40 APRIL-MAY 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The Vietnam Training Center, or VTC as everyone called it, was in a drab, charmless basement of the Arlington Towers apartment complex in Rosslyn, just across the Key Bridge from Georgetown. For six hours a day, we would assemble in small groups in windowless rooms endeavoring to mimic the seemingly impossible (to me) sing-song tonal language that was Vietnamese. I could not have realized that this assignment would give me a front-row seat to one of the most tumultuous periods in American politics since the Civil War, one that began 57 years ago, on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 1968. Ten months later, just before Thanksgiving, as I boarded a plane to fly to Saigon and start my assignment in the Mekong Delta, our politics, race relations, the Vietnam War effort, and America’s triumphal spirit would all be seemingly forever changed. Assault on the Embassy It all began when, breaking the traditional Tết truce, the North Vietnamese Army and the Việt Cộng opened a surprise nationwide attack on Jan. 30. The images of the fighting, which affected every major population center in South Vietnam including the capital city of Saigon, flowed almost instantly into millions of homes across America via television, sent by a new generation of skeptical, young correspondents, reporting firsthand from the scenes of battle. The fighting was intense, and American casualties were the highest ever. Among them were Foreign Service personnel, including Robert Little, with whom I had been practicing my Vietnamese tones just a few weeks earlier. Pulled from language training and sent early to address refugee issues, Little had been captured by a North Vietnamese team and summarily executed. The account of his death brought home the reality of the danger of our assignment. From then on, the main topic of our discussions during the breaks between hourly language classes was which handgun to buy to take with you and the ballistic capabilities of various types of ammunition. The most significant event of the Tết Offensive and, in retrospect, of the entire Vietnam War, occurred at 2:45 a.m. Saigon time on Jan. 31. It was then that a 20-man Việt Cộng “sapper team” blew a hole in the outer wall of the brand-new U.S. embassy compound and then rushed inside to try to storm the chancery, where the ambassador’s office was located. Frustrated by the ballistic doors and unable to enter the main office building, the insurgents nonetheless marauded about the grounds in search of targets. Several of the attackers gained access to an annex building where a senior official, George “Jake” Jacobson, one of the few individuals living on the compound (and who four years later would be my boss), was trapped without a weapon on the top floor. As the guerrillas made their way up the stairs inside the building, Jake opened the window and shouted for help. A Marine Security Guard threw his .45 caliber pistol up to Jacobson, who, according to the reports eventually making their way back to the Vietnam Training Center in Arlington, spun around and shot his would-be assassin in the face when he entered the room. U.S. Superiority Takes a Hit In tactical terms, the assault on the embassy was judged a failure. By 9:30 a.m., just six hours later, the episode had concluded. All of the Việt Cộng were dead, their bodies strewn around the embassy grounds. To demonstrate we had reestablished control, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker came to inspect the situation with a coterie of Western journalists, recording every image and then sending them back by wire service and video reports that would be seen in every remote corner of America. In strategic terms, however, the penetration of the U.S. diplomatic compound, the symbolic heart of American power and authority, was the most traumatic and devastating aspect of Hanoi’s monthlong countrywide offensive. The images and television reports of it undermined the confidence of the American people in the conduct of the war and began the erosion of the country’s will to prevail in the conflict. The perception that even with 500,000 U.S. military personnel in the country, we were unable to protect the embassy, the vital center of our operations, spread across America. Even for military hawks, the view began to take hold that something was profoundly flawed in the war effort. Concerns multiplied that the president and General William Westmoreland had badly misled the American people and foolishly ensnarled us in an unwinnable conflict. It was the culmination of seven years of political upheaval, all of which had begun on that night in January 1968, when those 20 Việt Cộng blew their way into the U.S. embassy compound.
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