The offensive began in the sky—with a shattering barrage of at least 12,000 rounds of rocket, mortar and artillery fire across the Demilitarized Zone, which divides North and South Viet Nam. Said Specialist Fourth Class Michael Hill, a U.S. adviser with ARVN units in the area: "It was like nothing we ever expected and nothing we ever saw." Then came the ground attack. Some 25,000 North Vietnamese troops, with Russian-built tanks and artillery, swept down through Quang Tri province, sending 50,000 refugees fleeing south and U.S. advisers scurrying to their helicopters. As his stunned military forces struggled to regroup, President Nguyen Van Thieu appeared on TV to deliver a grim ten-minute speech. "This is the final battle to decide the survival of the people," he said.
There may have been a touch of apocalyptic hyperbole in Thieu's words. Nonetheless, there was no doubt that the North Vietnamese had launched their largest offensive in South Viet Nam since Tet 1968. Hanoi clearly was seeking a decisive military victory that would both display the impotence of Thieu's regime and embarrass Richard Nixon politically. For Washington, and indeed for Saigon, it was the first real test of Vietnamization, a policy that the Administration had pursued—at a cost of 12,000 U.S. lives and three more years in a divisive and unpopular war—in order to buy time until the South Vietnamese could defend their own soil. To the Administration, however, the Communist attack was an opportunity as well as an uncertain challenge. The White House is convinced, as one official put it last week, that "if the Vietnamese fight well, this will hasten the end of the war considerably." In short, Washington felt—perhaps too optimistically—the fighting could mean an end to the stalemate, both on the battleground and at the Paris talks.
New Front. The early drama focused on the north, where the Communist onslaught swirled around some names familiar to many American G.I.s: Camp Carroll, Camp Fuller, Camp Ann, Alpha Two, Alpha Four. It also added something startlingly new to the war: heavy Soviet weapons, including tanks (ranging from light PT-76s to heavy T-54s of World War II vintage), artillery (up to modern 130-mm. guns with a 19-mile range) and even SA-2 missiles. By week's end, as the northern fighting settled down to a wary probing of defenses around Quang Tri city and Hué, the offensive boiled up in other areas.