Tết

And that was kind of the meat.

That's when the Tet Offensive began in January.

And so he was there during that, I guess, the heavier action.

Okay, now I'm going to stop right here.

Yeah.

So it was so interesting.

So he went November by January is when they had the Tet Offensive.

which, I think, I'm trying, the Tet is the, I guess, Vietnam's New Year.

Yeah.

You, you can do it the Vietnamese New Year, whichever [laughs] New Year you like.

Yes.

You don't even...

Maybe it was if the Americans want to play whack-a-mole with the cities taking out these different widespread Viet Cong attacks, they're not going to be able to stop the North Vietnamese army coming over the border from every direction and collapsing the border defenses and causing major destabilization in Vietnam.

And this offensive, by the way, is going to coincide with the Tet Lunar New Year.

It's a big celebration for the Vietnamese and one in which usually you acknowledge a truce, you stop fighting for a little while.

Soldiers go home, they celebrate with their families, a very important cultural event.

The next night, The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong attacked more than 100 cities and towns across South Vietnam at once, including Saigon, including the American embassy.

Militarily, the Tet Offensive failed.

But it ran for weeks in American living rooms, and by the end of it, much of the country had stopped believing the war was winnable.

It was the pivotal moment of the war in Vietnam.

We're working on our line between here and Saigon and hope to have it corrected shortly.

The evening of January 30th, John and the other men from the station walked back from dinner at the nearby MACV compound and pulled some chairs into the backyard.

Tet was starting, and Tet is the Vietnamese New Year.

And in the past, it was sort of like maybe Christmas time, and often the North Vietnamese would call a truce.