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Tet 1968 in the highlands

War and resistance Explainer 13 views 4 min read Back

In the early hours of January 30, 1968, the Tet Offensive reached the highland towns of Ban Me Thuot, Kontum and Pleiku; Dalat was attacked on February 1. For a week or more the fighting was in the streets. The towns were our market towns and provincial capitals, and the villages around them carried the war before, during and after.

A US Army map of Kontum city showing the town, the airfield, roads and the Dak Bla river — Kontum city, from a US Army Map Service series of the war years. US Army Map Service, via the US National Archives and Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The towns

Town	Fighting	What the record says
Ban Me Thuot	January 30–February 6	Attacked by three North Vietnamese battalions and local forces. A CIA situation report of February 2: “all parts of the town have been badly damaged from mortar fire and B-40 rockets.” By March most of the provincial government had stopped working.
Kontum	From January 30	Attacked early on January 30 by three battalions of the 24th North Vietnamese Regiment with a local-force and a sapper battalion; the CIA reported that they had apparently occupied several government installations. US 4th Infantry Division troops fought them in the city, and on February 2 the CIA reported that control “remained in doubt.”
Pleiku	January 30–February 4	A rocket barrage on the airfield, then an assault into the town. On February 7–8 the Montagnard Training Center was mortared.
Dalat	February 1–11	Attacks on the railway station, two US billets, a South Vietnamese Army outpost and the sector headquarters.

The enemy dead the US command reported for the four towns total nearly 2,800. It did not break down civilian losses by town. For the whole of II Corps, which included the coastal provinces as well as the highlands, its report counted 814 civilians killed, 2,919 wounded, 97,101 made homeless and more than 10,000 homes destroyed.

Highlanders in the fighting

Highland soldiers of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group, recruited and trained in the Special Forces camps, were brought into the towns: the US field report records that at Kontum two CIDG companies and Montagnard scout companies met the first assault, and that at Dalat on February 4 three CIDG companies reinforced the hard-pressed regional forces. Across South Vietnam there were 108 highland (“Trường Sơn”) Revolutionary Development teams, some 6,770 men, in January 1968 (see Mike Force and SOG and The American years).

In the villages

A CIA field report from Darlac, written in March 1968 from information gathered in the weeks before Tet, records what the Viet Cong asked of the villages: highland men would “have to carry food and ammunition for the Army of Liberation when the time came and also to act as guides”; villagers were told to save rice for the soldiers and eat vegetables instead; and a man could leave the village only alone, his family staying behind “in bond so to speak.” They had, the report says, been promised victory every year since 1964. After Tet a US observer reported that people in Ban Me Thuot who had spoken for the government before had “adopted a neutral attitude,” and that fear pervaded the town.

Also in the same weeks

Eight weeks before Tet, on December 5, 1967, the village of Đắk Sơn was burned with flamethrowers (see Đắk Sơn, 1967). At Ban Me Thuot the fighting also reached the mission compound (see Missions and doctors).

What is missing

No source we have found counts the highland civilians killed or made homeless in the Tet battles, as distinct from the lowland provinces. The numbers above come from American military and intelligence reports, which counted what their authors needed to count. If your family lived in or near one of these towns in 1968, we would like to hear what happened.

See also: Highland women in the war.

Sources

Compiled September 2026. Enemy casualty figures are those claimed by the US command at the time and are given only as the record states them.

tet 1968 tet offensive ban me thuot kontum pleiku dalat cidg civilians refugees war

FULRO, 1964–1992 On September 20, 1964, five armed camps in Darlac rose at once, and a movement was announced: the United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races. It lasted twenty-eight years and three weeks, longer than the war that produced it, and ended in October 1992 when its last fighters walked out of the Cambodian forest and handed their rifles to Un... Explainer 47 views Read More Pushed off, 1954–57 In 1954 the French lost and left. In 1955 Ngo Dinh Diem merged our country into the Republic of Vietnam. From 1956 his land development centers moved Vietnamese settlers onto highland soil in numbers our records put at around 850,000. No government objected, and the word the policy used for itself was assimilation. Explainer 46 views Read More 1975, and what came after The Republic of Vietnam collapsed in our highlands first: Ban Me Thuot fell on March 11, 1975, and the retreat from the plateau turned into a rout that reached Saigon seven weeks later. What followed for the Dega was not peace. It was reprisal, and the reprisal has not clearly ended. Explainer 27 views Read More The American years, 1961–1975 It began in one Rhade village in October 1961 with two Americans and no authority to speak of, and grew within a year into an armed network covering 200 villages and 60,000 people. Dega soldiers became among the most reliable troops in the highlands. By the end, over 200,000 of our people were dead and 85 percent of our villages destroyed or aba... Reference 44 views Read More BAJARAKA, 1958 Four peoples in one acronym: BAhnar, JArai, RAde, KAho. A movement that asked for our country with letters and demonstrations, whose leaders were arrested for it and held for five years, and whose survivors came out of prison in 1964 to found something that carried weapons. Changelog 54 views Read More Four highland towns The four towns of the highlands that the world knows — Buôn Ma Thuột, Pleiku, Kon Tum and Đà Lạt — all carry highland names, and all grew up on highland land as posts of someone else’s government. This page gives each one’s name, its origin, and the few dates that matter. Reference 21 views Read More