Map indicating towns and cities in which significant fighting occurred during the Tet Offensive of 1968
The Tet Offensive was a major escalation and one of the largest military campaigns of the
Vietnam War. The
Viet Cong (VC) and
North VietnamesePeople's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) launched a surprise attack on January 30, 1968 against the forces of the
South VietnameseArmy of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the
United States Armed Forces and their
allies. It was a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam. The name is the truncated version of the Lunar New Year festival name in Vietnamese,
Tết Nguyên Đán, with the offense chosen during a holiday period as most ARVN personnel were on leave. The purpose of the wide-scale offensive by the Hanoi Politburo was to trigger political instability in a belief that mass armed assault on urban centers would trigger
defections and
rebellions.
The offensive was launched prematurely in the early morning hours of 30 January in large parts of the
I and
II Corps Tactical Zones of South Vietnam. This early attack allowed allied forces some time to prepare defensive measures. When the main operation began during the early morning hours of 31 January, the offensive was countrywide; eventually more than 80,000 PAVN/VC troops struck more than 100 towns and cities, including 36 of 44 provincial capitals, five of the six autonomous cities, 72 of 245 district towns and the southern capital. The offensive was the largest military operation conducted by either side up to that point in the war. (Full article...)
Image 6Water puppetry, lit. "Making
puppets dance on water") is a tradition that dates back as far as the 11th century when it originated in the villages of the
Red River Delta area of northern
Vietnam.
Image 7Wooden doors in the Imperial palace in Huế, Vietnam
Image 12Dong Ho painting is a line of Vietnamese folk painting originating in Đông Hồ village (Song Hồ commune,
Thuận Thành District, Bắc Ninh Province.
Image 13The painting depicts the retired emperor
Trần Nhân Tông who has now become a monk and returned to Hanoi from his hermitage in Vũ Lâm.
... that Don Luce led a group of Americans to a secret part of a South Vietnamese prison where inmates were kept in squalor in what were called "tiger cages"?
... that when students spoke Vietnamese in a graduation speech in
Louisiana, the school district proposed banning all non-English languages?
The following are images from various Vietnam-related articles on Wikipedia.
Image 1A trio of Vietnamese musicians performing together. The man on the far left plays
kèn đám ma, the man in the middle plays the
đàn nhị and the man on the right plays the
trống chầu. (from Culture of Vietnam)
Image 319th-century manuscript of "Mysterious tales of the Southern Realm" (
Lĩnh Nam chích quái), a copy of 15th-century original tale. (from Culture of Vietnam)