Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive by Samantha M. "Tet", in Vietnamese, is a combination of a New Year’s Eve celebration and religious worship. It lasts for several days and is observed by most of the Vietnamese population. On January 30th, the DRV and the NLF launched coordinated attacks against the larger Southern cities. The Tet Offensive was designed to "break the aggressive will" of the Johnson administration and force Washington to the bargaining table. From the 1800’s until World War II, France governed Vietnam as part of French Indochina. In December of 1940, Vietnam established the League of Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh for South Vietnam. Viet Minh troops rescued downed U.S pilots, located Japanese prison camps, and helped U.S prisoners to the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The Second Indochina War, 1954-1975, grew out of the long conflict between France and Vietnam. Communist forces under the direction of General Giap defeated the allied French troops at Dien Bien Phu. On May 1954, the Viet Minh mounted an assault on the French fortress at Dien Bien. The battle of Dien Bien Phu resulted in the most humiliating defeat in French history. When Kennedy beat Eisenhower for President in 1961, he almost immediately dispatched a number of Special Forces Troops, known as the Green Berets, as combat advisers in Vietnam. Kennedy sent many armed helicopters piloted by Americans. In time, the skies became filled with helicopters or choppers, that the conflict became known as the "Chopper War". Within two hours after Kennedy took office, 15,000 members of the military forces were in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive was the false truce that Ho Chi Minh planned. It’s the one that Ho Chi Minh agreed upon publicly. General Giap and his Viet Cong forces attacked on January 30th and surprised more than one hundred cities. Tet is also a national holiday at the beginning of the New Year. Both North and South Vietnam thought the fighting would stop during the holiday, but Ho Chi Minh and General Giap had other ideas for the New Year. In 1967, they planned to pretend to go along with this celebration. When everyone was least expecting it, the North Vietnamese regular army and the Vietcong would launch an all-out offensive. The fighting began when Vietcong guerrillas, or big, husky, Vietnamese men, took over the American embassy building in Saigon. Insurgents, or people who revolt against authority, attacked close to one hundred cities throughout South Vietnam. Many soldiers and South Vietnamese civilians lost their lives On January 30th in Saigon, VC guerrillas armed with weapons from their secret coffin caches, blasted their way into the American embassy compound, killing several U.S. Marines. Tet’s violence hit the national capitals as well as six important and numerous military installations. In many ways, Tet was a failure to the Insurgents. This event was the turning point of the war. The fighting of the Tet Offensive began on January 30, 1968 at dawn. This happened in North and South Vietnam, especially in Saigon. The fighting didn’t take place in the rice fields, or in the lush mountainous regions where actually seeing the enemy is quite rare. It actually occurred within the borders of city streets and alleys. After years of watching the Vietnam War on television, Americans at home had become accustomed to a familiar pattern of images. In the U.S, North Vietnam would get its biggest benefit from Tet. In the U.S, on television, Americans saw all the terrible street fighting. They also saw what high prices the U.S was paying in the number of dead and wounded. Protests became very aggressive. The war had a major impact on life in America and the Johnson administration was forced to consider the domestic consequences of its decision’s everyday. Protests erupted on college campuses and in major cities. By 1968 every corner of the U.S seemed to have felt the war’s impact. Thousands of people came to protest American intervention in Vietnam and the leaders of the Democratic Party who continued to go after the war. Operation Rolling Thunder or the bombing missions, and the introduction of American combat troops on March 1965, caused the Communist Party to reassess its own war strategy. The Communist forces suffered tremendous casualties in the South and the massacre of thousands of non-communists in the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive created
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