After Tet

In the wake of the Tet Offensive in January and February 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced the cessation of bombing against North Vietnam and America's determination to seek peace. As negotiations began in Paris, most Americans believed the war was winding down and, indeed, almost over. Yet, ironically, the year that followed the Tet Offensive saw the fiercest battles of the Vietnam War. Now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of that bloodiest year, Ronald Spector has written a brilliant narrative account of the harrowing events that rarely reached American television screens but largely determined the war's course and outcome. The terrible battles of 1968 condemned America and North and South Vietnam to five more years of war precisely because they were costly and inconclusive. These bloody but indecisive operations could not break, but could only perpetuate, the war's diplomatic and military deadlock. For the rank-and-file soldier, the war raged on. Drawing upon recently declassified government documents, accounts by GIs, and his own eye-witness experience as a Marine in Vietnam that year, noted military historian Ronald Spector describes the vicious struggle in the jungles, mountains, and rice paddies. He shows how the bloodiest year epitomized every aspect of the war - from individual bravery to military doggedness to political vacillation - as both sides mounted increasingly expensive and desperate offensives. He reveals the experience of the soldiers caught between an ambivalent American government and an intransigent North Vietnamese leadership. Exploring the lesser known aspects of the war, Spector describes in detail the deterioration of American military race relations, the growth of the drug culture, the riots in U.S. military prisons, and even the experience of South Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong. Describing the bloodiest year from all angles - the personal, military, and political, the American and the Vietnamese -this comprehensive history will stand as one of the most important books ever written about the American military experience in Vietnam.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.