Loon by Jack McLean

Author:Jack McLean
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345515353
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-03T10:00:00+00:00

At half past midnight on Wednesday morning, January 31, 1968, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive at Nha Trang. Nearly seventy thousand North Vietnamese troops participated in this broad action that took the escalating war from the jungles into the cities of South Vietnam.

The following day, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese security official, was captured on film executing a Vietcong prisoner, shooting him in the temple at point-blank range. American photographer Eddie Adams won the Pulitzer Prize for the photo. It was to become yet another iconic rallying point for antiwar protesters back home. Despite later claims that the prisoner had been accused of murdering a Saigon police officer and his family, the image called into question everything claimed and assumed about our South Vietnamese allies.

Over the following weeks, nearly every city and military installation in South Vietnam was hit. Even the U.S. embassy in Saigon was penetrated by enemy troops and resecured only after a fierce battle. The offensive carried on for weeks and was the major turning point in the American attitude toward the war. Little remained the same after Tet.

Throughout the Tet Offensive we could hear Con Thien and C-2 getting hit every day. The 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, who took over our former position on the Firebreak, got hit by several battalions of NVA, and held their ground while losing only fifteen men. Choppers were on standby to take us up as reinforcements, but the call never came and we returned to our routines.

The Washout became one of the few marine installations untouched by the Tet Offensive.

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