THE WORLD

THE WAR The General's Gamble

Though ominous harbingers of trouble had been in the air for days, most of South Viet Nam lazed in uneasy truce, savoring the happiest and holiest holiday of the Vietnamese year. All but a few Americans retired to their compounds to leave the feast of Tet to the Vietnamese celebrators filling the streets. Thousands of firecrackers popped and fizzed in the moonless night. The Year of the Monkey had begun, and every Vietnamese knew that it was wise to make merry while there was yet time; in the twelve-year Buddhist lunar cycle, 1968 is a grimly inauspicious year.

Through the streets of Saigon, and in the dark approaches to dozens of towns and military installations throughout South Viet Nam, other Vietnamese made their furtive way, intent on celebrating only death. After the merrymakers had retired and the last firecrackers had sputtered out, they struck with a fierceness and bloody destructiveness that Viet Nam has not seen even in three decades of nearly continuous warfare. Up and down the narrow length of South Viet Nam, more than 36,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers joined in a widespread, general offensive against airfields and military bases, government buildings, population centers and just plain civilians.

The Communists hit in a hundred places, from Quang Tri near the DMZ in the north all the way to Duong Dong on the tiny island of Phu Quoc off the Delta coast some 500 miles to the south. No target was too big or too impossible, including Saigon itself and General William Westmoreland's MACV headquarters. South Viet Nam's capital, which even in the worst days of the Indo-China war had never been hit so hard, was turned into a city besieged and sundered by house-to-house fighting.

In Hue, the ancient imperial city of Viet Nam, the Communists seized large parts of the city--and only grudgingly yielded them block by block under heavy allied counterattacks at week's end.

Allied intelligence had predicted that there would be some attempted city attacks during Tet, but the size, the scale and, above all, the careful planning and coordination of the actual assaults took the U.S. and South Vietnamese military by surprise. In that sense, and because they continued after five days of fighting to hang on to some of their targets, the Communists undeniably won a victory of sorts. In the raid on the poorly defended U.S. embassy in Saigon, they embarrassed and discomfited the U.S., still coping with the stinging humiliation of the Pueblo incident. They succeeded in demonstrating that, despite nearly three years of steady allied progress in the war, Communist commandos can still strike at will virtually anywhere in the country.

The Battle of Bunker's Bunker

The most daring attack of the week--and certainly one of the most embarrassing--occurred when 19 Viet Cong commandos of the C-10 Sapper Battalion made the U.S. embassy their target. When Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker opened the white reinforced-concrete complex last September, few American missions ever settled into more seemingly impregnable quarters. Looming behind a 10-ft.-high wall, the six-story symbol of U.S. power and prestige is encased in a massive concrete sunscreen that overlaps shatterproof Plexiglas windows. Saigon wags soon dubbed it "Bunker's Bunker."

At 3:03 a.m., supporting V.C. troops positioned around the embassy began lobbing mortar fire onto the grounds.

Then the 19 commandos appeared, wearing civilian clothes (with identifying red armbands) and carrying automatic weap ons, rockets and enough high explosives to demolish the building. Attacking simultaneously, some of the guerrillas blasted a hole in the concrete wall with an antitank gun and swarmed through it; others quickly scaled a rear fence.

Though allied intelligence had predicted the attack, the embassy's defense consisted of only five U.S. military guards-- just one more than normal. They fought back so fiercely that only their courage denied the enemy complete success. Sergeant Ronald W Harper, 20, a Marine guard, managed to heave shut the embassy's massive teakwood front doors just seconds before the guerrillas battered at them with rockets and machine guns, thus denying the V.C. entry to the main building.

Unable to penetrate the main chancery, the V.C. commandos ran aimlessly through the compound, firing on every thing they saw. Meanwhile, small groups of Marines and MPs began arriving out side the walls of the embattled embassy.

The Viet" Cong burst into the embassy's consular building and various other buildings in the compound, but the Americans on the scene threw such heavy fire at them that the guerrillas were kept too busy to set off their explosives.

Finally, just before 8 a.m., Pfc. Paul Healey, 20, led a counterattack through the front gate, personally killing five V.C. with grenades and his M-16 rifle. Minutes later, two paratroop platoons from the 101st Airborne Division at nearby Bien Hoa landed on the rooftop helipad.

As the troopers advanced, a wounded guerrilla staggered into Mission Coordinator George Jacobson's white villa behind the embassy. He started upstairs, spotted the 56-year-old retired Army colonel there, and fired three shots. He missed, and Jacobson got him with a .45.

When the 6 1/2-hour battle ended, five Americans lay dead, as did two Vietnamese chauffeurs for the embassy who were apparently caught in the crossfire. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.