The Tet holiday is the biggest one on the Vietnamese calendar, and Lansdale and his colleagues had been up until four o’clock in the morning on the previous day reveling with Vietnamese friends. “We shot off giant strings of firecrackers . . . we ate Tet cakes and watermelons, and we drank rice and ginseng wine,” Lansdale recalled, completely unconscious of the chaos that would envelop the city in a few hours. Then they had spent the afternoon of January 30 “delivering Tet gifts to various Vietnamese friends.” Everyone was “a bit tuckered out when night came again.”
