Two Hundred Thousand More: Tet, Khe Sanh, Hue, and the Year America Stopped Believing, 1968

Measured against its own objectives, the Tet Offensive was a catastrophe for the side that launched it. The uprising it required never came. The Saigon government did not collapse and its army did not defect. The southern insurgency that surfaced to lead the rising was destroyed as a fighting force and never recovered. Nine weeks after the first attacks, the president of the United States halted the bombing, offered negotiations, and withdrew from re-election. This book is about why both of those things are true - and why that is not a paradox.

In November 1967 the American government mounted a deliberate campaign to tell its public that the end of the war had come into view - a claim built on the reporting system the previous volume of this series dismantled. Eleven weeks later, on a truce night, roughly a hundred thousand men attacked more than a hundred towns and cities at once, including the grounds of the American embassy in Saigon. The military result and the political result of 1968 pointed in opposite directions, and this book argues the relationship between them was not ironic but causal: the shock was proportional not to the military event but to the distance between that event and what the public had been promised - a distance that had been opened deliberately. Within five weeks came a request for 206,000 more men; within six, its leak to the press; within nine, a president's withdrawal.

The account runs from the siege of Khe Sanh through the night of the attacks, the embassy, Saigon, and the month-long recapture of Hue, to the reassessment in Washington, the deadliest months of the war - which came after Tet - and the election that handed the war to Nixon. A full chapter tells Hanoi's side from the translated Vietnamese record: what the General Offensive was actually designed to achieve, and what Hanoi's own histories later conceded went wrong. The hardest subjects of 1968 - the destruction of Hue, the mass graves, My Lai - are covered directly, from the inquiries and the records, with sourced figures and without atmosphere. My Lai is written from the Peers Inquiry and the court-martial record and from nothing else. The Hue graves are presented source by source, with the interest each side has had in each figure stated openly, and no number endorsed, because the evidence does not permit one.

What you'll learn:

• What Hanoi's plan required - and why all three of its conditions failed at once
• Why the warnings were not heeded, for reasons that were not stupid
• What actually happened at the embassy, hour by hour, against what was reported in the first hours
• Whether Khe Sanh was the objective or the diversion, with both readings at full strength
• How a number - 206,000 - became a leak, a reassessment, and a withdrawal
• Why most of 1968's American dead fell after Tet, in offensives popular memory has lost

This book is for you if:

• You want the military result and the political result held on the page at once, with neither collapsed into the other
• You want contested figures as ranges with a named source at each end - Tet, Khe Sanh, Hue - and the arguments the evidence cannot settle left honestly open
• You want 1968 from the documents: the Pentagon Papers, the official histories, the Johnson tapes, the Peers Inquiry

Two Hundred Thousand More is Volume 5 of The Vietnam War Chronicles, an eight-volume history from the Japanese occupation of Indochina to the fall of Saigon. The Introduction recaps the war so far - it stands alone.

A government that manufactures an expectation has mortgaged its credibility against events it does not control. In January 1968 the events arrived.