Word of the Day
Tet (tet)
Common clue: Vietnamese holiday
Tet Nguyen Dan, commonly known as 'Tet', is the Vietnamese New Year which is based on the Chinese calendar, a lunisolar calendar.
It is celebrated on the same day as Chinese New Year (or the Spring Festival) and shares many of the same customs. Tet occurs around late January or early February. Many Vietnamese prepare for Tet by cooking special holiday foods and cleaning the house. On Tet, Vietnamese visit their families and temples. Children are treated special on Tet; they are given money in red envelopes, called lì sì, by friends and relatives. Other common practices on Tet include firecrackers, dragon dances and lion dances which ward off evil spirits and bring in good luck for the new year.
It was the occasion of the notorious Tet offensive in 1968.
The Tet Offensive was a series of battles in the Vietnam War. It was a major offensive by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) beginning on the night of January 30-31, 1968, Tet Nguyen Dan (the lunar new year day). It involved military action in almost every major city in southern Vietnam and attacks on the US firebase at Khe Sanh. The objective of the 1968 Tet Offensive was to stimulate an uprising; a means that the Vietnamese had previously employed to overthrow oppressors. The Viet Cong (VC) and NVA hoped that South Vietnamese would emerge from their homes when the series of attacks began and assist in overthrowing South Vietnam's government. The plan failed; no uprising ensued.
The NLF and the NVA lost around 35,000 men killed, 60,000 wounded and 6,000 POWs for no military success. The US and ARVN dead totalled around 3,900 (1,100 US). But this was not the conflict as the US public saw it. US media reports of the battles shocked both the American public and its politicians. Apparently the depth of the US reaction surprised even the North Vietnamese leadership.
The NVA suffered a heavy military defeat but it is widely seen to have been an enormous psychological and propaganda victory. Until the Tet Offensive, General William Westmoreland's now-infamous public reports of the progress of the Vietnam War were highly fictionalized and exaggerated to appear positive for the American public, often using exaggerated bodycounts and other inflated numbers. Developing reports of the Tet Offensive severely undercut the upbeat war propaganda of the Johnson administration and The Pentagon, and served to unite previously divided public opinion towards opposing the war. When the news broke that a squad of VC had gained access to the American Embassy in Saigon, the event quickly came to epitomize the disparity between the facts and official statements, despite the squad's ineffectiveness and rapid subdual. Support for the Vietnam War began to steadily erode from that point on, until the release of the Pentagon Papers largely confirmed the deliberate practice of "covering-up" various facts about the progress of the war. After the Tet Offensive, the main issue of public debate would be "how to securely withdraw" from the war without losing a "hearts and minds" Cold War battle against then-enemy Soviet Union and its system of communism.
The heavy US shelling of Ben Tre produced the famous quote, "it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it."
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html). It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_offensive
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