How Did The Tet Offensive Affect The Vietnam War

The Tet Offensive was an event that changed American public opinion of the Vietnam war and even changed the war itself. Walter Cronkite inspired this change in public opinion. The Second Indochina War started much before the Tet Offensive though. North and South Vietnam were separated after the First Indochina War by the 17th Parallel, the North being communist and the South being Democratic. Every war starts with a “First Shot”. The “First Shot” in the Vietnam War, or the Second Indochina War, was the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Congress gave President Johnson anything he needed to win the war, and what he needed was a lot of money and a lot of troops. The Tet Offensive happened three years after the start of the Vietnam War, 1968|. The US military believed that Vietcong, Vietnamese Communists, would rest and stop fighting for their biggest holiday of the year, Tet. The Vietcong did not rest though. Instead, they ambushed and many American lives were lost. US soldiers fought off the Vietcong, and in that way, “won”,

Four students at Kent State University were shot during a war protest. Two of the students weren’t even protesting. Across the country, people were outraged that the National Guard would kill four innocent American citizens. The war was moving from Vietnam into the US. After the Kent State shootings, anti-war protests increased. The public was becoming fed up with everything this war had cost them. No longer was it peace-loving hippies protesting this war, all kinds of people were joining the protests. The nation was sick of having their sons ripped away from them and sent to fight thousands of miles away in a war where they didn’t even know what they were fighting for. Walter Cronkite predicted the war ending in a stalemate, after Kent State, this seemed even more likely. America had lost too much for the war to actually end in a