Tet With Tanks - The NVA Easter Offensive, 1972
By Frederick F. Lash Jr.

Published Tuesday, September 11, 2007  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

DRAMA AT PHU BAI; VICTORIES AT QUANG TRI AND AN LOC

“Gentlemen, if Phu Bai falls, it will be the equivalent of 10 USS Pueblos falling into North Korean hands,” Army Lieutenant Colonel J. Wesley Loffert, Phu Bai’s deputy commander, announced the day after Camp Carroll’s surrender. Loffert’s words stunned the huddled group of American officers who provided security and logistics for the intelligence unit. Each of these men well remembered the national disgrace four years earlier when the Pueblo’s captain surrendered his ship, caught patrolling off North Korean waters, without firing a shot. They knew that the Pueblo’s crew was unable to destroy classified documents and sensitive equipment. They now realized they were guarding similar but even more sensitive electronic eavesdropping equipment.

The loss of Camp Carroll was particularly devastating. Nearly 2,000 ARVN troops surrendered. In addition, the enemy captured 22 artillery pieces intact, including four long-range 175 mm guns, the most significant artillery fire support weapons between Phu Bai and the DMZ. As a white flag was raised and NVA soldiers penetrated Camp Carroll’s outer defensive positions, the American adviser group, including Lieutenant Colonel Camper and Major Brown, quickly boarded an American Chinook helicopter piloted by Captain Harry Thain, who braved intense artillery and small-arms fire to whisk away the group to safety. Sadly, Thain was killed a month later when his helicopter was destroyed by enemy fire while supporting operations of the 3d Battalion, 82d Field Artillery just north of Phu Bai.

A North Vietnamese soldier fires a bazooka as the NVA continues to
advance south. Image Credit: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

At Phu Bai, the Americans heard of Thain’s rescue of the U.S. advisers at their nightly briefing. Camp Carroll’s ignominious surrender – with the U.S. advisers vainly prodding the ARVN soldiers to fight – was not perceived as a ringing endorsement of President Nixon’s vaunted “Vietnamization” policy. Yet the soldiers at Phu Bai weren’t worried about political policies; they were more concerned that the North Vietnamese would soon attack them.

Their concerns seemed well grounded. For four days in mid-April, the Americans at Phu Bai watched a steady stream of panicked ARVN soldiers and Vietnamese civilians heading south along Highway One. The moving mass included men and women on foot carrying bundles, as well as some riding motorbikes laden with suitcases, and others packed into small Asian-made buses or larger ARVN military trucks. At one point, one of the dangerously overloaded ARVN trucks overturned, spilling soldiers and civilians over the road. Yet the crowd of refugees continued to move forward, ignoring their injured compatriots whom they left for the Americans at Phu Bai to administer first aid to. The crowd proceeded unhappily, moving down from Quang Tri and Hue, 12 miles to the north, and from numerous surrounding hamlets. Sometimes a few meters separated groups of refugees, while at other times it was a solid mass of humanity. Clearly, the NVA had failed to win the “hearts and minds” of this region’s population as they scrambled desperately to escape the onslaught.

By the third afternoon of that exodus, all but a handful of Phu Bai’s Vietnamese security guards, who manned the perimeter watch towers and bunkers, had slipped away. The situation was not encouraging: NVA troops were overrunning the defensive line to the north and moving toward Phu Bai; reports of enemy tanks trickled in; every civilian within miles of Phu Bai was gone or headed south; and there were no combat troops at Phu Bai. That night, the few remaining security guards and American Soldiers from the intelligence unit formed an ad hoc defensive security force.

Loffert’s concerns were justified. By early May, the situation in South Vietnam was desperate. To the north, the North Vietnamese held the entire northern province of Quang Tri and its namesake capital city, and they were applying pressure toward Hue, Vietnam’s ancient imperial capital. Hue had been one of the primary targets of North Vietnam’s famous 1968 Tet Offensive, and its strategic importance was significant. On May 1, the commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam sent a confidential message to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird predicting that Hue would fall, a defeat that would likely end the rule of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.

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