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This video shows what the main events are in the Tet Offensive. It also covers how the Americans felt about this war.

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At the end of January 1968, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces launched surprise attacks in cities and villages across South Vietnam just as the country was starting to celebrate Tet, the Vietnamese lunar new year. After being caught off guard, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces repulsed the attacks and inflicted heavy losses.

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The Vietnam War: 5 things you might not know

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The Vietnam War: 5 things you might not know

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This article gives 5 facts about the Vietnam war that are very little known.

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The Vietnam War began in the decade before, butthe conflict, and especially U.S. involvement, escalated in the 1960s. For the first time, Americans witnessed the horrors of war, played out on television screens in their living rooms.

This week's episode of "The Sixties" explores the war and its impact on American culture, then and now. Here are five facts from the episode that may surprise those too young to remember the Vietnam War:

1. U.S. involvement in Vietnam began with Eisenhower.

In the late 1950s, during the Eisenhower administration, Vietnam had split into North Vietnam, which was communist, and South Vietnam. Cold War anxieties dictated that if the North Vietnamese communists prevailed, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes.

When he took office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy vowed not to allow South Vietnam fall to communism.

2. The United States and South Vietnam had Catholic presidents who were shot to death in November 1963.

By the early 1960s,South Vietnam's conventionally trained army was no match for the Vietcong's guerrilla-style tactics.In addition, South Vietnam's Buddhist majority revolted against their president, Ngo Dinh Diem. They saw the Catholic ruler as a tyrant.

The Western-educated Diem, however, wielded absolute power and rose to dictator level by the summer of 1963. The CIA discussed toppling the regime.

With U.S. knowledge, Diem was killed by South Vietnamese generals on November 2, 1963. Kennedy immediately regretted Diem's death and U.S. support for the coup.

Less than three weeks later, on November 22, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One later that day. Soon after, Johnson told a grieving nation, "John Kennedy's death commands what his life conveyed, that America must move forward."

3. TV forever changed the way Americans viewed war

As casualties rose, the country increasingly turned against the war. The official line was that Americans were winning in Vietnam, but the evening news told a different story.

"What Vietnam did to America via television was introduce us to a new kind of America," said author Lawrence Wright. "One that was not pure, one that committed the same kinds of atrocities that are always committed in war, but we had never allowed ourselves to see them."

Reporter Morley Safer recalled the shock of witnessing Marines burn down 150 houses on the outskirts of the village of Cam Ne. An officer told the newsman that he had been ordered to level the area. Three women were wounded in the attack, one baby was killed, and four people were taken prisoner.

Safer asked a soldier if he had regrets about leaving people homeless, and the soldier replied, "You can't expect to do your job and feel pity for these people."

Another soldier told Safer, "I think it's sad in a way, but I don't think there's any other way you can get around it in this kind of a war."

Americans back home were stunned when the CBS report about the Cam Ne village hit the news.

After the broadcast, Johnson reportedly called then-CBS president, Frank Stanton, and said, "Frank, this is your President, your boys just s--t on the flag of the United States."

4. Some Americans resorted to self-mutilation to avoid the draft.

When the choices were Vietnam, jail or draft-dodging by going to Canada, some young men panicked and devised ways to fail the military's physical exam, including mutilating themselves, starving or pretending to be gay.

The compulsory draft, which had been initiated during World War II, meant registration for young men was mandatory at 18.

Working-class men were more likely to get drafted over those in the middle class because college students could get deferments.

In January 1965, 5,400 young men were called for the draft. By December of that year, more than 45,000 young men were called. When the monthly draft call rose from 17,000 to 35,000 per month, young people across the nation began engaging in civil disobedience.

On November 27, 1965, the March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam took place, attracting tens of thousands of protesters.

5. U.S. troops endured 120-degree temperatures while sitting in swamps.

Facing temperatures sometimes of up to 120 degrees F inthe wet jungle terrain, soldiers regularly became afflicted with infections such as ringworm.

Author and Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes recalled the difficulty of dealing with losing his friends on the battlefield.

"You'd throw them on a chopper and that'd be the last you'd see of them," he said, "and so you were constantly shoving it down because if you didn't you couldn't function."

Bonus: LBJ feared being remembered for his handling of Vietnam

Johnson, who made great strides with civil rights legislation at home, did not want to be remembered as the American president who lost Southeast Asia.

In a taped 1965 conversation, Sen. Richard Russell told Johnson that he "couldn't have inherited a worse mess."

"Well, if they say I inherited it, I'd be lucky," Johnson said, "but they'll all say I created it. Dick, the trouble is, the great trouble I'm under, a man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere, but there ain't no daylight in Vietnam. There's not a bit."

When CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who was called the most trusted man in America, traveled to Vietnam in 1968 and announced it was time for America to pull out, Johnson reportedly old an aide, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

Journalist Marvin Kalb noted that Johnson "realized he was no longer in charge of the war. The war was in charge of him."

In 1968, Johnson announced that he would not be running for re-election.

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the vietnam war: 5 things you might not know - cnn.com

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The Vietnam War: 5 things you might not know

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Here are five facts about the Vietnam War that may surprise those too young to remember the conflict.

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This page talks about the history of the Vietnam War

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The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

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On this page, it talks about how U.S. involvement increases during the Tet Offensive

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NOTE TO READERS
"Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations" has been retired and is no longer maintained. For more information, please see the full notice.

In early August 1964, two U.S. destroyers stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam radioed that they had been fired upon by North Vietnamese forces. In response to these reported incidents, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested permission from the U.S. Congress to increase the U.S. military presence in Indochina. On August 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Johnson to take any measures he believed were necessary to retaliate and to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. This resolution became the legal basis for the Johnson and Nixon Administrations prosecution of the Vietnam War.

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara points out action in Gulf of Tonkin during a briefing at the Pentagon. (AP Photo/Bob Schutz)

After the end of the First Indochina War and the Viet Minh defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the countries meeting at the Geneva Conference divided Vietnam into northern and southern halves, ruled by separate regimes, and scheduled elections to reunite the country under a unified government. The communists seemed likely to win those elections, thanks mostly to their superior organization and greater appeal in the countryside. The United States, however, was dedicated to containing the spread of communist regimes and, invoking the charter of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954), supported the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, when he refused to hold the elections. Diem held control of the South Vietnamese Government, but he could not halt the communist infiltration of the South. By 1959, the Viet Cong, South Vietnamese communist guerillas, and the Viet Minh, began a large scale insurgency in the South that marked the opening of the Second Indochina War.

Ngo Dinh Diem failed to capture the loyalties of the people of South Vietnam the way that Ho Chi Minh had done among the population of North Vietnam. Despite U.S. support, Diem's rural policies and ambivalent attitude toward necessary changes like land reform only bolstered support for the Viet Cong in the southern countryside. By 1963, Diem's rule had so deteriorated that he was overthrown and assassinated by several of his generals with the tacit approval of the Kennedy Administration. Three weeks later, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was also assassinated, and the war continued under new leadership in both countries. Before his death, Kennedy had increased the U.S. advisory presence in South Vietnam in the hopes that a U.S.-supported program of "nation-building" would strengthen the new South Vietnamese government. However, South Vietnam continued to experience political instability and military losses to North Vietnam.

By August, 1964, the Johnson Administration believed that escalation of the U.S. presence in Vietnam was the only solution. The post-Diem South proved no more stable than it had been before his ouster, and South Vietnamese troops were generally ineffective. In addition to supporting on-going South Vietnamese raids in the countryside and implementing a U.S. program of bombing the Lao border to disrupt supply lines, the U.S. military began backing South Vietnamese raids of the North Vietnamese coast. The U.S. Navy stationed two destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, in the Gulf of Tonkin to bolster these actions. They reported an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on August 2, and a second attack on August 4. Doubts later emerged as to whether or not the attack against the Turner Joy had taken place.

Immediately after reports of the second attack, Johnson asked the U.S. Congress for permission to defend U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. The Senate passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution with only two opposing votes, and the House of Representatives passed it unanimously. Congress supported the resolution with the assumption that the president would return and seek their support before engaging in additional escalations of the war.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident and the subsequent Gulf of Tonkin resolution provided the justification for further U.S. escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Acting on the belief that Hanoi would eventually weaken when faced with stepped up bombing raids, Johnson and his advisers ordered the U.S. military to launch Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against the North. Operation Rolling Thunder commenced on February 13, 1965 and continued through the spring of 1967. Johnson also authorized the first of many deployments of regular ground combat troops to Vietnam to fight the Viet Cong in the countryside.

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Milestones: 1961-1968 - Office of the Historian

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This video sums up a little bit of everything that happened during the Vietnam War. It goes in chronological order and is very organized

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In this photo it shows how the hawks were more offensive while the dove looks more peaceful. In the Vietnam war, The "hawks" wanted to bomb while the "doves" wanted to try to make a compromise.

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How did Nixon increase U.S. Involvement?

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How did Nixon increase U.S. Involvement?

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Nixon ordered massive amounts of bombings on Vietnam and started to pull troops out of the war

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What were the feelings of people at home?

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What were the feelings of people at home?

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The movement against the U.S. Involvement in war was small among peace activist but gained national attention in 1965, after the U.S. started bombing North Vietnam. Anti-War marches and protest started gaining a widening base of support through the next three years, after the successful Tet Offensive by North Vietnamese troops proved there would be no end to the war

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The Doves wanted to approach it through negotiation and compromise with Vietnam. They knew that victory was not guaranteed and that Russia and China may get involved in the war if we got involved.

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The hawks thought that bombings were the only way to stop the flow of supplies into Vietnam. They were against appeasement and thought they needed to be aggressive and tough on communism.

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Attrition is the gradual reduce of someone/something's power due to continued pressure or attack.

This is how the U.S. fought. They would send out tons of platoons , to draw out the enemy, then the bombers and gunships would come and kill all the Vietnamese.

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Describe the Tet Offensive of 1968 and how it affected Johnson's presidency

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Describe the Tet Offensive of 1968 and how it affected Johnson's presidency

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The Viet Mingg and the Viet Cong invaded South Vietnam on January 30th. They captured many civilians and we found approximately 2,800 buried. Johnson wanted to reduce bombing and in the same appearance, he announced that the was not going toa run for a second term of presidency.

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How did the people of South Vietnam react to the war and U.S. intervention?

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How did the people of South Vietnam react to the war and U.S. intervention?

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The South Vietnam population was split between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnam. The U.S. tried to get more supporters by supplying food and removing (killing) the communist population.

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How did Johnson increase U.S. involvement?

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How did Johnson increase U.S. involvement?

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Johnson followed the Containment Policy against communism and aided the South Vietnam.

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What was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? How did it expand Presidential Powers?

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What was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? How did it expand Presidential Powers?

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The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave Lyndon B Johnson any means necessary to prevent the aggression in Vietnam. It expanded his powers by giving Johnson full power to expand the war without the permission of the government

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How did Kennedy increase U.S. involvement?

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How did Kennedy increase U.S. involvement?

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Kennedy sent an inspection team to Vietnam and they reported that without help, South Vietnam was going to lose. He also ordered the death of Diem (South Vietnam President) to be assassinated. JFK was assassinated 3 weeks later.

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How did Eisenhower increase U.S. involvement?

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How did Eisenhower increase U.S. involvement?

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Eisenhower wants to stop aiding Vietnam by cutting off financial aid.

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How did Truman increase U.S. involvement?

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How did Truman increase U.S. involvement?

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Truman offers to help France keep Vietnam by giving them $100 million dollars in aid.

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The geography and climate was awful. There was every awful type of landscape like jungles, mountain, marshes, swamp. It seemed to work against them while it seemed to help the Viet Cong. They were hurt by poisonous herbicides aimed to destroy the thick vegetation. They got tons of diseases and sicknesses. Insects, pests, and other animals were big annoyances.

For a lot, it was just a goal to survive. This led to a growth in the use of drugs to escape.

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How did television impact people at home (in the U.S.) interpretation on the war?

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How did television impact people at home (in the U.S.) interpretation on the war?

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At the start of the war the the media focused little on the war and manly focused on the on the rise of communism in the country. January 1968 the Tet Offensive started and marked a major turning point in the media's coverage of the war even though it was a failure. It focused on unfavorable battles and events in the war and missed the winning picture of the war. After the Tet Offensive media coverage of the war was almost completely negative and changed a lot of american's opinions on the war.

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What happens to a divided Vietnam after the U.S. pulls out of the war and leaves the South to fight alone?

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What happens to a divided Vietnam after the U.S. pulls out of the war and leaves the South to fight alone?

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Viet Cong captured the capital city of South Vietnam, Saigon, after the U.S. pulls out of Vietnam. Once the Viet Cong captured Saigon, they united the nation of Vietnam under their new name, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

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Nixon Uses a Carrot and Stick approach to end the war. Explain what that means and how does he eventually end the war.

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Nixon Uses a Carrot and Stick approach to end the war. Explain what that means and how does he eventually end the war.

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The carrot and stick approach is an approach where the tactic is to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. Nixon used this approach to convince North Vietnam to sign a peace treaty to end the war in Vietnam

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Who was involved by being geographically next to Vietnam? How were they associated? What outcomes happened in their countries

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Who was involved by being geographically next to Vietnam? How were they associated? What outcomes happened in their countries

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North Vietnam would go through Cambodia during the Vietnam war.