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4 A Time for Heroes The Tet Offensive THE TET O FFENSIVE was the crushingly ironic series of battles that sealed the fate of the American military effort in South Vietnam. Having devoted thousands of lives to their war of attrition, American forces had arguably achieved a great measure of success by the opening of 1968, imposing prodigious losses on communist forces. Even so, the VC and the NVA, in their revolutionary zeal, believed that ultimate victory beckoned through a military “propaganda of the deed” and that an offensive targeting the vulnerable urban areas throughout South Vietnam would provoke a mass uprising, overthrow the Saigon regime, and oust its American backers. Additionally, the communists, as they had throughout the conflict, designed their military planning with careful attention to the U.S. homefront1 and hoped both to prey upon the fickle will of the American people and to spur antiwar elements in the United States to greater levels of protest. However, recent history also suggests that the communist leadership undertook the Tet Offensive as something of a desperate gamble—unsure if the critical morale that undergirded the NVA and VC war effort was sufficient to withstand several more years of attrition. Tet proved to be an unmitigated military disaster for both the NVA and especially the VC. The insurgents had chosen to stand and fight, but in the end the population did not rise up and left the VC and NVA to suffer severe losses at the hands of U.S. and ARVN firepower. Driven from the cities, and with the VC smashed as an effective fighting force, the communists were forced onto the defensive and surrendered land that had been under their control for years. Apart from the physical losses suffered during Tet, the ambivalence of the South Vietnamese population forced the communists to consider the nearly unthinkable possibility that the people of South Vietnam were something more than the unwitting stooges of American imperialism. The losses 95 and the realization that South Vietnam was more resilient than they had ever imagined led the communists to several conclusions. The war would be longer and more difficult than even they had imagined and, with the loss of so many VC cadre, would also become increasingly more conventional in nature, thus playing to the strengths of the U.S. and ARVN forces. However, even as the communists faced the specter of their own military fallibility, the will of the United States to persevere in the Vietnam War began to implode. The critical events of 1968 are seared into the American consciousness and national psyche, painful pictures that tell the story of a war gone awry: vivid images including Westmoreland’s pre-Tet confident prediction, made in November 1967, that “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view. . . . The enemy ’s hopes are bankrupt”;2 scenes of bitter fighting in the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon; the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite declaring that the war could not be won; Lyndon Johnson, worn down and beaten by years of war, declining to run again for the presidency; American cities on fire; and riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. The disparate elements of disunity, ranging from the growth of the counterculture to dissatisfaction with a war that nobody really understood, came together powerfully in one critical moment that perhaps best defined the limitations of the American century. Historical and popular attention has focused on this most central moment of the uniquely American tragedy that was the Vietnam War, attention that seeks to explain how such an overwhelming tactical victory actually led to eventual defeat. Scapegoats for the sorry situation abound. Westmoreland was at fault because he had never really understood the Vietnam War at all. Politicians were at fault, for they had hamstrung the valiant efforts of the U.S. military. The media were at fault for their tireless efforts to turn the American populace against the war. Much American scholarship, though, has left a rather glaring hole in our understanding of the Tet Offensive and its place in the Vietnam War. Though the VC and the NVA often play leading roles as the story’s protagonists, the ARVN and the South Vietnamese population are often consigned to the footnotes and sidebars of the history of the offensive and its aftermath. The popular historical view is flawed, for in most ways the Tet Offensive was a fratricidal affair, aimed at destroying the ARVN and provoking an...

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