by Mark Moyar via Military History in the News
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. During the Tet holiday ceasefire, Vietnamese Communist forces attacked all of South Vietnam’s towns and cities in order to smash South Vietnamese government forces and incite popular uprisings. Many of the government’s soldiers and policemen were off duty during the holiday, enabling the Communists to infiltrate the towns and cities undetected and strike the first blows. But government forces rallied quickly, and everywhere the population rejected Communist appeals to take part in the uprising.
By Andrew J. Bacevich, The American Conservative: “A friend recently called my attention to a symposium on “The Meaning of Vietnam” that appeared in the June 12, 1975 issue of the New York Review of Books. Just weeks before, Saigon had fallen and the Republic of Vietnam had passed out of existence. The editors of the NYRB considered the moment opportune for some of the paper’s regular contributors—leading lights of the East Coast intelligentsia—to assess the war’s significance and implications. ”
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Fifty years ago, the January 1968 battle laid bare the way U.S. leaders had misled the public about the war in Vietnam.
By Joseph J. Collins, Small Wars Journal: “I wanted the Burns epic to conclude with a discussion of strategic lessons, but alas, Burns and Novick left that to the viewers, bombarding them with different perspectives and personal vignettes. The series tried to spread understanding, but we are all prisoners of our own experiences and worldviews. It left some of us in the national security community yearning for something more concrete. ”