Word: tet
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...revolver aimed at Bay Lop's temple and the grimace on his face are etched into the memory of every American who read a newspaper in 1968. His summary execution by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of South Vietnam's national police, during the second day of the 1968 Tet offensive in Saigon altered U.S. public opinion about what was at stake in the war as much as any other event did. A quarter-century later, the victim's widow Nguyen Thi Lop, 60, lives in a decrepit house on the outskirts of what is now called Ho Chi Minh...
...fate of Lop, a captured Viet Cong captain, was a starkly dramatic moment in a nationwide battle that lasted 25 days and was fought in more than 100 cities, towns and military bases. Perhaps 37,000 South Vietnamese guerrillas and North Vietnamese soldiers died during Tet and subsequent cleanup operations. The losses of the American and Saigon-regime forces were about a tenth of that. Tet was a crushing defeat that practically annihilated the political and military capabilities of the Viet Cong. Yet the offensive marked the beginning of the end of U.S. involvement -- a disengagement freighted with national guilt...
...effort. "The American military was so huge we could not possibly destroy it, so we had to destroy America's will to fight," says legendary military strategist General Vo Nguyen Giap, who served as North Vietnam's Defense Minister in 1968. "And by that measure, the Tet offensive * succeeded." America's leaders had convinced their public that the war against communism was being won at a reasonable cost. Tet shattered that myth...
...will live on. Veterans of the war and of the antiwar movement may never entirely make peace with each other. In the year 2000, when they gather at conferences marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, they will still be arguing over Khe Sanh and Kent State, Tet and the Moratorium, just as old Union and Confederate soldiers relived and refought Antietam and Gettysburg well into this century, until they too had passed into history. That is the real bottom line on Vietnam: there is no statute of limitations. The war imposed a life sentence on an entire...
Last week, just before the arrival of Tet, the Vietnamese celebration of the lunar New Year, the worst violence yet erupted among 800 likely returnees ^ waiting for the flights home in a camp known as Shek Kong...