Tet Offensive

If you stand back just far enough, history repeats itself. And we might just learn something from the outlines. The lesson comes from the Vietnam War. On January 30, 1968, during the Vietnamese New Year festival, approximately 85,000 combatants from the National Liberation Front (the so-called “Viet Cong”) and North Vietnam staged a surprise attack all across South Vietnam. The scale and the audacity of the campaign was unprecedented. But more than that, it was the surprise element that stood out. The offensive targeted over 100 locations, including cities, towns and military installations, and the capital of South Vietnam, then known as Saigon, hitherto immune from large-scale fighting.