The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

22 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Allan Wendt was a junior FSO on night duty when the embassy was attacked by Viet Cong commandos. This is his story. BY AL LAN WENDT AllanWendt, a retired FSO, served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1971. He also served in Düsseldorf, Brussels, Cairo andWashington, D.C. He retired in October 1995 after serving as the first U.S. ambassador to Slovenia, but returned to the State Department in 1999-2000 to work on Bosnia and Kosovo. T he fortress-like U.S. embassy in downtown Saigon was the citadel of the American presence in Viet- nam during the Vietnam War. From this block-long concrete structure, under the direction of the courtly Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, our 500,000-strong expeditionary force and huge civilian assistance program sought to roll back the communist tide. At 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 30, 1968, I lay asleep on a cot in Room 433 on the fourth floor of the embassy. I was a 32-year-old Foreign Service officer on my second overseas tour of duty and was just beginning my first week-long stint as night duty officer. Suddenly, the building was rocked by a loud explosion. Automatic weapons fire broke out, and rockets began to thud into the building. The embassy was under attack. As I soon learned, a 20-man Viet Cong commando squad had blown open the wall surrounding the embassy compound and poured into the court- yard. With this strike, the communists launched their famous Tet (Vietnamese lunar new year) Offensive. Viet Cong Attack on Embassy Saigon, 1968 FOCUS ON THE FOREIGN SERVICE IN VIETNAM I quickly retreated into the more secure and better equipped communications roomwhere a communications specialist, James A. Griffin, was on duty. A call to the ground-floor Marine security guard post revealed that at least one Marine guard, Sgt. Ronald W. Harper, was alive and functioning. The Viet Cong attackers, at that point, were not in the building. I took the elevator to the ground floor, where the situation looked bleak. There was considerable damage to the building and another Marine lay wounded and covered with blood. We managed to carry him up to a cot on the fourth floor, the one I had been sleeping on. I soon learned that in the initial attack, four military policemen and one Marine security guard had been killed. Under Attack and on the Line Despite an atmosphere of extreme tension, I found I was able to communicate with the outside world. From the fourth floor communications room, I placed and received innumerable telephone calls to and from the White House Situation Room, the State Department Operations Center (where I had previously worked) and the U.S. Military Assistance Command Center near Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport. An American civilian telephone operator skillfully weeded out nuisance and nonessential calls. I spoke regularly to embassy offi- cers at the offsite command post set up for Amb. Bunker. Civilian and military callers from near and far wanted to know the exact state of play. Were there any enemy fighters inside the building?