[DJ Taylor]

As tomorrow night is the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 Tet Offensive, I will now share with you my remembrances of the event.

[libertylover]

Thanks for sharing your story.

[JDoutrider]

Thanks DJ...

[Mark]

I was there also. I was back home in March. As I recall in my feeble memory, I read that the North Vietnam head General later wrote a book(His name Giap or similar)and he stated that he was preparing to surrender because they lost a lot during Tet, but then he read some of our news(Cronkite, etc) and he held on to the conclusion.

[bkopto]

a truce had been negotiated with the Communists, and both sides had agreed to a cease-fire during the two weeks of Tet

This is the problem right here. Two week vacations is not warfare. I don't know what it is, but its not war. It is pretend war. You are either in war or you're not. Thanks LBJ.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

The US Embassy was NOT destroyed. The Embassy Complex were entered but the 19 man VC team was decimated after fierce fighting that cost us some good Marine guards and soldiers.

See Don Oberdorfer’s massive book “TET” - The Turning Point in the Vietnam War”.

Also, go to the website of Vietnam Veterans for Factual History (www.vvfh.org) to read other personal reports about Tet at their onsite library.

They also have published and are continuing to publish “Yellow Books” for each year of the war (1963-1975), written by those who were there (military, diplomats and journalists) for specific subjects.

TET destroyed the VC as a full-fledged military force, their depleted ranks being filled by NVA from then on. I interviewed a coupled captured PAVN young soldiers in Cambodia in 1970, who thought they were fighting the Americans. They really didn’t know that they were in Cambodia. They belonged to the 6th Division, which later showed up at An Loc in 1972 where it was decimated.

TET also exposed the Viet Cong Infrastructure, their underground parallel government or shadow government, but civil and military. They lost a majority of their best cadre during the fighting and subsequent “offensives” of April-May 1968, summer 68 and the Spring Offensive of 1969/Fall Offensive (designed to aid the anti-Vietnam movement in the US by running up US casualties in the weeks before the demonstrations).

By 1970, the VCI in the Mekong Delta was collapsing to the point that top Provincial VCI leaders were defecting, which caused lower ranking VCI to conclude that the war was lost, and they defected (Choi Hoi program).

Very interesting story. Thanks for writing it.

[Eagles6]

Bkmk

[OKITRUMP77]

I was stationed 56 Air Commando Wing Nakhon Phanom, NE Thailand then.