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I was looking at Cracked.co and I cae across this article.
5 Embarrassing Failures History Class Turned Into Victories
In 1968, the Vietnam War was steadily escalating. The North Vietnamese (the commie bad guys) attempted to make one really big overwhelming push and win the war once and for all. Known as the Tet Offensive, the attack involved more than 80,000 troops attacking more than 100 towns and villages, and was the largest military action at that point in the war.
How History Remembers It:
The Tet Offensive signaled the turning point of the war for the North Vietnamese, and against the U.S.-backed South. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., this had started happening:
The people were starting to distrust their government in a serious way, and President Lyndon Johnson's administration found that it was almost completely unable to convince the American people that the war was still winnable.
"We have fire-breathing tanks! How can we not win?"
CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who at the time was the most trusted and recognizable name in news, went on TV and declared that the U.S. should basically just "negotiate, not as victors," because at best "the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate." Upon hearing this, Johnson was rumored to say, "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
After coming into office, President Richard Nixon initiated a policy of "Vietnamization" and withdrew troops from the region. This meant the North Vietnamese were free to take over South Vietnam, and the whole thing had been one huge, stupid waste.
"Don't feel bad, guys. One day, they'll turn this war into some pretty great movies."
The Reality:
The Tet Offensive resulted in a huge defeat for the communists.
Though initially the attacks caught the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces off guard, they pushed back hard and inflicted massive casualties, all but crippling the North Vietnamese military. The failure of the North Vietnamese was so great that far from being a demonstration of their imminent victory, American generals such as William Westmoreland believed that, after Tet, the North Vietnamese army was so damaged that it was finally on the verge of defeat.
But that wasn't the narrative that would survive in the press. Earlier we referred to these versions of history as "wishful thinking," but it's not that anyone short of the Viet Cong were rooting for the Americans to fail. It's just that those who believed the war was a dead end finally had their proof, whether or not the facts on the ground supported it. This was the story everyone opposed to the war had been waiting to tell.
If you hum "Ride of the Valkyries" loudly enough, you can ignore anything.
North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh actually called it a few years earlier when he said his side didn't need military victories, but only needed to hang on until the U.S. got sick of the whole thing and bailed out. So, who knows, maybe treating Tet as a disaster, and thus making it politically easier to start getting out, was the best thing that could have happened. But it's giving a whole bunch of credit to a North Vietnamese army that kind of got its ass kicked.
So after reading this I got an idea for a POD. If the US edia had not reacted the way they did and paid attention to US ilitary specialists; could the US have had enough support to continue the war and possibly win it?