Word: tet
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Popular history tells us that American troops were caught napping when North Vietnam launched the Tet offensive. Yet while Vietnam celebrated its new year, at least one top U.S. Army officer was practically lying in wait. General Fred Weyand couldn't stop American officials in Saigon from throwing a party on Tet's Eve, replete with Chinese firecrackers and a lawn band. Convinced of an imminent strike, however, Weyand kept his troops close to Saigon, and officers in his camp placed bets on the timing. All wagered that the strike would start between midnight...
...South Vietnamese allies won the battle, but it proved an empty victory. The American public perceived the attack as a sign that the war was amounting to endless folly. The U.S. military's request for 206,000 more troops became politically infeasible. Tet played a role in L.B.J.'s decision not to seek re-election. And young Army Major Colin Powell would later incorporate Tet's message into his doctrine that the U.S. should fight a war only with decisive force and vital interests at stake. --By Daren Fonda
During the Tet Offensive in 1968, the Vietcong under Communist leadership had massacred thousands of civilians in the village of Hue; after the war, the regime imposed a series of land reforms that drove thousands of South Vietnamese families into “re-education camps...
...course in Dallas on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when Kennedy was shot. Then much of the country's bold optimism soured as Americans watched the war in Vietnam spin out of control on the news. When Ho's forces surprised U.S. troops with the Tet offensive on Jan. 30, 1968, threatening Saigon, most Americans realized the government had been deluding itself that victory was close at hand. Disillusion was followed by despair when assassins shot King on April 4, 1968, and Robert Kennedy two months later, on June 5, and as young protesters overshadowed that summer's Democratic...
...book traces the evolution of this "ideology of brutal frontal assault." His case studies range from the Greeks' destruction of a Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis (480 B.C.) to the U.S. victory (in strictly military terms: the author acknowledges the political defeat) over the Viet Cong's Tet offensive...