Lionhead wrote:
Actually quite the opposite and in fact troop morale AFTER Tet was at an all-time high BECAUSE the VC had ‘com-out-to-ply’ and were curbs-stomped for the effort. Tet was initially a shock but quite along the lines of the Ardennes and Pearl Harbor with similar results in stiffening military resolve and morale. The US stomped the VC flat, which arguably was what the NV politicians and military wanted so they could ‘re-build’ from scratch. Any and all NVA formations that moved South were intercepted and destroyed. “Militarily” the US won every engagement they got into but as has been noted that’s very much NOT capable of winning a war if you don’t have a policy and end-goal planned as well which the US never did.
Tet actually only ‘worked’ in a sense that it caused a general loss of confidence and support from the US civilian leadership and population which arguably should have known better. (People tend to blame Jane Fonda for ‘loosing’ the war for us but in fact it was actually Walter Kronkite telling Americans the war could no longer be won that screwed us over. Fonda was a marginal “Hollywood” star whereas Walter was someone EVERY American trusted implicitly. When someone like that tells you that you can’t “win” even if you ARE winning you lose hope. He did, we did)
Militarily for both the VC and NVA it was a disaster but arguably, (as noted) it was far more so for the native VC groups than the NVA and worked to their advantage in the end.
To the OP the idea that the US ‘could’ go “all out” in Vietnam is false. The US could not even do that in Korea, we had to have and depended on additional UN forces that were not really available in Vietnam. (Yes we had “allied” support but it was neither as full nor as deep as that in Korea. It couldn’t be as US policy at the time didn’t allow it since they didn’t see it as needed)
Political and policy “goals” were never clear in Vietnam and without them you had everyone from the top down questioning why they were even there. Pile on top of that “engagement rules” and restrictions that handicapped what effort there was and a less than competent political ‘home team’ that we are supporting and the overall end effect is going to be failure. Vietnam was a ‘side-show’ and absorbed an inordinate amount of money, manpower and effort to the detriment of other US commitments.
What’s arguably “funny/sad” is that the situation was quite clear from the beginning that the US would never ‘win’ in Vietnam unless they in fact DID commit to the conflict fully, but as noted that was in fact the one thing we could NOT do. The whole “those who don’t know history…” truism shows clearly in Vietnam because you ended up with the exact same situation that allowed the “rebel” Colonies to “win” against the British way back when.
We weren’t ‘important’ enough to expend the required effort to subdue
Randy