The Tet Offensive Karsten Mok

‘The Tet Offensive was a massive defeat for the Vietcong.’ HFDYA?
Use the two page handout discussed in class AND the extra hand-out ‘Tet: Before
and After.’ I want to see quotes from BOTH these sources.
Structure: one paragraph for each side of the argument ( e.g. ’In some ways…’ ‘But
on the other hand, it could be argued…’) and then a short concluding argument
where you explain which side of the argument you come down on and why…

In some ways, I agree that the Tet offensive was a massive defeat for the Vietcong.
Although the Vietcong took the Americans and South Vietnamese by surprise, they
were eventually able to cope with them and causing massive casualties. With over
30000 Vietcong soldiers killed, it most definitely decimated most of the mainline
units, which having a relatively lower allied death count of 3400. In a military sense,
America has certainly won the war.
However, the Tet offensive directly widened the credibility gap in the US, where
lies of the government covered what was actually happening. From 1965 to 1967,
the disparity between government’s optimism and what was actually happening in
Vietnam became clearer and clearer. Famous and well-respected anchorman
Walter Cronkite asked ‘What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the
war!’ Another cartoon about the Tet Offensive by Herblock titled ‘everything’s
okay- they never reached the mimeograph machine’ further revealed to the public
that America was clearly losing the war while the government denied it.
Furthermore, what 60 million Americans see when they turn on the TV to watch
the network news was the chief of South Vietnam’s national police executing a
Vietcong suspect in the middle of a Saigon street, photographs of suffering
Vietnamese children are printed on the newspaper. How could Americans support
a supposedly democratic government when all they saw was the above.
Westmoreland, the US army general famously declared that the United States and
the South Vietnamese had inflicted devastating losses on the attackers. It was clear
to the American public that the allies were not winning the war, and the
government was lying to them.
In conclusion, the allies did win in the actual fight in the Tet offensive. However,
in a tactical sense, the propaganda that was brought up by this war that widened
the credibility gap in the US outweighed the victory mentioned above, turning the
war into a stalemate. Overall, if the Tet offensive was a massive defeat for one side,
it was for America, but not the Vietcong.