Word: tet
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...American public officials lied to each other and to the public over the course of the long war. Specifically, a CBS documentary ("The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception") showed how the U.S. military successfully strove to "supress and alter" estimates of Communist forces in Vietnam before the January 1968 Tet offensive...
...would rout communists from the political "infrastructure" and preserve our control of the presidential palace. That theory justified escalation after escalation for 12 bloody years, through more than 57,000 American and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese deaths. Ultimately, we were in Vietnam not to "win" the war--for Tet hammered home the realization that this was unrealistic--but to attain "peace with honor," a euphemism for an agreement which would allow us to withdraw our troops and preserve face...
...Richard McArthur, recalled that his estimates of enemy strength had been halved by superiors while he was on vacation. The U.S. commander in charge of producing the official estimate of enemy forces sent to the Pentagon and the White House wrote to his wife in March 1968, shortly after Tet began...
Wallace produced one of the most effective moments in the program when he confronted Westmoreland about his distortion of the enemy troop estimates in the wake of the Tet offensive. Wallace showed that, according to the government figures at the time, the entire North Vietnamese army had been wiped out in Tet. This was, of course, absurd; the North scored an important tactical victory by demonstrating the ability to stage attacks simultaneously in every important South Vietnamese city, and in any case went on fighting for some time thereafter. What the documentary failed to mention, however, was that the illogic...
...Viet Nam memorial is a loser. The proposed monument may satisfy the needs of the Washington Mall but it fails to impart what the war meant to those who fought it. In 1968 newsmagazines printed a photo of a U.S. army tank carrying soldiers wounded in Hue during the Tet offensive. That picture says more about the pain and sacrifice Americans suffered than the proposed "hole in the ground...