They were to emerge from the jungle, “liberate” the old imperial capital of Hue in central Vietnam and stir up a national popular uprising.
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It was January 30, 1968, three years after President Lyndon B. Johnson had ordered 125,000 American troops to Vietnam to ward off a Communist takeover of the south, and the rest of Southeast Asia. Dai and his comrades saw things differently: With nationalistic pride, they were on a mission to reunify Vietnam, launching the surprise assault on South Vietnamese and American troops now known as the Tet Offensive.
“The revenge deep inside the northern soldiers was so big,” Dai, 73, said in an interview at his Hanoi home in January. “All the soldiers believed we could liberate all the country.”
Nguyen Qui Duc, only 9 years old at the time, has a very different memory of early 1968. Duc was visiting family for the Lunar New Year, known as Tet, Vietnam’s most important holiday. His father was a regional governor attempting to maintain a pattern of normalcy in South Vietnam as the war raged. A ceasefire was in place for Tet, with much of the South Vietnamese military on leave. It was meant to be a joyous week providing a reprieve from the war. But while sleeping in his grandfather’s house, Duc was awakened around 1 a.m. by gunshots. The soldiers assigned to protect the family had vanished, with men speaking in the distinctive northern Vietnamese accent closing in.
“My mom went to the door and said, 'I have two kids in here,' and the soldiers said, 'We'll shoot anybody we find if you don't tell us about everyone here,'” Duc recently recalled at the bar and restaurant he now owns in Hanoi. He saw his father taken away and presumed killed, while the rest of the family huddled in a basement for several days until they were rescued by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.
On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the battles of the Tet Offensive, in Hue and elsewhere, have been discussed and dissected in news outlets, books, symposiums, TV segments and exhibits across America, where the attacks are remembered as the moment that turned U.S. public against opinion the war. But in Vietnam, the anniversary of this moment in history, leading up to the Tet holiday on February 16, is being observed very differently — if at all. In fact, Dai’s and Duc’s willingness to share their memories is a rarity in a country where the event is rarely discussed publicly.