The Second Tet

Hanoi has often asserted its belief in "fighting and negotiating" at the same time, and last week the Communists did just that. Shelling, mortaring and rocketing 122 targets throughout South Viet Nam, including 40 cities and towns, seven airbases and dozens of other allied installations, they staged the long-expected reprise of their countrywide Tet offensive. Round 2 did not come near the original. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong did not overrun a single allied town or installation, launched ground attacks only in Saigon. One captured Viet Cong document outlined their limited goals: "Our immediate requirement is to carry out harassment fire, and the current requirement is to create pressure over peace talks between our representatives and American representatives in Paris."

Saigon itself was hit hard only in certain areas, such as the Chinese district of Cholon. Though scattered shells fell throughout the capital, life in downtown Saigon was business as usual after the first alarms: streets were filled with noisy scooters, pedicabs and cars; stores stayed open; sidewalk vendors hawked their trinkets. Despite the bombing of two small power plants, the city's electricity and water supplies flowed normally. Unlike Tet, there was little city-wide fear that the Communists might overrun the capital.

Headstone-to-Headstone. But in the parts of Saigon where the mixed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units made a strong effort, there was fierce and bloody fighting. One enemy battalion took positions near the entrance to Tan Son Nhut, where a French military cemetery stands. It took South Vietnamese paratroops two days of headstone-to-headstone and house-to-house battling to drive the Communists out. All week long, battles raged around Saigon's Y Bridge, where snipers and Communist demolition teams, vainly assigned to blow up the forked span, held out against helicopter gunships and jet bombers while U.S. and South Vietnamese armor and infantry slashed at them on the ground. At week's end they came out shooting, trying to escape a tightening "wagon train" ring of allied armor and guns; 88 were killed. Inside Cholon, a few Viet Cong flags blossomed, and terrorists stalked the streets.

Refugees jammed the bridges and choked the streets in flight to safer parts of town, many carrying previously packed suitcases--one of the precautionary legacies of Tet. They added 80,000 new refugees to Saigon's 39,000 still waiting to be resettled since Tet. But most were only temporary visitors to the refugee centers; only five relatively small portions of the city were actually destroyed, involving some 2,000 shacks and houses. The rest of those fleeing were simply getting out of the way of the fighting.

Into Open Swampland. The Communists tried to reinforce their infiltrated units inside the city; they massed troops that had marched overnight from Cambodia in groups of five and six and attempted to slip them through the ring of allied troops around the city. One group of Viet Cong women dressed in semimilitary garb was captured as it brazenly tried to march across a bridge into Saigon. Communist units approached Saigon from three directions and everywhere were beaten back. One force coming from the west was forced by U.S. armor into open swampland, where they were cut down by jet fighter-bombers and helicopters as they doggedly kept moving toward the city. Some who were captured were only 13 and 14 years old.

When a Viet Cong squad entrenched itself around the Phan Thanh Gian Bridge, South Vietnamese Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan grew impatient at South Vietnamese navy and marine troops trying to knock them out, came to the bridge to take personal command of the assault. It nearly cost him his life. After firing several bursts from his AR-15 at the enemy, he himself was hit in the thigh and leg. An American MP floated Loan down the river under the protection of the floor boards of the docks and stilt-houses until he could be safely evacuated. Loan's deputy, however, died in action, as did the commander of Tan Son Nhut Airbase. But because of the remarkably swift reaction of the city's 50,000 government defenders. Saigon's civilian dead numbered only a few hundred, less than one-twentieth of those at Tet. And by week's end an estimated 2,500 Communists had died in their attempt to breach the capital's defenses.

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