40th Anniversary of the Tet Offensive

[Recycled]

The years have gone by fast. 1968 was a wild year. I remember reading about the offensive, as I has just started reading and the newspaper opened a whole new world to me as a small fry.

 

It's interesting to look back at this and think about how the public's perception of Vietnam changed in just a few months. It was a real mind bender for a lot of people.

 

At least nobody's pushing the domino theory in Iraq.

[Jim]

Long time indeed. Unfortunately The Idiot and his team did believe that Iraq was the first domino. The wingnuts thought that peace and democracy would blossom, which would lead to popular movements in Saudi Arabia and Jordon, then the Palatinians would migrate in mass to these areas and greater Israel would become a reality without those pesky squaters. Take a read of "The Assassins Gate".

[Hugh Conway]

Sir, does this mean that Ann Margaret isn't coming to visit?

[ivan]

Sir, does this mean that Ann Margaret isn't coming to visit?

fucking awesome - aww...no morning dew!

[Choada_Boy]

Nothing hotter than a nice pair of Tets.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Nothing hotter than a nice pair of Tets.

 

Les Grands Tetons - tres bien!

 

[rob]

I worked with a guy who saw combat in Vietnam and was there during the Tet. He didn't talk about it a lot but he described some pretty intense urban fighting. He ended up getting shot in the elbow and was sent home.

 

It sounds like we inflicted some pretty heavy casulties on the enemy under some pretty intense conditions. Our Marines are pretty tough. Too bad they're abused by our government -- they deserve better.

[Mal_Con]

We won the Tet battle just like every battle in Nam, still lost the war. Problem was and is that you cannot win against an insurgency in another country by military means and leave it to quislings. Mao showed that 20 years before Tet.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

 

You can surely win against an insurgency. But you have to be brutal. We don't have the appetite for that.

 

The Vietnamese lost at least 2 million people in Vietnam, half military who were KIA. We lost around 58,000. A high price for "victory".

 

 

[ivan]

You can surely win against an insurgency.

indeed - the romans certainly had their ways

 

we beat a nationalist insurgency in near identical terrain in the phillipines just a few decades prior to vietnam (the filipinos not having allies feeding them tons of modern weapons helped)

[tvashtarkatena]

Brutality is not what defeats insurgencies. On the contrary, it is more often brutality that fuels them.

 

Academic studies of past insurgencies recommend a threshold troop to populace ratio and proper deployment. In the case of Iraq, these recommendations would require about half a million troops. Patreus did change deployment policies to bring them in line with these studies and achieved some positive results, but our troop deployment still falls far short of recommendations, as it has since the invasion.

 

Still, the past is the past, and the world is dynamic, and Iraq insurgency is proving to be a different animal than anything in the past, so the studies do not provide a complete playbook.

 

There are those who would argue, incorrectly, that brutality and torture are required to break an insurgency, but history proves that informants are much more effective in infiltrating such movements.

[lI1|1!]

actually you win a war against an insurgency with lots and lots of caffeine