Remembering Tet After 40 Years

BY HOMER KIEFER
Special to the Herald Courier

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive – a series of battles that solidified sentiment against the war in Vietnam. Segments of the media portrayed Tet as an enemy victory, yet history reveals another picture. I was there, and this is the real story.
In November 1967, I commanded a battalion in the 25th Division, and I moved that battalion north of Tay Ninh to Katum – a Special Forces camp just south of the Cambodian Border. We went east along a road that was parallel to and just south of the border to establish Fire Support Base Beauregard.
From there, we sent units farther east to establish another base. This new base was along what intelligence reports had described as a North Vietnamese infiltration route from Cambodia toward Saigon. Later, we learned that this route played a major part in the enemy build-up for the Tet offensive.
The 25th Division Artillery commander asked me to name this new base; I told him to call it “Burt.” My great-grandfather, Andy Burt, had enlisted in 1861, and in 1868 – 100 years before Tet – he was in command of an Army base on the Bozeman Trail during Red Cloud’s War. I wanted the new Fire Support Base to be named after him.
At midnight on Christmas Eve 1967, a West Point classmate of mine, Al Bracy, and I sat atop a bunker at Fire Support Base Beauregard. The sky was clear and a million stars seemed to press down upon us. It was a holy, peaceful night that belied what would happen just a week later.
Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, all hell broke out at Burt; enemy regiments tried to overrun the base. For four hours, it was touch and go. From Beauregard, we fired supporting medium artillery. At the beleaguered base, we launched direct artillery fire at the enemy charging our barbed wire.
In repeated human wave attacks, they broke through our perimeter again and again and we engaged them in hand to hand fighting. The chaos continued until morning when the enemy withdrew.
No one who was at Burt that night will ever forget it. One of the soldiers who was injured early, but was not evacuated until daylight, was Oliver Stone. He later wrote a story that he called “Platoon” based on that night. “Platoon” launched Stone’s career.
In response to enemy attacks south of us, I moved my battalion closer to Saigon. During subsequent Tet attacks on that city, I took a helicopter to visit wounded soldiers at the hospital at Long Binh. Above Route One near Saigon, my pilot and I heard a commercial radio report of what the speaker described as a major ambush on the road above which we were flying.
I told the pilot to go to the place in question to see if we could adjust artillery fire in support of our guys. We flew up and down the road supposedly being attacked, but we never saw any action. The road was peaceful and traffic was flowing normally. Yet, Radio Saigon was still describing a major ambush there.
To me, that sensationalist broadcast was exactly how much of the media approached the entire Tet Offensive. Because of such reporting, Tet became an enemy victory in the minds of the American people when in reality its battles had destroyed the Viet Cong.
My last memory of Tet was the night of May 12 at Fire Support Base Pike, west of Saigon. About midnight, the enemy attacked. As usual, the initial attack was diversionary, hoping we would commit our reserves to defend one sector and thus expose us to a later major attack elsewhere.
In my sector, the enemy broke through briefly, when one of our howitzers jammed. My sergeant major and I led a response team to that point, repelled the enemy and put the jammed howitzer back into action. When morning came, we had not lost a man, but there were more than a hundred enemy bodies in front of our perimeter.
That night was a microcosm of what really happened during Tet: a massive military victory for us that became a defeat because major segments of the American media wanted it to be.

Col. Homer “Hawk” Kiefer, of Bristol Virginia, was a career Army officer, serving in the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and commanding a batallion in Vietnam. His may be reached through his Web site, www.hawkkiefer.com.