When Arkansans chatted on Jan. 28, 1968, they might have recounted what President Lyndon Johnson had recently said in his State of the Union address. As the El Dorado Times reported, the president claimed that the nation was firmly determined "not to back away from our responsibilities in Vietnam" and also committed to diligently seeking "a just peace."
The same paper noted that a "week-long cease-fire" was about to begin in South Vietnam. Perhaps this would give leaders in Washington, Saigon and Hanoi a chance to think things through. The truce had been declared in observance of Tet, the lunar new year, which a Chinese acquaintance once described to me as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day wrapped into one.
No one possessing a sense of context believed the cease-fire would hold completely. The Tet "truce" of the year before had been marred by nearly 200 incidents that led, so the Times reported, to the deaths of 27 Americans, 45 South Vietnamese and 553 Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers.
Not much of a truce.
And as Tet of 1968 approached, the Marines at Khe Sanh, near the Laotian border, underwent bombardment reminiscent of the First World War.
Full tranquility in South Vietnam at the end of January 1968 was beyond imagining, but the promise of several days of relative quiet was welcome.
Around Jan. 28, John Stillman arrived in Dong Ha, in far northern South Vietnam. He had heard about the truce and looked forward to a breather. "For us it was just gonna be a break," he said. "We wouldn't have to do anything." When he and the other soldiers with the 101st Airborne heard explosions in the early morning of Jan. 31, "we thought they were fireworks going off."
Maybe some of it was fireworks. But then, "the next day, when we walked out of the base camp onto Highway 1 to go into the village, that's when we saw all the civilians dead. Men, women, kids--they were all killed. It got worse from that day on."
It got worse because of the intensity of combat the Tet Offensive triggered. The months following Tet were the bloodiest of the war. In short order, three of Mr. Stillman's friends were killed.
But then things got better. The North Vietnamese belief that southerners would rise in mass to support them went unrealized. And, throughout South Vietnam, the Vietcong were decimated. Mr. Stillman and the soldiers he fought with thought "we just about got them whipped." He says that "there was even talk amongst us that we might go home early."
But the story back home was different. "The news media said we could not win the war. It was unwinnable." For the first time, the famed newsman Walter Cronkite ended a broadcast with an editorial. He said the war was lost in stalemate. Soon, President Johnson, appearing utterly defeated, said he would not run again for office.
Where at least some of the 20-year-olds on the ground thought that North Vietnam was like a boxer stunned and close to being knocked out in the next round, authorities and people of influence in the U.S. were shaken by the media narrative about Tet, illustrated by shocking if short-lived images from Saigon. What American and allied soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors succeeded in making a decisive military defeat for North Vietnam, American leaders turned into a psychological loss.
And the country has never recovered.
John Stillman and hundreds of thousands of others came home to be confronted by another adversary--the unhappy children of ease who had the gall to throw obscenities and other objects at combat veterans returning from a year of unbroken toil.
This was the same crew that, over time, thoroughly ruined the high- performing educational system handed to it by the World War II generation. The same crew that has so casually assented to dumping trillions of dollars of public debt onto their grandchildren's shoulders. The same crew that spent much of the past three years screaming about nearly worthless masks and obviously ineffective vaccines. The same gaggle of self-absorbed brats incapable of genuine self-assessment, let alone apology.
As with every other moment on this Earth of shadows, Jan. 28, 1968, was a day of unknowing. The North Vietnamese had a plan and thought they knew. They were wrong. American forces expected relative calm and thought they knew. They were wrong. After the Tet Offensive, the U.S. media said it knew. It was wrong. Sanctimonious, protesting university professors and students thought they knew. They were wrong. Combatants thought that, once returned to civilian life, things would go back to normal. They were wrong.
After the easy U.S.-led victory over Iraq in 1991, President George H.W. Bush said that the country's "Vietnam syndrome" was over. Hardly a week goes by that I don't speak at some length with a Vietnam veteran.
President Bush was wrong.
Preston Jones lives in Siloam Springs and oversees the website "War & Life: Discussions with Veterans" (warandlifediscussions.weebly.com) and the Stuff of Life YouTube channel (youtube.com/channel/UC88m0O9N0xvs2zU8d95Hu9w).