South Carolina State Museum

The Vietnam War’s biggest single battle is being recalled beginning on its 40th anniversary Jan. 31 when the State Museum opens the exhibit TET: Military Victory, Political Defeat.

 

The exhibit is “a way to explain parts of what went on in Southeast Asia to a new generation and a recollection of lessons learned for an older one,” says Director of Collections and Chief Curator of Natural History Jim Knight.

On that historic day the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong (communist guerrilla fighters from South Vietnam) launched a major offensive. The attack was called TET after the lunar new year observed in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of enemy soldiers attacked towns and villages all over South Vietnam.

“For the more than half-a-million American soldiers who were in Vietnam, I believe Jan. 31, 1968 is a date that every one of them knows where he was and what he was doing,” said Knight, himself a veteran who was in Vietnam at the time of TET.

In the exhibit, Museum guests will see enemy weapons and ammunition, uniforms and equipment, even booby traps, one of the most important tools of guerrilla warfare. “It also will include maps of the country, a history of South Vietnam and of how we got involved in it,” said Knight. “It’s set in the time period of the Cold War, so it was us versus the communists. Vietnam was the first domino of the ‘Domino Theory,’ which made it immensely important to U.S. policymakers.”

In addition, the exhibit will feature “a huge number of images, because a picture, as they say, is worth a thousands words.” Knight added that some of the photographs will be “hard to look at.”

Because the offensive took the American forces by surprise, many people were pressed into combat service who weren’t trained as infantrymen. Cooks, mechanics, truck drivers, clerk typists and others were required to use their weapons regularly.

More than 1,700 American soldiers were killed in the TET offensive, which lasted until Feb. 28, said Knight, and many of them were South Carolinians.

Militarily, said Knight, the offensive was “a flaming loss for the enemy. Some estimate that their losses might have been as high as 64,000 in that one month.

“But though they lost on the battlefield, they won on the field of public opinion, because Americans were appalled that enemy soldiers were suddenly swarming through the U.S. embassy’s compound in Saigon and that America and its allies were having a hard time blunting the attack.”

This shows that the importance of public opinion cannot be underestimated, said the curator. Many people consider February, 1968 as the month when public opinion in America began to shift from a pro-war stance to an anti-war sentiment.