Despite the exotic surroundings, spirit of adventure, and virtual lack of adult supervision, not every mission was a vacation. When the famed but ill-fated Tet Offensive of 1968 began, the Snake Platoon had two teams in the field. One of them was in Dalat. Dalat was at that time a resort city where the richest Vietnamese (reportedly from both sides of the conflict) went on vacation. It was considered to be far from the war. There was a beautiful lake downtown where one could rent a paddle boat and take a leisurely ride around the lake. I’m sure I have seen a picture of some platoon members racing with them.
The Dalat mission had been completed, part of the team had flown out to Pleiku, and the rest were to drive back the following day. They were staying in the Modern Hotel downtown. This hotel was set in a low area, and most of the center of town was above it. One could view the main part of town, the market, a movie theater, and a lot of restaurants from the hotel’s flat roof. During the night, someone shook Skip Galinski awake and told him they were being mortared. He told them they were crazy – Dalat was off-limits to the war. Then, a mortar exploded right outside the hotel, so they went up to the flat roof to see what was going on. It did not dawn on them that they would make excellent targets on the low and well-lit roof. They were watching the airport being shelled a few miles away when a round hit the nearby market, prompting them to get off the roof and back inside.
In the morning, they discovered that there were a lot of NVA soldiers around the hotel. It seemed that they had just driven in and taken over the city. There was no hiding the fact that the guys were in the hotel, because their truck was parked right outside. The guys found a couple of majors in another room, who had a radio and were in touch with MAC V Headquarters. MAC V advised them that there was a country-wide offensive going on and that they wanted the men in Dalat to just watch the NVA and report on their activities.
The NVA appeared to be headquartered in the theater and were senselessly killing civilians in the street, including a young boy whose only offense was that he wanted to sit in the street by his bicycle rather than on the curb as he had been told. Four national policemen came down the street in a jeep, seemingly unaware that the city had been taken over by the enemy. The NVA fired a rifle-propelled grenade (RPG) from the theater and made a direct hit on the jeep, which crumbled like an accordion and was consumed by flame. Miraculously, three of the four policemen appeared out of the smoke from the burning jeep and ran down the street, avoiding all of the bullets striking the pavement around them.
MACV advised the men in Dalat that the South Vietnamese would soon be counterattacking with armored scout vehicles and that they were to pin down the NVA in the theater so that they could not attack the scout vehicles with their RPGs. One of the majors assigned Galinski and Bill Spinner specific targets to eliminate when the counterattack started. The guys settled in at bathroom windows and waited for what seemed to them an eternity. When the order to fire came, they took out their targets. They looked for others, but the streets were momentarily empty. Galinski and Spinner maintained their positions throughout the counterattack and eliminated additional NVA troops as they tried to exit the theater and escape from the advancing South Vietnamese troops.
Galinski was awarded the Army Commendation Medal with a V device (for Valor), and Bill Spinner was awarded the Bronze Star with V for their actions on that day. The difference in their commendations is that Spinner went outside during the fight and destroyed their monitoring equipment. Platoon Sergeant Ike Eisworth was noticeably irritated about the loss of the equipment.
At about the same time, the other team was in Ban Me Thuot, exotic in its own right, but not a beautiful resort town like Dalat. The last Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, had a hunting lodge in Ban Me Thuot where Teddy Roosevelt would stay while hunting tigers. On occasion, tigers could still be seen in the area. A unit next door to the by then bombed-out lodge had a tiger skin hanging on the side of one of its hooches. The NVA considered Ban Me Thuot to be the key to cutting South Vietnam in half, which worked quite well for them in 1975, and they were not going to back off from it willingly.
This team, which included Eric Shervey, Dean Hutchison, Rod Brudvik, Robert Weinhold, Larry Monuteaux and others, had been staying in a small villa in town when the Tet Offensive started on January 31st. After a few days of being cut off, they made their escape from the villa to the MACV compound. The next morning, half of the team got out and returned to Pleiku. The rest were sent to the helicopter assault compound south of town to help defend the perimeter, and they dug in on the south berm for a few days. Shervey recalls that ‘Puff’ (AC-47 gunship) kept them alive by “spraying red where the VC were.”
Eventually, they were able to move from their foxholes to a hooch where they got to sleep on cots. Things were calming down, but the base was running short of food, water and ammunition. About a week later, a convoy came in with c-rations, “but no beer,” Shervey notes. One night, the mortars started coming in much closer.
The enemy walked their mortars up to and past the hooch where the team was holed up. One round came through the metal roof and exploded upon entry right over them. Hutchison got the worst of it, with a big hole in his left thigh. Shervey caught fifty-some pieces of shrapnel in his backside and feet. Brudvik got a piece in his upper arm, and Weinhold stopped one with his head. The head wound must have addled him, because he ‘crawled off somewhere.’ Brudvik and Shervey went looking for help and got Hutchison to the medical tent. Hutchison and Shervey were both sent out on a Medevac helicopter and hospitalized for their wounds. Brudvik and Weinhold were treated and released, although Weinhold is reported to have received a metal plate in his head at a later date.
Remember, the recruiters had told every one of them that there was no ASA in Vietnam.
On a broader scale, the 1968 Tet Offensive proved to be a military disaster for the communist forces. The Viet Cong numbers and abilities were so reduced that they became ineffective for years to come. Walter Cronkite, of CBS news, often cited as “the most trusted man in America,” however, reported it as a major communist victory and a disaster for our side. Thus began the shift in public opinion away from support of both our involvement in South Vietnam and our troops. This shift eventually led to the end of our involvement and the loss of South Vietnam to the communists of the north. It was not the offensive that beat us; it was the media’s reporting on it.
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