Vietnam War (1968): Tet

Decolonisation, partition and a televised intervention Vietnam was a Vietnamese civil and revolutionary war that the US, China and the USSR internationalised -- and that Laos and Cambodia paid for as sideshows that were not sideshows. The 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords created a "temporary" partition. Diem, with US backing, refused elections that Ho was expected to win. Nation-building in the south was a police and landlord war as much as a development project.

The Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos and Cambodia was a logistics system, not a metaphor. Hanoi's decision for armed reunification was made in stages, not in a single 1959 telegram. After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident and resolution, Johnson chose open bombing and ground combat in 1965 rather than withdrawal or a wider war with China. Search-and-destroy, free-fire zones, and the CORDS pacification effort were parallel theories of the same war.

ROK, Australian, New Zealand, Thai and Philippine forces fought as allies. Their stories are thinner in US film than in their own memorials -- especially the large ROK expeditionary corps. Tet 1968 attacked cities, including the US embassy compound in Saigon. Militarily the offensive was destroyed; on US television it ended the promise of a short war. Johnson declined to run again. Nixon's Vietnamization and secret bombing of Cambodia widened the regional map.