Forty years. According to the Bible, the length of time that Israel wandered in the Sinai Peninsula after escaping Egyptian bondage.
Forty years of the world turning, forty years of global conflicts, the rise and fall of dictators, of military regimes, of negotiations.
Forty years of what came to be a black eye for the American military.
It has been forty years today since the Tet Offensive. It has been largely undiscussed by the American media today, but it has not been forgotten in Vietnam.
Vietnam on Friday marked 40 years since the Tet Offensive with colourful military parades of its veterans and re-enactments of the surprise wave of urban assaults that marked a turning point in the war.
Communist Party leaders and military chiefs watched as former guerrillas and regular soldiers filed past Ho Chi Minh City's Reunification Palace, formerly the presidential palace of the US-backed Saigon regime ousted in 1975.
Youths in black Viet Cong pajamas with models of AK-47 assault rifles and rocket launchers joined the parade, as did women carrying fruit baskets on shoulder poles, recalling the way arms and bombs were smuggled into the city.
"The 1968 Tet Offensive opened a new page in the Vietnam war and struck a blow to the imperialist Americans' will to continue their aggression," said Le Thanh Hai, using the rhetoric of the Communist Party he heads in the city.
"It is one of the most glorious chapters in Vietnam's history."
In a parade of more than 10,000 veterans, service members, and others held today, the celebration was a dual event, marking the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive as well as the founding of the Indochina Communist Party on 3FEB1930.
Sharing the podium with Vietnam's Communist Party leader Nong Duc Manh was Nguyen Thi Binh, signer for the southern Provisional Revolutionary Government, former vice president of Vietnam, and signer of the 1973 Paris peace accords.
Tet has become, in recent years, a center of growing controversy among historians, military analists, and the intelligence community. It is widely conceded, now, that the United States and the South Vietnamese greatly overestimated the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Retired Vietnamese military commanders have admitted in recent years that they were suffering heavy casualties and taking heavy losses in fighting the Americans. Congressional leaders and military commanders clashed on their opinions regarding who was actually winning. Assertions by General William Westmoreland that the U.S. was on the offensive against the communist uprising were met with confusion and doubt by the American public. The American political machine began to downscale operations in Vietnam, eventually leaving the South Vietnamese on their own in 1973. Saigon finally fell to the North in 1975.
One has to wonder, when hearing Senator Harry Reid announcing that the war in Iraq is "lost," and General Peter Petraeus denounced as "General Betray Us," if we are not seeing history repeating itself today.
"Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it."
Once and Always, an American Fighting Man
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