Posted on 12/24/2019 3:19:23 AM PST by Kaslin
My Dad drove a supply truck in the 6th Armored Division. His unit was held up and didn’t make it to the battle. He said that saved his life. He said very little about it. Now with the 75th anniversary, I wished I knew more. Thanks for this thread.
Tet was a military disaster for the South Vietnamese communists, and completely put the war in the hands of the North Vietnamese alone. It couldn’t have been so disastrous for the North if four years later they launched the Easter Offensive (stopped only by US air intervention), and seven years after Tet they took the whole thing. The military realities were very clear in 1968.
I’d compare it to the Six Day War followed six years later by the Yom Kippur War; it was very clear Israel had been caught off guard because they overestimated the damage they’d done in 1967. They had no idea that so soon after a war against three countries, two of them could rebound so quickly; it was clear that they needed to re-think the whole dynamic in the area, and returned the Sinai in exchange for a peace with Egypt that has held to this day.
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