| True about the Tet Offensive DTop and I was aware of how that all went down. It was the great invisible victory for the USA: The Vietcong were almost entirely wiped out as an effective fighting force and the NVA had to smuggle their regulars in to compensate. Sadly, this is not what the American people saw. The American public had just been told that "we are winning and its almost over." Then the Tet Offensive happened and (similar to not finding WMD's in Iraq) it made the White House and Military look pretty stupid.
Its unfortunate that the American public did not know that the Vietcong self-destructed in the Tet Offensive. From the Military point of view, the enemy came out into the open and was absolutely demolished by the resulting US/SVA counterattacks. To use the Castle image, the enemy opened the gates, lowered the drawbridge, went charging headlong right into vastly superior forces and got their asses handed to them. Charge of the Light Brigade all over again, and they took an unrecoverable number of casualties. But anciently or in modern times, the immediate result is that everyone on the opposing side assumes that their enemy must be a lot stronger than previously believed. Afterall, nobody would be stupid enough to commit suicide on the field of battle, right? But the Vietcong did exactly that.
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"It is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it."
- General Robert E. Lee
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