Maggie's Farm

The South Vietnamese role in the fighting, though, is all too often missing from the story. In actuality, ARVN did the bulk of the fighting in Hue, losing 357 in battle and killing 2,642 N.V.A. and Vietcong fighters. It was their city, their capital, their battle. The struggle for Hue during Tet 1968 was arguably ARVN’s greatest victory of the war — a victory too often denied its proper place in history.
The fighting in Hue, and the wider Tet offensive, is best understood in a Vietnamese context. The attacks were not, strictly speaking, aimed at American forces; they were aimed militarily at ARVN, and psychologically at the South Vietnamese national will. The American military fought gallantly as part of Tet, from Saigon in the south to Khe Sanh in the north. But, as in Hue, the bulk of the Tet fighting fell to ARVN, with South Vietnamese forces suffering two-thirds of the estimated 12,000 allied casualties in the overall campaign.
Within this broader context, Tet was even more of a spectacular failure for the North Vietnamese on all levels. The Communists had long contended that ARVN was a puppet force that would collapse when faced with real military pressure. But ARVN fought hard and well during Tet, besting the Communists at every turn. Making matters much worse for Hanoi, the South Vietnamese had not risen up in support of the North even though the vicious fighting left 600,000 of them refugees. With their Tet plan in tatters, the Communists were left to rethink their war effort, and their vision of what South Vietnam really was.
Within the broader context of the Vietnam War, more than anything else Tet indicated South Vietnam’s resilience and military competency after nearly 14 years of conflict. While ARVN usually receives little notice in the West, and is usually dismissed as doomed to failure, the Tet experience hints at something deeper and different — a difference reflected in some perhaps startling numbers.