Seven Red

I’ll be posting a few entries over the next month to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, which began January 30, 1968 with some smaller scale attacks in I and II Corps, with the main offensive kicking off on January 31. Mostly, I’ll just post some passages from Michael Herr’s classic account in Dispatches; there are certainly more historically detailed accounts out there (Don Oberdorfer’s Tet: The Turning Point in the Vietnam War being at the top of the list), and certainly more military-history styled accounts, but for humor, understated pathos, and just knock-you-down good prose, it’s hard to beat Herr. I had students read the long first chapter, Breathing In, for a class I taught called “The Politics of Ingestion.” They loved it. What did it have to do with ingestion? Well, if you’ve read Dispatches, you’d get a sense of it. The unit – on rhetorical style – was called “The War (on Drugs).” So then, this opening passage from the second chapter, called simply Hell Sucks:

During the first few weeks of the Tet Offensive the curfew began early in the afternoon and was strictly enforced. By 2:30 each day Saigon looked like the final reel of On the Beach, a desolate city whose long avenues held nothing but refuse, windblown papers, small distinct piles of human excrement and the dead flowers and spent firecracker casings of the Lunar New Year. Alive, Saigon had been depressing enough, but during the Offensive it became so stark that, in an odd way, it was invigorating. The trees along the main streets looked like they’d been struck by lightning, and it became unusually, uncomfortably cold, one more piece of freak luck in a place where nothing was in its season. With so much filth growing in so many streets and alleys, an epidemic of plague was feared, and if there was ever a place that suggested plague, demanded it, it was Saigon in the Emergency. American civilians, engineers and construction workers who were making it here like they’d never made it at home began forming into large armed bands, carrying .45′s and grease guns and Swedish K’s, and no mob of hysterical vigilantes ever promised more bad news. You’d see them at ten in the morning on the terrace of the Continental waiting for the bar to open, barely able to light there own cigarettes until it did. The crowds on Tu Do Street looked like Ensor processioners, and there was a corruption in the air that had nothing to do with government workers on the take. After seven in the evening, when the curfew included Americans and became total, nothing but White Mice patrols and MP jeeps moved in the streets, except for a few young children who raced up and down over the rubbish, running newspaper kites up into the chilling wind.

Saigon in the Emergency:

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