At 3:00 a.m. on January 31, 1968, Viet Cong sappers entered the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon. Thus began a two and one-half month struggle commonly known as the Tet Offensive. On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson who, in 1964, had one of the greatest landslide presidential election victories in U.S. history, declared he would not seek reelection and that he would offer America's enemies in Vietnam a negotiated peace. It was the beginning of the end for U.S. involvement in the Second Indochina war.

Why did Tet become such a watershed?

This book explores this question not with a view to providing a final answer, but to act as a beginning from which serious scholars and students of the Second Indochina War can attempt to explain the phenomenon called the Tet Offensive. To be sure, in spite of all the disagreement over the meaning of Tet, one consensus has evolved over the years:  it was the climactic event of America's involvement in the Indochina wars. For that matter, if one event can be said to have been the single defining moment for the entire Vietnamese struggle for national unity and independence, Tet is that event. But why? These articles begin the search for that answer.

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