Mark Moyar

Yeah, and he was certainly trying to put a positive spin.

And, you know, he initially is going to be a candidate in 1968 for the presidency.

And so he will bring General Westmoreland back to kind of give pep talks and say how things are going well, you know, rather than saying it himself.

But this is partly to assure people that

In fact, things are going okay.

Then you get to the Tet Offensive in 1968, which seems to contradict that.

What happened?

So in early 1967, the North Vietnamese, they keep losing battle after battle.

And so they at first think things are going well.

In early 1967, they finally figure out

that they're taking crippling losses and that their own commanders in the South were kind of deceiving them about how things were going because they didn't want to lose face.

So they were always claiming they killed all these American South Vietnamese.

Somebody finally did the math and said, well, wait, the Americans and South Vietnamese are getting stronger, even though you claim you did.

So they finally kind of figured out we got to come up with a new game plan.

Since fighting in the remote areas of South Vietnam is not working, what they're going to do is target the cities of South Vietnam, which they've largely left alone, and these are controlled by the government.

Their thinking is that if we go in there, the people there are going to rise up because they hate the South Vietnamese and American capitalists, and they think it's going to be kind of like in 1945 when they go into Hanoi.

They attack.

They decide to attack during the Tet holiday, which is the biggest holiday of the year, violating a ceasefire.

So they have the element of surprise.

But turns out the people are not ready to rise up.