning "secret" Tet objectives, however, which I should discuss.
The first is whether Tet was intended to influence either the March primaries or the November presidential election in the U.S. The answer for this is simply no. Documents captured at the time and statements of the Vietnamese participants since make it clear that the political leadership in the DRVN had no idea how their attacks would be seen in the U.S. They were happy to exploit the resulting shock and dismay but had no way of anticipating or attempting to create it.The second is whether the entire operation was an elaborate maskirova designed to cover Hanoi's destruction of the power of the COSVN and northern domination of a post-war Vietnam. This, too, appears to be an urban legend.
The "militants" believed that Tet would lead them to power in the South, while the "moderates" and the remaining soft-liners were willing to go along, if also willing to accept less than total victory if it meant a break from aerial attack and an opportunity to open negotiations leading to a political takeover. (It's worth noting that two of the three primary American proponents of this notion are Norman Podhoretz and Harry Summers, both wrong about virtually everything else about Vietnam.)I suspect that both the "moderates" and pro-Soviet soft-liners wept few tears about the loss of Southern militant leadership during Tet. But the losses would also hurt the military operations of the PAVN, hardly a desirable result. So, sadly, another perfectly good conspiracy theory shot to hell.
Beginning in October the PAVN initiated a series of engagements that are known as the "Border Battles". In October a PAVN brigade attacked at Song Be and another attacked the Special Forces camp at Loc Ninh that resulted in a ten-day fight that gutted the PAVN regiment. Another attack centered around Dak To committed four regiments of the PAVN 1st Division against the U.S. 4th ID and 173rd Brigade, ARVN 42nd Infantry Regiment and an airborne battalion.After 22 days both the PAVN 1st and the US 4th Divisions were exhausted, and the 173rd was badly beaten up, and for what appeared to be no reason. The Wiki entry comments "MACV intelligence was confused by the possible motives of the North Vietnamese in prompting such large-scale actions in remote regions where U.S. firepower and aerial might could be applied indiscriminately. Tactically and strategically, these operations made no sense."
Perhaps the pinnacle of nonsense took place between 21 JAN 68 and the end of March at the old CIDG-MAC/SOG outpost of Khe Sanh in the Huong Hoa district of Quang Tri province, just a short drive down Route 9 from the Demilitarized Zone.The "siege" of Khe Sanh is really a topic in itself. Over a period of some two months between two and four PAVN divisions encircled, bombarded and assaulted the combat outpost. About 200 or so Marines died, perhaps 1,000 PAVN troopers...but the real significance of Khe Sanh was on the mind of the American commander. GEN Westmoreland considered defense of the post crucial to the point where a significant amount of U.S. combat power was shifted north into the I Corps AO; 50 U.S. maneuver battalions were there by the end of January, 1968. As Tet broke over Vietnam Westmoreland prepared (but didn't release) a statement reading "The enemy is attempting to confuse the issue …I suspect he is also trying to draw everyone's attention away form the greatest area of threat, the northern part of I Corps. Let me caution everyone not to be confused."The diversionary attacks had worked. Now it was time for the big dance to begin.
Probably the most repeatable rule of warfare is that no plan every survives contact with the enemy. The corollary should probably be that no plan ever survives contact with the soldiers tasked to carry it out. Tet was no exception. The "border battles", with their immense cost and apparently pointless objectives, should have had every intelligence agency in the South quivering with nervousness. One commander, LTG Fred Weyand of III Corps was suspicious of the weird PAVN/PLAF activities in his AO, which included Saigon. He requested reinforcements for the Capital District, and Westy ordered 15 U.S. battalions back to Saigon from the Cambodian border to increase the garrison to 27 maneuver battalions, a crucial move in the upcoming attacks.- On 28 January 11 Viet Cong cadres were captured in the city of Qui Nhon while in possession of two pre-recorded audio tapes appealing for a popular rising in the cities.
- on the night of 29/30 January Nha Trang, Ban Me Thuot, Kontum, Hoi An, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, Qui Nhon, and Pleiku were all attacked. Supposedly this had something to do with a mistake or difference in the lunar calendar in the northern provinces. All the attacks included mortar or rocket prepping the (mainly) ARVN positions for simple mass PLAF main force ground assaults. Almost all of these attacks were wiped out with heavy PLAF losses by daylight.
A countrywide stand-to was still not ordered.
"At 03:00 on the morning of 31 January communist forces assailed Saigon, Cholon, and Gia Dinh in the Capital Military District; Quảng Trị (again), Huế, Quang Tin, Tam Kỳ, and Quảng Ngãi as well as U.S. bases at Phú Bài and Chu Lai in I Corps; Phan Thiết, Tuy Hòa, and U.S. installations at Bong Son and An Khê in II Corps; and Cần Thơ and Vinh Long in IV Corps. The following day, Biên Hòa, Long Thanh, Bình Dương in III Corps and Kien Hoa, Dinh Tuong, Go Cong, Kien Giang, Vinh Binh, Bến Tre, and Kien Tuong in IV Corps were assaulted. A total of approximately 84,000 communist troops participated in the attacks while thousands of others stood by to act as reinforcements or as blocking forces. Communist forces also mortared or rocketed every major allied airfield and attacked 64 district capitals and scores of smaller towns."
The Tet Offensive had begun and the entire nation of South Vietnam seemed to be aflame.
To tell the end at the beginning, Tet was a disaster for the PLAF. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 45,000 of the roughly 175,000 Viet Cong troops committed to the attacks in and around Saigon were killed, tens of thousands more wounded or captured. Of the 7,500 PAVN/PLAF involved in the fight for Hue between 2,000 and 5,000 were killed. More crucially, the VC infrastructure and covert organizations all over the South were crippled by the deaths and capture of key personnel. And not a single recorded case of popular uprising occurred. The COSVN, the Central Committee and the "militants" had been disastrously wrong.The two most desperate battles were in the Saigon area and Hue, and they serve to illustrate the course of the debacle...and the strange way that battlefield defeat became strategic victory for the communists. Let's look at them; first Saigon, then Hue.
The Engagements (Saigon and Huế):
Saigon: Of the 84,000 troops committed to the active assaults on 31 JAN, about 10 battalions of VC Local and Main Force soldiers were tasked six objectives in downtown Saigon: the new U.S. Embassy was perhaps the most visible and public.The others included a variety of military (ARVN GHQ at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Long Binh HQ for the RVN Navy) and civilian (Independence Palace, the National Radio Station) All of these were assigned to the C-10 Sapper Battalion recruited from Saigonese. Viet Cong Local Force battalions targeted the central police station, the Artillery Command and Armored Command headquarters, all at Go Vap. Biên Hòa Air Base and ARVN III Corps headquarters received 2 VC battalions, while Tan Son Nhut Air Base, northwest of Saigon was attacked by 3 battalions. Thirty-five battalions; PLAF and PAVN, were part of the Tet mission in Saigon.
In addition, the VC had thoroughly penetrated the RVN security in the capital. Officers, politicians, public figures and others in positions thought critical for the support of the government of the South were targets; their addresses and movements had been tracked down and hit teams were sent out in the last night of January to kill them and their families. Many of these people were killed - this part of the operation was quite successful.
The remainder were, for the most part, typical of the fate of the Tet attacks and attackers. Let's look at the attack on the U.S. Embassy for an example.Since 1968 U.S. Embassies have been attacked eight times (although of the eight half were in either Lima, during the Shining Path insurgency, or Beirut, during the civil war in Lebanon. The remaining five include the 1979 Tehran takeover, an attack in Karachi in 1979, a bombing in Kuwait in 1983 and the Al Qaeda bombings in Africa in 1998) but at the time the idea of an American embassy being attacked - even in a war zone where the U.S. was fighting on the side of the enemy of the attackers - was inconceivable to an American public whose war consisted of watching "Combat!" and "The Rat Patrol" and the nightly news.[I should add that I was an eleven-year-old then fascinated by the battle footage then aired on the news. To me the most fascinating part always came at the end of the Friday night NBC Nightly News - then called the "Huntley-Brinkley Report"
and my father's mainstay of world information - when the sound would go off and the screen would show just three visual cards; an American flag above the number of U.S. KIAs for that week (typically in the high two to low three figures), an RVN flag with a higher number (typically three figures) and finally the red/blue-with-the-gold-star DRVN flag with the highest number (never below three and usually a four-figure value). At eleven I couldn't understand why the enemy Reds didn't just give up...]
At any rate, it was 2:45am when the U.S. Embassy attacked by a 19-man sapper team. These guys entered though the undefended perimeter wall by blowing a hole through it with a simple satchel charge.The group must have taken some time getting through the hole - not a large one as you can see from the picture, giving the small USMC guard on night duty time to lock the chancery doors. The two military policemen pulling gate guard at the "night gate" - SP4 Charles L Daniel and PFC William E Sebast - died as well as a man could, doing their duty to the end. They locked the gate and managed to kill both the VC patrol leaders soon after the assault team got inside through the hole in the wall.This made all the difference; without their officers and despite having forty pounds of C-4 the assault team ran in aimless circles in the embassy grounds until 18 of the 19 were shot down. I should add that the efforts to relieve the embassy were fairly chaotic. Two MPs responding to Daniel and Sebast were killed, the rest of the Marine guard never did get inside the compound until after a large force of GIs from the 716th MP Battalion arrived, a platoon from the 101st tried to air assault onto the roof at 5am but was driven off by fire...finally the MPs and USMC guard force broke in and shot down the remaining VC.At 8am the Embassy was officially declared "secure"
Speaking of the evening news: here's a typical news broadcast of the fighting in Saigon and at the Embassy:
The Wiki entry for the Embassy building has a good summary of the night's fighting. The objective was purely symbolic, I should add - less than a dozen people were inside the chancery building when it was attacked. And the VC had horrific luck in battle. But for the U.S. public, the event was a real shock. Despite an army of 500,000 and three years of fighting the enemy we had been told was ready to surrender had managed to attack the very symbol of U.S. power in the capital city of our Vietnamese "ally".
The other Tet attacks this night met much the same fate as the Embassy assault; ARVN and U.S. forces, greatly assisted by their mobility and air support, brutally smashed the VC/PAVN attacks. Most of the assault forces and assaults were crushed by midday on the 31st. The exception was in the Chinese neighborhood of Cholon and around the Phu Tho racetrack, southwest of downtown Saigon.This area was razed in fierce fighting between several ARVN units until 7 MAR. Finally the area was declared a "free-fire" zone and the ARVN Rangers moved in, fighting from house to house until the last living thing had been killed.
Huế: Again, the PLAF/PAVN stormed into the city center in the dark morning hours of 31 JAN.In this case the main effort was to secure something called "The Citadel", a 19th Century walled fortress north of the Perfume River that served as HQ for the ARVN 1st Division and other city garrison troops. If the attackers had expected the "puppet" troops to fold they were highly mistaken. MG Truong's 1st ARVN Division fought hard, and the situation remained in flux for the first day. Most of the rest of the city fell to the attackers, however, who seem to have done some random butchery on people they didn't like - perhaps 500 to 2,000 people, including foreign civilians, priests, policemen, government officials and political enemies were confirmed killed or simple disappeared - while digging in to resist the inevitable counterattack.And this was inevitable. There was no "general uprising". The majority of the Vietnamese people kept their heads down, and the VC and NVA forces were now exposed in the cities to the merciless and overwhelming ARVN and U.S. firepower. The month-long fight to retake Huế was bloody for the Marine, U.S. Army and ARVN troops involved, but the outcome was foregone and the casualties inflicted on the northerners and their southern allies crippling.The Wiki entry sums things up succinctly: "Except at Huế and mopping-up operations in and around Saigon, the first surge of the offensive was over by the second week of February. The U.S. estimated that during the first phase (30 January – 8 April), approximately 45,000 communist soldiers were killed and an unknown number were wounded. For years this figure was held as excessive, but it was confirmed by Stanley Karnow in Hanoi in 1981. Westmoreland claimed that during the same period 32,000 communist troops were killed and another 5,800 captured. The South Vietnamese suffered 2,788 killed, 8,299 wounded, and 587 missing in action. U.S. and other allied forces suffered 1,536 killed, 7,764 wounded, and 11 missing."
The Outcome: Grand tactical U.S./ARVN victory.
The Impact: Tet was seen as a disaster of the first order for the COSVN by both the political leadership in the North and the U.S. leadership at MACV.
In 1969 a COSVN directive read: "Never again and under no circumstances are we going to risk our entire military force for just such an offensive. On the contrary, we should endeavor to preserve our military potential for future campaigns." More than 20,000 PLAF/PAVN troopers "rallied" to the Southern forces in 1969. Although the attacks on the cities had enabled the VC to gain control in much of the countryside the horrendous losses in Tet crippled many of the VC cadre and caused much of this gain to be lost as the U.S. moved away from the direct-action tactics of search-and-destroy and the big sweeps under the incoming MACV commander, GEN Abrams.
However, the effect of Tet on the political situation in both the South and the U.S. would prove decisive.
In the RVN the offensive was just another bad day for a "nation" that had had many of them. President Thiệu used the chaos and the resulting anger to consolidate his power.This, in turn, helped narrow the power base in Saigon. The RVNAF continued to train and fight in the mold of their American trainers and suppliers without anything like the economy and manufacturing base the U.S. Army and Air Force had. Although Thiệu was distrusting of the U.S. long-term commitment to his country he made no attempts to prepare for the day when his soldiers would have to fight alone.
In the U.S. the effect of the offensive was shocking. We were used to the idea that American arms and American causes were inevitable and inexorable. The seeming torrent of body bags, the stories of ARVN soldiers and Vietnamese policemen fleeing rather than fighting, the seeming pointlessness of the brutal fighting made American civilians skeptical of the war and more inclined to support an end, regardless of the outcome. Part of this was the direct effect of the Johnson Administration's decision to make the news from Vietnam all sunshine and lollipops. Part of this was the American public's determination to be fat, dumb and happy. But a huge part of this was the massive miscalculation on the part of the U.S. government, beginning with Eisenhower, of the strategic importance of Vietnam and the difference between a homegrown revolutionary and a world-wide Communist conspiracy.
On 18 February 1968 MACV posted the highest U.S. casualty figures for a single week during the entire war: 543 killed and 2,547 wounded. Mainly as the result of Tet (including the "mini-Tets" that followed in the spring and summer of '68), the Year of the Monkey went on to become the deadliest year of the war for the U.S. forces with 16,592 soldiers killed.For all the cautionary tropes of dominoes and Red Menaces most Americans saw no point in an endless war in southeast Asia. Worse, this war now seemed not to be ending, but intensifying. Tet didn't look like a failed gamble, but like a harbinger of worse to come - it was like a Battle of the Bulge without a Berlin to conquer. Shocked by reality after years of official lying, the U.S. public saw Vietnam now not as a domino that needed propping up but a bloody jungle road leading...nowhere.And so the U.S. public began voting not with its feet but with its children; visible draft-resistance, draft evasions and deferments skyrocketed. Johnson refused to run in 1968. The country spiraled down into disorder, and to Nixon. Tet had proved decisive, not in the way its planners had anticipated, but decisive all the same.
Touchline Tattles: Perhaps the most enduring image from Tet is this one: ARVN BG Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a VC prisoner.The circumstances are fairly twisted as is so much of the war in Vietnam. On 1 FEB 68 the victim, who may have been either one Nguyễn Văn Lém or a similar looking fellow named Le Cong Na, was caught in civilian clothes by Loan's unit. He may or may not have been part, or leading, a hit team targeting RVN police officers and their families. He may have been a VC propaganda or covert operations officer. Either way, he was handcuffed when Loan produced a revolver and used it to put a round through the VC prisoner's brain housing group.
The U.S. public had seen nothing appalling about the liquidation of civilians in the firestorms of Dresden or the incineration bombing of Tokyo and Kyoto, had seen no crime inherent in the starvation of native tribes or the incarceration of Filipinos in concentration camps. It surveyed without anguish the notion of "free-fire" zones in Vietnam, where anything moving was an enemy and would be killed.
But this image, and the others that symbolized the personalized horror of war, like this one,and this,brought home the ugly face of war to the U.S. public and it responded with a revulsion it had not shown before and has not since.
So in a sense, when General Loan raised his arm and squeezed his trigger, he helped shoot dead his own cause, his own country and his ally's concern for them both.
