[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Tet offensive and the Impact on the Vietnam War
Making sense of Vietnam is difficult because the war was at a minimum a three-actor event (if one does not ascribe an independent purpose to the Vietcong, which one can do certainly after the early 1960's), wherein each player had different purposes. For the United States, the war was limited in terms of US purposes, if not always in firepower. For the North Vietnamese, the war was one of total political purpose that commanded the complete resources of the people, and the purpose was hardly less desperate for the leadership (if not necessarily the total population) of South Vietnam. Vietnam was, in other words, a war of asymmetrical purpose: the outcome was clearly more important to America's adversaries than it was to Americans.
The Vietnamese communist offensive against the urban cities that was launched during the holiday of Tet in 1968 is often portrayed as a decisive military win for the United States that was subsequently turned into a defeat by a news media misleading public opinion as to the real events of the Vietnam War. Turning this conventional explanation of the impact of Tet Offensive on the course of the Vietnam War on their head, Schmitz (history, Whitman College) analyzes the events of Tet, arguing that it was in fact a significant military, political, and economic defeat for the tactical assumptions of US leaders.
He also describes how policy makers in fact came to recognize the reality of the defeat, as opposed to simply responding to public reaction to the media's portrayal of events, a reaction that was in fact not all that great in the context of an already unpopular war. (Philbert, Robert E (1995)In the Vietnam War, a prolonged attack mounted by the Vietcong against Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and other South Vietnamese cities and hamlets (including the US Marine base at Khe Sanh), which began on 30 January 1968......
