Up until Tet, the official US line was that North Vietnam was a separate entity, and was trying to take over the South.  All the insurgent forces in the South were really agents of the North.

After Tet, the new line was that southern insurents were an entirely separate entity, which was defeated in Tet.

Funny how that works.

Although I just loooove wallowing in details (my most recent diary looked at House elections since 1890!) my bottom line is usually big picture.  The moment I heard about a Buddhist monk (Thich Quang Duc) immolating himself, I knew that (1) we were on the wrong side and (2) we would lose.  I was 12 years old at the time.

Some time after that I learned how long Vietnam had been fighting for its independence from China (it was independent for a good part of this time, but always had to be on guard against China), at which point the total absurdity became evident to me--since this clearly shot the domino theory all to hell.

We weren't privy to the inner thoughts of the Ho, Giap and NLF at the time, so we really had to think about what things could possibly mean, and what they clearly could not mean.  And many of us came to think in "world historical" terms.  Meaning that invididuals, however remarkable and important, did not make movements: movements made individuals, not just over the course of a generation, but over the course of centuries.

From this perspective, Giap's memoirs are still significant, but not fully determinative, for the simple reason that no individual's perspective can fully encompass the larger movement they are part of.  This is one reason why historical figures are often remembered differently than they see themselves.

Which is why I still give far more weight to the ultimate objective--getting the US to withdraw--than to the short-term objective--overthrowing the SVN government, and far more weight to seeing the Northern and Southern resistence as part of a unified whole, stretching back in time almost 2000 years.

Finally, however, the main reason I object to calling Tet a defeat for the Communists is that this is part of a larger narrative, which says, "We won the war in Vietnam, but lost it at home."  We Americans are rarely, if ever, concerned with the internal politics of people we are fighting overseas.  When we suddenly develop such an interest, there is invariably an ulterior motive, and this narrative clearly shows what it is in this case: to blame-shift the loss of the Vietnam War.

We would do well to remember that George Washington "lost" almost every battle he fought in the Revolutionary War.  It's amazing that most people don't know this.  The difference between Vietnam and the Revolutionary War is that Vietnam had been fighting that sort of insurgent warfare for 1900 years.  They knew better than to equate tactical and strategic victories--which, for me, is arguably a better way to distinguish Tet's shortcomings for Giap vs it's success than to speak of "military defeat" vs. "political victory."

One reason that Tom Paine was such an important figure in the Revolution is that the American colonists did not have such a common understanding, but Paine, above all, supplied it to them, so that they came to see the strategic shape of their struggle behind the tactical surface, which seemed like nothing but a set of defeats--at least on Washington's part, which was the central "front" of the war.