The days leading up to TET flowers filled Nguyen Hue Street in downtown Saigon
We all expected that TET would mean that a cease fire would
be observed, as soldiers from both sides would take this traditional break from
war and spend time with their families. Little did we know that the sound of
fireworks had turned into the sound of gunfire while we slept.
In that early morning hour, we did not know that we
were already in the epicenter of the biggest offensive of the war, carried out
by the North Vietnam Army (NVA), not only in Saigon but throughout the country
– now generally felt to be a turning point in the war, the TET Offensive.
I had scheduled a breakfast meeting with visitors from
the States at the Hotel Majestic, so I jumped on my Lambretta motor scooter and
headed out, leaving Judy at the house with our five-month-old baby, Bret. Strange, I thought, there’s little traffic on
the streets so my ride down to the Saigon River wouldn’t take long. Soon enough
I started running into barricades and road blocks guarded by ARVN (South
Vietnamese) troops, and the occasional sound of small arms fire and a loud boom
in the distance. After several
diversions I arrived at the hotel where I met Bill Snyder and Atlee Beechy of
the Mennonite Central Committee and quickly learned that the American Embassy,
only a few blocks away, and many other sites, were now under attack.
I remember the next days as a time of apprehension,
rumors and un-knowing. We lived with the
sound of bombing around the city, but little concrete information as to the
scope of the battles. It was several
days until we were able to get out to assess the needs and destruction in some
of the neighborhoods around the city. Our
first concern was to verify the situation of our many volunteers and staff
stationed in the city and around the country.
We heard via cable from the Vietnam Christian Service (VNCS) teams in
Nha Trang, Pleiku, Quang Ngai and then the other smaller and remote places
where our people were working. It was
almost a week later that we heard from Hue, one of the cities in Central
Vietnam that under-went some of the fiercest battles. In fighting that went on
in Hue for almost three weeks over two hundred US Marines and probably
thousands of Vietnamese from both sides of the conflict were killed as that
beautiful city endured major destruction.
We were relieved to hear that all seven VNCS staff in
Hue were safe! Indeed, we could report to anxious colleagues
and families back home that we were all O.K.
When Ove Nielsen at Lutheran World Relief in New York called my mother
and said, “This is Ove Nielsen from LWR in New York” she burst into sobs before
he could finish saying “we’ve just heard from Saigon that Judy, Jerry and Bret
are safe”. The reality was that folks
back in the States were getting more information from newspapers and evening
newscasts then we were right in the middle of it. The American public was alarmed, and rightly
so.
The TET offensive is one of those times and places
etched in my mind forever, the sounds, smells, sights, feelings; and the
destruction we observed. Above all it
was the solidarity and shared emotions we experienced with each other, both
international colleagues and Vietnamese.
And it reinforced our commitment to have a small part in ending this
madness, or at least alleviating just a bit of the suffering it caused.
For some of us TET was the beginning of the end of our
time in Vietnam as Judy and Bret and other mothers and children were evacuated
to Malaysia; and a few staff who could not continue with their projects were
reassigned to other countries. But most
“VNCSers” persisted and continued to do social work, distribute aid, bind
wounds, and show solidarity with the displaced and traumatized – until it all
came to an end when the NVA finally marched into Saigon in 1975.
