Word: tet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Communists also paid another kind of price. By choosing for their attack the time of Tet, the sacred family time of the year for the Vietnamese, they undoubtedly alienated major portions of the population. They also brought bullets and bombs into the very midst of heavily populated areas, causing indiscriminate slaughter of civilians caught in the crossfire and making homeless twice over the refugees who had fled to the cities for safety. Moreover, they totally misjudged the mood of the South Vietnamese. Believing their own propaganda, the Communists called for and expected a popular uprising to welcome the raiders...
...timing and total effect, the Communist offensive changed the rules of the war in a way that will make it more difficult for the enemy in the future. In making a mockery of the Tet truce, proposed in the first instance by the Viet Cong and reluctantly agreed to by the allies, the Communists, as U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker indicated, made it highly unlikely that there would ever be a holiday truce again. By demonstrating their resources of manpower, the resiliency of their communications and command networks and the quality and quantity of their weaponry in the widespread attacks...
Into Saigon in the days just before Tet slipped more than 3,000 Communist soldiers armed with weapons ranging up to machine-gun and bazooka size. Some came openly into the open city, weapons concealed in luggage or under baskets of food, riding buses, taxis and motor scooters, or walking. Others came furtively: some of the Viet Cong who attacked the U.S. embassy had ridden into town concealed in a truckload of flowers. Once in town, they hid their weapons. Only after the attack did Vietnamese intelligence realize that the unusual number of funerals the previous week was no accident...
...coastal cities of Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa and Nha Trang, leapfrogged over into the highland cities of Kontum and Pleiku and continued southward into the Delta?where some of the first attacks came only at week's end. The timing was as sequential as a mammoth string of Tet firecrackers going off one after the other, obviously aimed at tying down allied forces the progressive length of the country...
...arms with the Communists and help overthrow the Thieu government. In Hué and Saigon, the Communists announced the formation of revolutionary Committees of the Alliance of National and Peace Forces. But throughout South Viet Nam there were few takers. In Danang, when a Viet Cong rose at a Buddhist Tet service with a pistol in one hand and a bullhorn in the other, bidding the crowd to support the "uprising," the Buddhists seized him and his two comrades and turned them over to the South Vietnamese police...