Sep 6, 2018 5 min read

Imagine driving the 1,000 or so miles from Pittsburgh to Disney World through a corridor in which the national borders at some points are only 30 miles apart.

Take a look at a map, and that’s pretty much what you get with the northern and southern extremes of Vietnam. And that pretty much explains why the long, narrow nation along the South China Sea – or the East Sea, Bien Dong, as the Vietnamese prefer to call it – has a natural divide between the north and south, most notably when it was divided into two republics for two decades.

It’s been 43 years since the Fall of Saigon put an end to the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and fully half a century since the conflict’s defining chapter, the Tet Offensive.

In March, Mt. Lebanon resident Todd DePastino organized a tour of Vietnam for veterans of the war and others who wanted a firsthand look at what the nation looks like today. He spoke about the experience during a recent Peters Township Public Library program that included a thought-provoking history lesson.

The presentation was right up DePastino’s alley, as he has taught Vietnam War history classes at the university level. And he calls Tet one of the most important events of the 20th century, as far as the United States is concerned.

Regarding Vietnam’s history, the culture extends as far back as 6,000 or 7,000 years, with the nation’s anomalous geography established following independence from China’s Han dynasty at the Battle of Bach Dang River in 938.

Fast-forward a millennium, and France occupied Vietnam until another decisive battle, at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954. With no one apparently learning from experiences in Korea, the multinational Geneva Conference subsequently split Vietnam into two halves, one with a communist government and the other supported by the United States.

Also shades of Korea, the U.S. government decided to intervene in efforts to drive out the communists, resulting in the Vietnam War. Which brings us to the Tet Offensive.

On Jan. 30, 1968, North Vietnam forces launched a surprise attack on the South during an assumed cease-fire because of a national holiday.

“By any military measure, the Tet Offensive was a massive defeat for the enemy. It should have gone down as one of the greatest military catastrophes, really, in military history,” DePastino explained during his presentation. “We were caught by surprise, but we regrouped and beat them back, and beat them back badly, and in the following weeks, took back every inch of ground that the enemy had taken during the surprise uprising.”

He then took a breath, gestured with his index finger and said the inevitable: “But …

“My students always had a tough time with this,” he said, “but it ended up being a strategic victory for the enemy, because the psychological and political toll that it took on American public opinion at home was so great that it eroded support for the war almost overnight.”

If you’re of a certain age, you may recall seeing footage of the carnage on television, and perhaps you heard Walter Cronkite’s CBS News pronouncement of Feb. 27, 1968:

“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion.”

The words of the era’s poll-affirmed “most trusted man in America” ran counter to what Army Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam War, had stated a few months previously:

“With 1968, a new phase is starting. We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view. I have never been more encouraged.”

Westmoreland had a key role in the efforts of the Vietnam Information Group, a program launched by national security adviser Walt Whitman Rostow to drum up domestic support for the war effort.

“And it worked. By Christmas, more than 50 percent of Americans believed that we were making progress and there was light at the end of the tunnel,” DePastino explained. “And then came Tet.”

He cited a 50th-anniversary article in the Washington Post, “How Americans lost faith in government” by Josh Zeitz, reporting how the attack and the reaction to it “set the groundwork for a decades-long erosion of public trust in government and public institutions In this sense, President Trump … is only the most extreme embodiment of a pattern that began a half-century ago.”

To support the theory, DePastino presented findings of a poll that Gallup had conducted periodically for six decades: “Do you trust the government in Washington (D.C.) to do what is right just about always, or most of the time?”

In 1958 and again six years later, 77 percent of the respondents answered in the affirmative. In December 2017, the figure was 18 percent.

“I think he’s on to something,” DePastino said about Zeitz. “Our faith in government, in our own government, was shattered in Tet, and I don’t think we ever put those pieces back together again.”

Todd DePastino is founding director of the Veterans Breakfast Club, an organization that meets throughout the region and encourages veterans to speak about their service experiences. For more information, visit veteransbreakfastclub.com.