ABSTRACT
The Tet strategy was hardly a new idea for the Vietnamese Communists. Its germ was the August Revolution, in which the Communists had provided a nucleus of armed force for the popular uprisings that had brought the party to power in 1945. Party doctrine subsequently held that surrounding the cities with rural revolution, as Maoists advocated, was insufficient in Vietnam. The cities up to this time had experienced a few terrorist incidents, but never had the fighting in the countryside pushed into their confines. A person born in Saigon, Hue, Danang, or Can Tho easily could have reached maturity without feeling any direct effect of the war. For many urbanites, US intervention brought jobs and larger pay packets, not pain and suffering. Communist strategy called for luring US forces away from population centers, and so the Tet Offensive began neither at Tet nor in the cities.
