Tet Perspective: Mr. Charles Baker
Charles Baker was an officer and pilot in the US Army’s 199th Recon Air Company. He began his deployment in July of 1967, and by the time Tet came, he was a Flight Operations Officer in the Mekong Delta. On the day before the offensive began, January 31st, his group received a paper with Intel. Mr. Baker and the other men deduced that the message said they would be attacked that night, but they didn’t believe it until noticing unusual sounds and lights around them.
That night, Mr. Baker was woken by mortar rounds. Bright fires on the runway compromised the concealment that the dark night provided, so take off was not an option. As there were gunshots all around, he made his way to the revetment and found his company, some of whom were already injured.
While Mr. Baker narrowly avoided being in the line of fire, he went to his Bird Dog—a small, combat airplane. He shot blindly into the night until the sun rose. Then, Mr. Baker could see just how many people had perished during the night. He began moving the dead and wounded off the battlefield. The Viet Cong’s caliber rounds continued while Mr. Baker was in his bunker and while he checked the flight line. After this first stretch of battle, the rest of Mr. Baker’s Tet experience is a blur. The Viet Cong had taken control of nearly every village in the Delta, so the next month was spent chasing them out.
Mr. Baker explaines that, aside from three wounded men, everyone in his group was left unharmed. He remembers that after Tet, things became quiet. They weren’t mortared for some time. However, the Viet Cong could not say the same—their own offensive backfired on them. According to Mr. Baker, the American soldiers had killed “great numbers” of Viet Cong fighters: “They really didn’t exist in the Delta any more after that.” Because of this destruction of the enemy, Mr. Baker deemed Tet:
"...one of the greatest numerical victories the American Army ever had."1
Interestingly, Mr. Baker’s account perpetuates one of the myths that Moïse refuted—that the Tet Offensive almost entirely destroyed the Viet Cong. If the staggering Viet Cong death toll and nonexistent American one that Baker describes is an accurate microcosm of the offensive, then the Viet Cong would have been nearly wiped out. However, we cannot assume that this one clash during the Tet Offensive is representative of all others without further research.
1Charles Baker, Interview with Charles Baker, interview by Jason Stewart, Charles Baker Collection, Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, February 8, 2010, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=OH0745.