HANOI, Vietnam — Ngoc Dai, a 23-year-old soldier in the People’s Army of Vietnam, was fighting the Americans near the besieged Khe Sanh combat base when his unit received elating orders. They were to emerge from the jungle, “liberate” the old imperial capital of Hue in central Vietnam and stir up a nationwide popular uprising. It was January 30, 1968, three years after President Lyndon B. Johnson had ordered 125,000 American troops to Vietnam to ward off a Communist takeover of the south, and the rest of Southeast Asia. Dai and his comrades saw things differently: With nationalistic pride, they were on a mission to reunify Vietnam, launching the surprise assault on South Vietnamese and American troops now known as the Tet Offensive.
“The revenge deep inside the northern soldiers was so big,” Dai, 73, said in an interview at his Hanoi home in January. “All the soldiers believed we could liberate all the country.”
Nguyen Qui Duc, only 9 years old at the time, has a very different memory of early 1968. Duc was visiting family for the Lunar New Year, known as Tet, Vietnam’s most important holiday. His father was a regional governor attempting to maintain a semblance of normalcy in South Vietnam as the war raged. A ceasefire was in place for Tet, with much of the South Vietnamese military on leave. It was meant to be a joyous week providing a reprieve from the war. But while sleeping in his grandfather’s house, Duc was awakened around 1 a.m. by gunshots. The soldiers assigned to protect the family had vanished, with men speaking in the distinctive northern Vietnamese accent closing in.
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