Lessons from the Tet Offensive

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, my name is Vanessa Hatcher, I hail from Falls Church, Virginia and I am a senior here at Hillsdale majoring in speech studies. I have the great pleasure tonight of introducing to you a distinguished historian of our time and a man of tremendous intellect. Not so fast doctor I am just hold on a second. Victor Davis Hanson is the is a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College. He received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz and his PhD in Classics from Stanford University. Dr. Hanson is currently a senior fellow at the Hoover institution, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Service. He has also taught at Stanford and in the 20032004 academic year, he held the visiting Shifrin Chair of Military History at the US Naval Academy. In addition to his weekly column for National Review online, he has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard and the Claremont Review of Books. He has written or edited 16 books including "The Soul of Battle", "Carnage and Culture", "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming", and most recently "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War". Fellow students, faculty and distinguished guests, it is my honor to introduce to you tonight's speaker and current Hillsdale visiting professor, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming, I know that it will be a little bit different milieu from the 300 in Thermopylae. But I at least never thought and I don't think very many of you did either that 40 years from Vietnam we would be back again, you know when I was in high school, freshman high school, I remember seeing an ad that said, "Don't let General Waste More Land take over" and I saw the New York Times is running the one about "General Betray Us". We even have we have Iraqi Study Group now. We used to have something called The Wise Men. I don't if you remember the panel of distinguished state department Bradley, Matthew Ridgway, Averell Harriman, but it was a same distinguished group that gave almost the same type of advice, that things had to be radically changed. 40 years ago, during the Tet offensive we were in the middle of a campaign cycle. New Hampshire primary loomed large right in the middle of the offensive just in the way it does today. And we had a president with ratings below 35 percent and a war that was controversial, but not quite as unpopular as everybody thought it was, at least at the time. So things have changed, and things have stayed the same. Excellent talk the other night, Mark Moyer mentioned President Bush's avocation of Vietnam on this 22nd at the veterans of foreign wars. And that caused an outrage. But of course there wasn't one Vietnam; there were four Vietnams so to speak. And I think of the problem what the president had immediately was that Americans kind of agree on two of them, but can't on the other two. We all agree that from 1963 to 1964-65' John Kennedy and then later Lyndon Johnson thought that it would be a little bit easier than it turned out to be and it was a wise idea to send advisors and then by October 1965, they sent sizable troops. I think every body agrees now that the intend was novel but we were naïve in the ramifications of that decision. I think every body agrees about the second phase of Vietnam, that from October 1965 until January 31, 1968 even though we had lost 20 we had lost 20,000 lives, we got up to 505,00,000, that we did not have a strategy that was winning, and that we were confused and the search and destroy missions were not working and the bombing campaign operation Rolling Thunder was not working. I think people in the left or right can agree on those two stages or phases. But what the President was evoking were not those two stages, he was talking about the third and fourth and that's where the controversy lay, because from the beginning of Tet in January 31st all the way until the last troop ground soldier was in Vietnam, roughly at the end of 1972, early in 1973, there is a great division, the people who were more conservative believed that we finally got it right over trial and erroneous in all wars we would learn from our mistakes and we had crafted the strategy of much more precise and rational bombing of the north and we had a new commander General Abrams and we had fix things and we were on the way to the path of South Korea. People on the left said no, we never did get it right; we lost 40,000 people in that calculation. And then President Bush touched the nerve when he talked about the denouement of Vietnam. And the fourth and final stage of course was 1974 and 75', that is when we had a viable government in place, we cut off for 21 resolutions of the congress aid and we curtailed air support and it was destroyed in 75' by conventional attack, not a counter a war of counter insurgencies. Those who were conservatives believe that finally all that blood and treasure had been worth something and we would be on the path of something like South Korea with a chance to evolve into a full-fledged democracies and what happened instead, whether we look at the holocaust in Cambodia, the million Boat People of the United States and Europe, they half million who were send to reeducation camps are disappeared and the 30 something years of tyranny that people had to live on, it was a tragedy and that was what President was pointing to. The people on the left to this day the people who have ads that say "General Betray Us" reminiscent of "General Waste More Land" they believe just the opposite, that the war was lost and what happened was not all that bad. I read that today in a column written by a man of the left; that if we look back and look at Vietnam it wasn't that bad, or if it was bad, we caused the holocaust. And so there was great the President got right into a controversy that has not been resolved today. I like to turn though to Tet and see what this war can teach us about history in general and our First thing we remember about Tet is that we use that term loosely for a series of offensives that started on January 31st, 1968 and culminated some where in the first week of April. But what was going on at Tet, it's important to understand the general landscaped. At that time, just a week and a half before Tet, the North Koreans had tried to send a hit squad in - into the presidential palace of South Korea. The USS Pueblo had been taken at the same time that Tet it was beginning to unroll. We had pretty good indications that Gene McCarthy was going to run for a President against President Johnson and Bobby Kennedy had made an about face and said that not only Lyndon Johnson had the wrong strategy, but he had betrayed the strategy of his brother John who would have not done what he didn't quite tell us what John Kennedy would have done, but he would not have done it. And remember that cities themselves were in turmoil, there were riots, as close by here is Detroit, and Lyndon Johnson felt that this war on poverty had to proceed, at the same time he was going to escalate troop increases and remember that right before Tet, we had a 505,00,000 troops, this country is paralyzed, even though it has 50 million people more than it did at the time of Vietnam, it's paralyzed over the question of the surge from 160 to 180, back to 140 but this was a country that put 505,000 men in the field. And finally remember that there had been a series of lectures, some on his own initiative, some not, by General Westmoreland in April, June and November and about the report of things on the ground and they had been if I could use that vernacular, "sexed up" by the administration; Lyndon Johnson and said that if you want to look at the tragic figure, I really think that General Westmoreland is for of his faults, he did not quite say as he was quoted by Johnson that we were really at the end light at end of tunnel. All of that was going on when Tet broke out. What was Tet? It was right in the Vietnamese lunar new year, there had been a truce, requested by the communist, half of the army of Republic of Vietnam or South Vietnamese allies were on leave, even though we had ample intelligence information that such an attack was going to transpire, we didn't pay much attention toward; it was a much worse intelligence failure than the WMD in some sense. And the south the North Vietnamese strategy was to bring the war into the cities of Vietnam, in a multi fastidious fashion, all of them, as many as they could, and to show the Americans not just that they did not have control and that its effort their effort at pacification had failed, but literally to win in a military victory and to hold territory and win the war. Now that's controversial because post facto after the defeat the North Vietnamese argued that they really didn't at seek to attain that, that they wanted a psychologically victory that they in fact gained. But I don't think if you read the documents of the time, they really did believe they were going to have a military victory. We really associate Tet retreat different places in Vietnam, although as I said it was a simultaneous attack all over the country. The first was a course in the night 31st in Vietnam, in Saigon itself most famously the attack, not just on the racecourse, the radio station, but on the American Embassy, were 19 sappers blew a hole in the walls of the embassy, got in through the concrete flower pots and actually were firing on the embassy, and we with the first ability to get globalize communications, almost instantaneously were seeing this pictures of Ellsworth Bunker being shepherded out and state department like fellows were at the shades, or CIA people in civilian clothes with guns and bodies on the embassy grounds. What we didn't know was that that attack only lasted six hours and was decisively repelled. But reverberated throughout the United States at that time, we felt that the embassy had either been lost or Ambassador was being held or we had suffered a military defeat, but was only a six hour incursion, nothing like the Iranian hostage crisis that went on well over a year. And we didn't really understand or we couldn't fathom that this entire effort to take the Capital only lasted but two weeks. By two weeks the North Vietnamese were fundamentally defeated in Saigon. The second theatre of operations was the provincial capital Vei, up near the DMZ, and this was a city that of great antiquity in Vietnam, had not really been attacked previously and was an enclave of culture and science and had held a great number of not only catholic missionaries, but German doctors, French intellectuals, during the French colonial period it had been the place favored by the French and for 25 days there was a siege of Vei, were some where over 10,000 to 15,000 army of North Vietnam regulars tried to take the city and hold it; the Americans were caught off guard. Their Vietnamese allies were mostly on vacation and for 25 days the US Marine Corp fought out of the citadel, so to speak, that fortified center that had the great it was a fortifications of some duration, had been long part of Vei's history and a magnificent effort, if you want to compare Vei with Okinawa or Iwo Jima, it reminds one right over the First Marine Division in World War II, what the marines did was absolutely incredible. A very small force took the city back within 25 days and killed over 8,500 of the enemy, one of the most amazing feats of courage that one could find, and while this was happening, remember right after this happened was the My Lai Massacre, where Americans had killed somewhere between a 100 and I don't think 500, but may be a 100-200, that had not been announced, Seymour Hersh had not broken that story, but there were rumors of it. But I mention that only because of the time that was happening the North Vietnamese took out some where between two and 4000 civilians and shot them and even if they were not dead, they buried them alive and they killed at least 25 Americans. They killed people who spoke French, they killed people with eyeglasses, they killed people who had any tend of sophistication and westernization, I mentioned that because even today that's a controversy, that in some ways it's a precursor of what we saw in Cambodia that elemental hatred of foreigners that was part of this xenophobic North Vietnamese doctrine and I mentioned that because I just saw an essay by my friend Christopher Hitchens where he argued that Al Qaeda is much more evil and there is nothing that with in the North Vietnamese that even approximates what we see in Baghdad. In fact there was, if anybody studies what the atrocities that were committed by the North Vietnamese, the sheer murder and torture, I think they can see that it ranks with the type of atrocities we are seeing today from Al Qaeda. The third front in the Tet offense is that that comes quickly to mind of course is the famous siege or infamous siege of Khe Sanh, up near the DMZ. And the American military commandant apparently thought that the entire Tet offensive, ipso facto was a ruse to divert American attention away from Khe Sanh. A forward military base had been built by Special Forces, I think in 1962 and was quickly surrounded and had to be supplied by air. And that siege went on from actually began a little bit before Tet, from mid to late January, went all the way into early the first week of April. And when it was all over the the US Army and it's ground contingents had fired somewhere between a 160 and 200,000 artillery shells, the Air Force in a eerie precursor to what we saw in the Gulf War had figured out a quadrant system and had begun carpet bombing. And when they were all done the Americans had supplied the entire base by air, kill some where between 15 and 20,000 of Vietcong and North Vietnamese just completely destroyed the enemy and even today, visitors to Vietnam will tell you there are 72 graveyards that surround the position at Khe Sanh, and had won an a miraculous military victory. Okay, so what was the reaction come April, to this surprise attack, this amazing American and South Vietnamese recovery and the enormous damage inflicted on the enemy. The enemy had committed over 60 probably closer to 80,000 troops and they lost anywhere from 40 to 45,000 dead and untold numbers of wounded. And to answer that, we have to look at the media reaction to Tet, the military reaction and the political reaction. The media reaction was quite astounding. It was a multi faceted, multi media reaction. Every genre a popular media culture was involved. Most famously you remember the picture of Eddie Adams, who had won the Pulitzer prize, where I think it was General Loan, had his pistol showing blowing out the brains of a suspected Vietcong agent, who probably just minutes before had been involved in an attack on South Vietnamese forces. That was plastered all over the world as a sign that the United States was backing a government that committed atrocities. We had editorial cartoons, some of you in the audience from my age would all remember Herblock, a very famous op-ed or a cartoon of a general hiding under the desk in the embassy and say, I think things are all under control, while he is sweating on the phone. This was trying to capitalize I guess the six hour attack on the embassy. We had a very famous satirical editorial column by Art Buchwald, famous satirist of the time, recently passed away in which he had General Westmoreland posing as General Custer and saying we got we got sitting bull on the run and that was supposedly hysterical and had a lot of play. Arthur Schlesinger, "the court historian" of the Kennedy administration wrote a damning essay comparing Khe Sanh to Dien Bien Phu, the French catastrophe during the colonial wars and had had not only forecast a similar fate to the Americans there, but had done so in such a way that the media at least had reported that Lyndon Johnson had said, "I don't want no damn Dien Bien Phu." Later he denied saying that. But that French military catastrophe was on everybody's mind and Schlesinger's piece brought that to the fore. We had most famously Richard Evans I think I the Wall Street Journal wrote a very I guess analytical, empirical essay in the conservative Wall Street Journal that summarize that Vietnam was lost. We had some other people who had been involved with the Wise Men, Dean Achison, most notably, Clark Clifford, remember was coming in to replace Robert McNamara. All of them had been on the record and that had been leaked in private conversations, that we could not win. Perhaps most famously was Walter Cronkite, who has went to Vietnam, he wanted an hour show and that was cut down to 30 minutes, but he traveled extensively through Vietnam and when he came back, I think it was aired February 26th and he made that famous editorial summation at the end of his hard hitting investigative report that, we were we could not win and we couldn't lose, we were in a stale mate and with honor we had to ask for terms, negotiated. All of this then was happening on television, remember this was the time when television there was not 500 channels, 65 percent of the people watched who watched television got their news from Huntley or Brinkley or Walter Cronkite. And we don't have time but if you see some of reporting from Frank McGee parallel to that, so most thirds of the American households had got an official that the source of their official news had been told the war could not be won. So we had op-eds, we had articles, we had cartoons, we had television documentaries, we had still pictures and that was imbued in the American psyche that some thing had got wrong. And yet however one interprets that risky divination of polls, the American people still by majority wanted to win in Vietnam. How did the politics, let me go to the military how did the military react to this media outrage? I think they didn't help themselves, remember that General Westmoreland, as I said, on three occasions earlier had assured people that things were getting better. He didn't say that we were going to win, but he assured things that things were getting better. In a very pressing observation, he said that we would turn things over to the Vietnamese within two years, almost a glimpse of what became Nixon's Vietnamization policy. But they did a couple of things, I think that were quiet mistaken. The first thing they did after assuring the American people quiet correctly, that we had won a great military victory and inflicted untold damages, I said on the enemy, they put in a request, a stealthy request and it was leaked to the New York Times, as always has leaked as every thing is always leaked to the New York Times, that they needed an additional 205 or 210,000 more troops. And so immediately the public said, if we won in Vietnam and we were winning in Tet and we have more troops than we have ever had, why do we need another 205,000 troops. And they did not come out with an explanation, at least a convincing explanation on why that was so, and the Johnson administration denied it. Second thing I think that besides this request for troops, it was not handled well, and besides the pre Tet assurances that things were getting better, they did not tell the American people why we had put so much investment in Khe Sanh. You could argue that it was a killing field, that we wanted to kill great numbers of the enemy. You could argue that it was a strategic landing place up near the DMZ, but they made none of those arguments. Instead through Operation Pegasus, we had a land bridge cut out to Khe Sanh, we got the beleaguered garrison out and then we destroy the camp. And almost immediately the media took that up and said, if that was so important and people died, why did you destroy that camp? And there wasn't really a convincing explanation of why that was so. And then we in June, I think it was necessary adjustment, but when General Westmoreland was kicked upstairs and General Abrams took over, at the same time we had a change in Defense Secretaries. The impression was that we had entered a period of crisis. What was the political reaction to this? Well you would have thought, given the military advantage that the President would have, announced he was running for a second term and wanted to intensify the bombing up the North and if he wasn't willing to have more troops, at least express confidence in his soon to be replacement General Abrams. Instead from what we can tell, Lyndon Johnson in a series of interviews was absolutely stunned. I think it would be almost be fair to characterize him; he was stricken to a point of inaction at some point. He didn't even tell his closest advisors he was considering not running. And when the news came out about the New Hampshire primaries and Bobby Kennedy's unexpected attacks on him, he announced that he was not going to run for President on March 31st and almost nobody knew it until the day before he made the announcement. And it left the Democratic Party absolutely in shambles and then more importantly he didn't really coordinate with the military but announced a unilateral bombing halt and in addition to that a unilateral request for negotiations, even though the North Vietnamese had not been willing to do that before and even though within two weeks the North Vietnamese have announced to the world press that they did not see much advantage in having such negotiations. In other words after we have killed 40,000 of the enemy and we had destroyed the South Vietnamese Vietcong based army for probably about a year and a half, they were scattered, and after we had really inflicted serious damage on the regular army of North Vietnam and after we had been bombing we called a unilateral halt to the bombing. The result of that was that enemy was shaken and there was a lot of acrimony among the North Vietnamese, then quickly decided that, well their expressed purpose to actually grab these cities and hold them and then sweep into Saigon had failed, they noticed immediately that they had scored an amazing psychological victory. A psychological victory that would lead to changes in military strategy and operations on the part of the United States and it did, they were given an immediate reprieve from bombing and more importantly they felt that they had dethroned or knocked out or had enough influence to change the politics in United States and had gotten rid of a sitting US President. And it was quite an effective performance in the part of North Vietnam in that sense. Now I would like to finish with a couple of observations about self critique, civilian control of the military and why the western tradition is so effective militarily precisely because of this emphasis on individuality and free expression. Remember that Western Civilization as we know going to back to the Greeks prices the idea that a civilian militarism I should say, or civic militarism, the idea that the soldier is a citizen first, a private property owner in many cases and he has certain rights and responsibilities with his officers and the civilians control the military, that's deeply imbued in the western tradition. And part of that tradition means that people criticize the manner of operations as they transpire and part of the beauty of that system is that in reaction to this challenge and response the military operations become better. After all I mean after the Athenians brutally took Milos in 416 BC, Euripides wrote a play about it immediately, called The Trojan Women, criticizing that policy. All one has to do is read the sixth and seventh book of Thucydides to see the acrimony that was involved over this Sicilian Expedition and all of the enterprises in Athens, and out of that usually came someone to the fore better advice. It was not it was not some Numidian or it was not some Carthaginian, who says that we make it a desert and call peace. That was a Roman critic - Republican policy. If you think of the most autocratic period in the West, when the notion of consensual government was most threatened, perhaps in 16th Century Spain, right in the middle of the conquest of Tenochtitlan by Hernán Cortés, he was given a writ from the Spanish Government arguing that he should not continue because of the brutality from Narváez. And once he was in there Bishop Sahugun wrote a series of criticism of Cortés. When the British were involved in the Zululand Wars of 1879, the Bishop the family of Bishop Colenso appealed directly to Victorian Statesmen to stop this war of extermination against the Zulu. There has always been this tradition, both moral and ethical, and also militarily how to re-find operations as they transpire. And indeed during Tet, this system, this long tradition of this system worked pretty well in some sense. In other words people really did see that there was limitations to search and destroy, that General Westmoreland was not an effective communicator, that you could not simply go and fortify Khe Sanh and claim that it was a strategic asset and then withdraw without explaining that to the public. And so these changes were made, General Abrams took over and I think you can argue that both on the ground and especially in the air if you compare the bombing campaigns between Rolling Thunder and Linebacker, they were quantitatively more effective. And all of that came in part as the result of criticism by Americans of all different classes and positions. So it was healthy. And there had been a tradition of this as I said throughout the West. But something happened in Vietnam that evolved a long western tradition that was salutary and is something that was pernicious. And what were those factors that turned legitimate criticism of military operations and legitimate ethical and moral concern about the performance of US forces in the field into something that was a antithetical to the very idea of offering an alternative to what had been a murderous Stalinism, Chinese call it communism. What was it? What were these larger trends that made criticism turn into something that was nihilistic? I think the answer to that is of some concern to us tonight because the same factors are working, as we see Iraq, but at a much better speed. The first of course is this was the first war where we had global communications, satellite communication. So it was very possible to walk up to a marine in Vei and have somebody with a journalism degree from Columbia, 23-24 and stick a microphone into his mouth and say, what you think this is like? And if he had just lost somebody killed, or if he had been involved in the theatre, one or two blocks, he was able to say this sucks or this is bad and that could be broadcast to living rooms all over the United States not as an anecdote of one person in one city in one campaign, but as a complete emblem of the entire about the entire war. In other words there were young people who were broadcasting, unedited, on the ground reports in Vietnam that were not being altered and they were being presented as if they were systematic analysis. And that was something that had not happened before. I know that it's a cliché, but believe me, if people had done that at D-day, I don't have to say D-day, if they had it done two weeks after D-day, when that brilliant campaign that lost 3,500 had unfortunately turned into six weeks in the hedgerows, it would take 80,000 dead, wounded, missing, because somebody in the strategic planning sphere of the D-day operations had not asked what is the [0:32:57] ____? If somebody had stuck a microphone into a soldier, 101st Airborne and said, what do you think these hedgerows don't you think somebody should have told you what a Tiger Tank is? Don't you think somebody should have told you what a Panzerfaust was and he would say this sucks; it's terrible. That would have had an enormously damning effect. So we had not come to terms with that reality in Vietnam, it was new and we are coming to terms now to a great much greater degree because it is expanded not just from instantaneous television and radio but to literally at real time on the internet, private emails, telephone calls daily. And that makes it much harder to conduct operations. Married with that first trend is even a more challenging trend that we are now at epic point in our civilization, we are the most leisured and wealthy civilization in the history of the planet. In other words we are asking you, this we did in Vietnam to live a comfortable suburban existence and to go over in to the seventh ring of Dante's Inferno and fight somebody who has nothing or if anything to lose. You could ask somebody to go to Coal Harbour and suffer that misery if they were trying to be a hard scrabbled farmer in a Michigan countryside and they didn't think there was much different between the two. I asked my father once, how did you fly 39 missions on a B-29 over Japan, 1600 miles each way, at night with poor communications and being told you had to smoke a pack a day and take Benzedrine to stay awake. And he said, you didn't know what it was growing up on 20 acres and the depression, it is a picnic in comparison. But not so Vietnam, we were asking very affluent people to do something that was very dangerous and dirty and awful. And the bridge between western foot soldiers at home and abroad now is like it has never been on the history of military affairs. We are asking people in Iraq who have a $250,000 Bachelor's Degree from West Point and wives and children, a beautiful home and a guaranteed future to go over to Anbar province and fight somebody, may be Ahmed, one of 15 children, where five or six had been killed or didn't make it pass the age of six because of childhood diseases, who can take a $100 RPG and shoot it into his helicopter and kill him and everything he represents and all that investment and the way that military discuss both there and here, we will consider that is an asymmetrical equation. But that will hurt us more than it will be if that helicopter lands on Ahmed. And that's it has never happened before. And when you marry that with an instant revelation to people back home and very, very luxurious and ample circumstances, it makes it very hard to conduct infantry battle. And finally, there is a third element that happened during Tet and has only increased today as we look at the similar situation in some sense in Iraq and that's the idea, what I would call now post modernism, but I think it would be could called during the Vietnamese period, utopianism. And that was the idea that after World War II, there had been not a large conventional war involving United States soldiers. There had been affluence of home and there had come and involved in an idea that war in itself was a aberration. It was a mistake, it was rare. This is very different than any period in the history of western civilization. Plato said that peace is a parenthesis; war is a natural order of things. Heraclitus said, war is the father of us all. The Greeks had taught us that it was a tragedy and the way you prevented it, it was like rust, it was always there. And it was a natural order and you only prevented through deterrence and vigilance. But because of our privileged circumstances and the circumstances of our interior lives, we began to think that war was an aberration and that we through greater education, money, cut out law, whether through international organizations or diplomacy and sometimes we can of course, but if you look at some of the reactions to Tet, it was thinking gone up side down. Why in the world, human nature being what it is would a North Vietnamese opponent who found that they had achieved unexpectedly a psychological boon suddenly want to stop fighting? They will only stop fighting if they thought they were going to lose and be killed, but to think that was retrograde, it was suggesting that the primordial limbic system of our brain still ruled us and that was completely impossible in an area of utopianism and peace studies in other words. All of those have all of those confront this in Iraq today. And that's what General Petraeus as he testify today and tomorrow is up against. He is up against the war where everything he does would be instantly translated, and unfiltered and editorialized by people within seconds. He understands that he not only has to ask soldiers to leave a very comfortable existence to go to one very not comfortable, but that he has to expect that people who send them will not object to that. And he has to understand that the mindset of Americans today is therapeutic rather than tragic. They don't accept certain natural limits on life, that we all die, that is particularly tragic fashion. We don't all live to be 90 and fall asleep in a restroom, that war and sickness and disease have plagued us for years and we try to do the best we can and just because you are not perfect doesn't mean that you are not good. So he is dealing with all this. I would like to sum up by a very controversial thing that the famous historian John Keegan wrote at the end of his classic book, "The Face of Battle". And it was severely criticized for it was published in 1975 and he had just discussed the tremendous carnage at the Battle of the Somme, when the British forces under General Haig lost 20,000 men within two hours. And he argued that after World War I and after World War II, he did not think that a generation of westerners would be able to would be able to engage in infantry battle in a systematic fashion. And people argued, laughed at that, because quite soon after that came the Falklands and then the First Gulf War. But I think he was on to something. I think that if the present trends come true, it will be very hard for the United States to send ground troops at a far distant country and fight an unconventional war that is not played at the strength of western the western military tradition, against a foe who was far poor and far more desperate on us than we are and explained it in such a fashion. And if that's true we may have come to the end of classical infantry battles as we have known it and our wars will be those that we want to fight, that we choose to fight, but our enemies may choose not to fight. And I think that's a very that's one of the lessons of Tet and I think it's a very disturbing one indeed. Thank you very much.