Operation Commando Hunt Vietnam December 1968
The year 1968 in Vietnam opened with the Tet Offensive, and a goodly part of the year was taken up in dealing with the ramifications of that offensive, which though it had been a failure from a tactical viewpoint, was a major strategic victory for the North Vietnamese. American and South Vietnamese commanders had been stunned by the size of the Communist attack, which had been wholly unsuspected and supported with equipment and supplies which had been smuggled into position without prior detection by US forces or ARVN troops. The Americans were aware of the Ho Chi Minh trail, but interdicting material which moved along it was complicated by its traversal of portions of Laos.
In November 1968, knowing that the support of the American people for continuing the war was rapidly dwindling, President Johnson ordered a halt to Operation Rolling Thunder, the aerial bombardment of North Vietnam by US Air Force and Navy bombers, with the hope of bringing North Vietnamese to the peace bargaining table with more than just lip service towards ending the war. Doing so also freed American aircraft to shift their targets away from the heavily defended corridors around Hanoi and Haiphong, and towards the more vulnerable supply depots and roads on the Ho Chi Minh trail, the path down which much of the Tet Offensive had traveled.
What Commando Hunt did was shift the air war from Vietnam to Laos, at least as far as the aerial bombing was concerned. By the time the American involvement in Southeast Asia came to an end, the United States had dropped over three million tons of bombs on Laos, in attempts to destroy the communist pipeline to the south. By contrast, about one million tons of bombs were dropped on North Vietnam. Although the bombings in Laos were officially considered to be classified (as were similar operations in Cambodia) their existence was widely suspected and reported, leading the public to believe that Johnson was once again expanding the war.
When it was quietly announced that more than twenty thousand US Army and Marine troops would be subject to a second tour of duty in the combat zone it added to the perception that American involvement in the war was deepening. Anti-war protests increased, and the looming presence of the law and order candidate, Richard Nixon, became more and more of a shadow of the future. Nixon promised a secret plan to end the war.
Protests against the war increased as the backdrop to the already volatile presidential election which in its course had seen the assassination of one candidate, the withdrawal of another (who happened to be the sitting president of the United States), and the nation divided along the lines of whether support of American involvement signified patriotism or treason. For the first time in American history veterans of combat duty were ostracized upon their return by some of their fellow citizens. As 1968 drew to a close, it seemed as if the nation was irreversibly polarized.