American History Hit - The Tet Offensive: Turning Point of the Vietnam War?

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

January, 1968. Fighting in Vietnam has been ongoing since the 1950s. Ho Chi Minh and the leaders of the communist forces in Hanoi have concocted a strategy for a decisive victory to end this conflict of attrition.What happened in the Tet Offensive? Who won? And why was it such a massive turning point for the Americans in Vietnam. We find out with Mark Atwood Lawrence, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.Mark is the author of ‘The Vietnam War: A Concise International History’, ‘Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam’ and ‘The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era’.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Anisha Deva. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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We're on the grounds of the new U.S. Embassy building, a block-long eight-story concrete fortress, just completed a few months ago having reportedly cost $3 million to build. In today's dollars, that's $26 million. Things are quiet within the sprawling compound. only the occasional sounds of guards at their posts and employees working the night shift until suddenly the building is rocked by the explosion

people shout in confusion automatic gunfire breaks out grenade rockets thud against the chancery walls a radio crackles with the voice of MP specialist for Charles Daniels calling for urgent assistance they're coming in they're coming in he shouts just before the system cuts out

At the Nightgate, Daniels and his fellow guard private first class William Sebastiff and shot. A team of Viet Cong sappers has blown a hole into the perimeter wall. 19 V.C. eventually fight their way onto the grounds. But with the loss of their troop leaders, the fighters falter, and for the next six hours, dig in against MPs and U.S. Marines. By 9 a.m., it is all over, with the embassy back under American control. 18 Viet Cong fighters lie dead, their bodies scattered. Only one captive has been taken alive.

By any normal measure, the skirmish was a complete and utter defeat for the intruders. But the U.S. Embassy siege was only one of many actions around Saigon and elsewhere that night. The beginning of a relentless, multifazed campaign. The Tet Offensive was underway. Hello, folks. Don Wildman here, and this is American History Hit. Thanks for clicking through. The Vietnam War is confusing history for so many Americans, even those of us who are alive in the day. The story's been told through so many different media, iconic movies and such, and you can see it now covered ad nauseum online.

Like Korea, a decade before, which had some similar stakes at hand, Vietnam was a civil war, into which the United States quite deliberately inserted itself to staunch the spreading communist threat in the world and decisively protect our interests abroad, or so the American people were told. For the first time ever, the military role would play out on a new stage, on television screens, in homes and college campuses across the nation, a bloody conflict in a strange land with strange names, a culture utterly far into our own. The only matter that was clear to the American public was that our young men were fighting and dying in agonizing numbers to decide a struggle that wasn't ours in the first place. Or was it? Depends on your outlook. But some real clarity can be gained about our efforts in Vietnam by focusing on the tipping.

point of the war. It happened in 1968 and is known as the Tet Offensive, a surprise attack by North Vietnamese forces that when all was said and done, marked a fork in the road for the American and South Vietnamese military strategy. Before Tet, we were fighting one kind of war in Vietnam. Afterwards, well, we were looking for a way out. And here to explain the what, why, and how of the Tet offensive is Mark Atwood Lawrence, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, hookum horns. Dedicated listeners will remember Mark. and I discussed LBJ on a previous episode still available on the hit list. Welcome, Mark.

Nice to have you back. Thanks, Don. It's great to be here. It's probably helpful, Mark, to start off with a brief overview about where all this begins, but let's make it brief because we got a lot to talk about with Ted. Tell me about the division between North and South Vietnam, Geneva Conference, and so forth. So there had been the so-called first Indochina war between the French and communist and nationalist Vietnamese forces that played out down to 1954.

1954 is a big breaking point where all the parties go to the conference table and they decide to divide Vietnam into what we conventionally call North Vietnam and South Vietnam. And that was, of course, the basic geography that would provide the sort of basic landscape and battlefields for the Vietnam War as Americans know that term that would, of course, play out in the 1960s and 1970s. You didn't have Laos. You didn't have Cambodia. Vietnam was occupied by the French before 1954, before the war that happens from 46. to 54. Then there is this Republic of South Vietnam, which is created by the partition. It's like Korea, North and South Korea. The United States gets behind the Republic of South Vietnam, and that really begins our involvement, which steps up and becomes kind of official by 1964 with LBJ. That's right. South Vietnam was at first a very weak state. There were many voices in the United States that said, you know, essentially, hey, wait a minute, is this really a viable

nation that even with vast amounts of American support can endure and can, you know, defend itself even against a communist-oriented North. And the Eisenhower made the critical decision to stand by South Vietnam and to try to build it into a formidable nation with a legitimate government and military forces and all the other things that make a nation a nation. And thus began, you know, the long American commitment to defend South Vietnam. It's a fascinating thing to discuss before we get to which is that, you know, you have such a success story as far as Americans are concerned with South Korea, one of the leading economies in the world. Basically the same thing happened on the Korean Peninsula as we were proposing to happen in South Vietnam or South and North Vietnam. Yet an entirely

different thing happens because the North Vietnamese were really good at fighting a war. Exactly. Exactly. And the South Vietnamese government never succeeded in the same way as the South Korean government in implanting itself as a legitimate government or around which ordinary people would rally that ordinary people felt allegiance to. And I think that's a crucial difference between the two cases. By the time we arrive in late 1967, Tett will be coming up in a month. Tett is a major deal in Asia in general, but certainly in Vietnam. Lunar New Year, festival of first day, the most important holiday celebration of the year. It's all about family, the arrival of spring. Usually at this time, a truce is involved. It has been for the years before.

American forces, South Vietnamese, are expecting the same thing this time. Up until Tet, well, the previous years, how had the war been going for American forces and the South Vietnamese? So the United States had made the fateful decision to commit large numbers of combat troops in the middle of 1965. So by, you know, let's say the mid to end of 1967, the run up to Tet, Americans had been fighting for a couple of years in growing numbers, right? the American commitment had grown from a few thousand at first to hundreds of thousands by late 1967. And the introduction of large American forces had had a huge effect on the battlefield in Vietnam. Essentially, American forces had reversed a very dangerous situation from an American standpoint in 1965, when without the introduction of American forces, it's almost certain that

South Vietnam would have fallen to the communists. The introduction of American forces changed that situation drastically and really stabilized the military situation in South Vietnam. Now, that's not the same as saying Americans and their South Vietnamese allies were on the way to victory, but they had stabilized the situation such that a communist victory was certainly no longer in the cards in the short term. The strategy prior to this, and we're talking about 64 to like 67, and really it gets locked in around 65, 66, is there's search and destroy missions. This is the Huey helicopters. This is that whole, you know, what we see in apocalypse now. How we were fighting this war was to go out, find the enemy, destroy them, come back to base. That's kind of how this was

being executed, right? I think that's right. There's no question that that search and destroy that I think we all know something about from watching the Hollywood movies was very much part of the American approach. I think, though, it would be too simple to say it was the only course of action that Americans were taking. You know, as you were mentioning just a couple of minutes ago, Americans were also working hard to build and to stabilize a South Vietnamese government, and Americans were also pumping resources into the counterinsurgency war in the countryside. So it wasn't just these big unit operations out in the countryside. There were also these other dimensions of the war.

This is one of the things I think that makes the Vietnam War so complicated. It was multiple wars at the same time. And again, that war that we know as search and destroy kind of out in the countryside with American patrols, trying to provoke engagement with the enemy. That's certainly real, but it's not the whole story. And the other unique thing, which does play into this offensive we're about to talk about, is that you have a preceding decade, even more, really, of an infiltration going on. You know, a big part of war is winning minds and hearts. That's been going on from the North Vietnamese perspective for a long time. That previous revolution against the French was the whole country of

Vietnam was against the French. And so for a long time, these villages, and remote areas have been worked on by the communist leadership. So that's a completely different kind of situation than, say, in South Korea. Yeah, that's true. Speaking of things that make the Vietnam case complicated, you have sort of two wars going on simultaneously. Within South Vietnam, there were South Vietnamese who resisted their own government and who took up arms against their own government. People who were born and raised in the South, the insurgency, sometimes historians call them. And then there were North. Vietnamese who were, as you're suggesting, crossing the border, coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

this famous pathway through Laos and Cambodia, to reinforce their nationalist or communist allies below the 17th parallel. So both of these things were going on simultaneously, an insurgency within the South and a cross-border infiltration by the North Vietnamese to support that effort. Okay. So let's talk about 68. So at this point, we're expecting a truce, as I mentioned, is going to be called at certainly late January is when Tet happens. At this point, everybody would sort of go home and visit their families both North and South. There's been a history already of this happening. So little do American forces certainly know. Something else is in store. That is right. It is sometimes said about the Tet Offensive that it was a surprise attack. And there's something to

that, as you pointed out, the tradition had been truces, meaning not a total cessation of hostilities, but a sharp decline in combat for a period of time. But it is also true that American intelligence, the American military was well aware that something was afoot in South Vietnam. They had understood for many weeks, if not months, leading up to the Tet Offensive, that the North Vietnamese were reinforcing their positions,

were sending larger and larger shipments of material down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, were sending increasing numbers of North Vietnamese forces into the South. So it would be going too far to say it was a complete surprise, The timing was the surprise, not the fact that there was a major offensive. It kind of follows three phases. There's the first phase, which is late January.

It continues throughout the year, really, the spring, and then there's a third phase in the summertime. Explain how this first attack happens and where. So the first attacks start on January 30th. The attacks were focused, and this was very much by design, on urban areas in South Vietnam, Something like 100 towns and villages across the span of South Vietnam came under attack. 36 of 44 provincial capitals. And one of the reasons why this is significant is that up until that point in the war, the cities or towns had generally been areas where the government was dominant.

South Vietnamese forces were in control. The government had a relatively high level of authority and control in those areas. So the offensive was designed to take the fight into the strongest areas of South Vietnamese government control. And this was something really new in the course of the war. Way plays a big part in this. The city of Wei is sort of not in the middle part of the country, but it's down there. It's the old royal capital of Vietnam, a beautiful place to be, by the way. I have shot a television show there, and one of my favorite spots in the world to have stood on a hotel balcony looking over the perfume river.

I mean, it's an extraordinary place. Have you been there? I have. It's beautiful. It just melts your heart. And to think of the violence that was happening here in 1968 is extraordinary. Why do the North Vietnamese focus on this city? Hue, for some of the reasons you just mentioned, had important symbolic power, right? This was the historic imperial capital of Vietnam. So taking the battle to the South Vietnamese in Huey City was a potentially really significant way to demonstrate that the communists had the upper hand.

and, you know, ultimately would prevail in Vietnam. At the end of the day, it was just one of the many cities that I've just mentioned some of the numbers. So what really distinguish Huey ultimately is that that was the place where the communists held on for longest after that initial attack at the very, very end of January. One of the important facts to bear in mind about the Tet Offensive is that South Vietnamese and U.S. forces reversed the tide of the offensive pretty quickly, almost everywhere. Hue City was one of the exceptions. And that has to do with some peculiarities of the geography of Hui, but it also has to do with the point you're getting at, I think, this sort of symbolic power of Hui,

and the resource is therefore that the communist put into the attack there as really central to what they were trying to accomplish. It becomes one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the war. The city is virtually destroyed. More than 5,000 civilians are killed, 2,000 of which are executed by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. But those forces lose upwards of 5,000 people are killed there as well. I remember this from my childhood.

We would watch these shows. NBC News was our chosen go-to place. And I remember seeing the body counts. It was just a regular part of the news where you'd see this sort of weird graphic. It was always like a huge amount of North Vietnamese, and then there was a couple hundred Americans. It was always that kind of scorecard was being tell. It was very grisly. And that was really a part of American life for a good half of my childhood, for sure.

very dark. Way is another example of this where a huge amount of loss on the enemy side, not so much, but still significant numbers on the American side. Yeah, it was an extraordinarily, you know, bloody, grisly, brutal battle. Listeners who've seen Full Metal Jacket, for example, will know something about how this episode has been imagined by Hollywood. I think there's probably something quite real to the way in which the battle is depicted there. There's a wonderful, new-ish book by a journalist named Mark Bowden that describes this battle, in extraordinary detail. I highly recommend it. I'm holding up the book. It's a big, thick book that he wrote the Black Hawk Down book, and it's really extraordinary. I bought it after I came back

from away because I was so fascinated by the irony of this place being such a violent place. It's such a peaceful town now. You can't believe it. What was the ultimate goal of this attack in terms of what did the North Vietnamese expect would happen from this? So this is such an interesting question, and it's a question that historians really weren't able to answer with any confidence until quite recently. And the reason for that is that we now have access, limited access, but still decent access to North Vietnamese decision-making records. So really for the first time, we know something about how to answer that question. And the short answer, it seems to me, is that communist leadership in Hanroy hoped to inspire a rebellion in the cities, in these focal points

of South Vietnamese power that would send the message pretty clearly to the South Vietnamese government, to the world, more generally, that the South Vietnamese government was just a hollow shell, and this would all kind of crumble the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government, and this would be a major step toward ending the war on communist terms. The communists called the Tet Offensive, the general offensive in uprising, and that captures something really important about communist motives. They wanted to provoke an uprising that would really send this message that the war was just about over, and South Vietnamese governments had no legitimacy in the eyes of its own population.

Bowden actually opens the book with an account of a young girl in South Vietnam, in a village who's acting as an operative on behalf of the North Vietnamese. That was the case a lot, and that's what I mean about them sort of seeding the ground here. Did they expect that the work they had done, the plants that they had all around, all of that had taken root, and therefore this would just sort of fall before them? Or what was their expectation? I think that's right. We now know that an extraordinary amount of preparation went into the offensive. Supplies, weapons, manpower were, you know, infiltrated into the South or repositioned within the South so that at the end of January, when the go moment came, this process would play out with these, it was hoped, decisive results.

And Bowden's book, as you've mentioned, is a great example of the kind of meticulous research that enables us to see how much preparation had predated the offensive. Were the Coochee tunnels part of this as well, those tunnel systems outside of Saigon? You know, I don't know that those tunnels that are, you know, well known to Western tourists who visit Vietnam had a crucial role in the Tet Offensive per se, but I think they're indicative of the kinds of elaborate preparation that the communists were capable of. During the Tet Offensive and at many other points throughout the Vietnam War, the level of ingenuity, the level of dedication to solving, in this case, sort of engineering problems is truly remarkable. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

So let me get a handle on this. So at this point, late January, not only Huey has been attacked, but also many different places, roughly speaking, how many different attacks were going on at the same time. Well, the number that historians often throw around is like 100 towns and cities in the early phases of the offensive. And I think that gives a sense of the scale somewhere in that neighborhood. Of course, there were probably smaller attacks that don't count in that nice round figure. but that gives you a sense of, you know, the scale of the attacks. And really, these were distributed

across the whole extent of South Vietnam from the de-militarized zone in the north all the way down into the Mekong Delta. Yeah. And even into Saigon, which is, you know, today, Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, has an attack happening. I mean, this is terrifying. There's panic in the capital. Yeah. We talked about Huey, but really the most important city symbolically, of course, was the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon. And the communist, clearly planned very carefully the kinds of attacks that would play out in Saigon. They targeted specific installations that would really drive home the message that the communists were hoping to send to the South Vietnamese population, to the American population,

to the world public opinion more generally. They attacked, most importantly, the U.S. embassy compound. And with some success, for a matter of hours, communist commandos occupied part of the grounds of the American embassy compound. And this was, of course, heavily reported by American news media. And this was the kind of thing that the North Vietnamese were hoping to provoke, right? This image of the United States threatened at the heart, literally the heart of American power and influence in South Vietnam. Now, that was reversed and all of the attackers were killed or evicted from the embassy and things returned to something like normal. But still, the damage had been

done from a symbolic point of view. equate this in some ways with the hostage crisis of 1979. I mean, it was that kind of shock value to American audiences to realize, oh my gosh, we're not invulnerable to these, we call them revolutionary troops. Despite our might, we are not scaring people to that degree. This all happens at a critical moment back in the domestic side, which is this is an election year. This is 1968. January of 68, LBJ has not yet announced that he, you know, he's still considering a run for his official second term. And, you know, a lot is in the balance right now back home. Suddenly this happens.

I've always wondered if they knew the effect that they were having on the American public through news media. Yeah, I mean, I think the short answer to that is yes. There is substantial evidence that leaders in Hanoi were attentive to public opinion in the United States and to global public opinion. I do think with the case of the Tet Offensive, it's possible to exaggerate that. I think that the principal goal was to affect opinion in South Vietnam of the South Vietnamese population. You'd have to say, I think, that the North Vietnamese failed in that objective. Where they succeeded was very much in what you're getting at, the attitudes of the American population. But I think it would be a mistake based on what we know now from the North Vietnamese archives to say that that was the goal from the

beginning. You know, it was part of the calculation, but not the highest priority. So you've already mentioned that first attack is repelled. And yet, you know, everything's off balance at this point. How is LBJ? How is Westmoreland? How is the American leadership sort of adjusting to this factor? And what kind of changes take place? Well, the American military command pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the offensive, surprising though it had been, had been repelled effectively, that the communists had been, dealt a pretty significant blow in symbolic terms, but also in very material terms, and that there was an opportunity to capitalize on that reversal and to really take the fight hard to the enemy

to really build on this unexpected but terrific development from the standpoint of the United States. So you see in February and March of 1968, General Westmoreland, the Joint Chiefs of staff arguing for a new deployment of a couple hundred thousand more troops, right, to capitalize on what they viewed as a success. But the problem, of course, for people who held that view is that the political mood around the war had changed so drastically that the administration ultimately concluded that any new introduction of large new American troops was out of the question. Yeah. Well, this is where you have to take into consideration the campaign. The whole factor of the presidential campaign is.

going on, which is really strikes at the core of this whole problem. I mean, people who say that we could have won in Vietnam are really talking about the post period after Tet, aren't they? Yeah, oftentimes. A lot of folks, including some historians, have kind of locked onto this idea that there was a legitimate opportunity after Tet to achieve victory, whatever that means, that there was an opportunity that Americans let pass because of the changed political mood of the country. Right. At which point it would have required, as you say, a new draft, essentially, I mean, beyond reservists, they were going to have to get. How many people would draft it at that point? I mean, hundreds of thousands. Yeah, exactly. The proposal was 206,000 more troops for Vietnam and calling up of the reserves to the tune of over a million. And a factor that was getting increasing attention in March of 1968 was the economic consequences of the war. This was a period of a deep crisis in the world.

economy driven by the outflow of gold from the American reserves, very complicated economic reality. But the bottom line was that Americans increasingly could not escape the question of what this would cost. And in lives especially. And how bad a look for Johnson going into the summer of presidential run, the convention, you know, all of which was bad enough, you know, having not increased troop strengths and so forth. But if you If he had made those moves in March and so forth, he would have been admitting that this was, you know, his way. And he couldn't do it, no pun intended. So there you go.

It's a really interesting tipping point that really can be identified as a central factor in understanding how Vietnam really played out. Yeah, that's true. There are people out there, and I think there's some legitimacy in this who will say that Johnson's decision not to run again was driven in part by concern about his health. He was well aware of the massive heart attack he had suffered in 1955 and was concerned that he was not physically up to another term. But I would say, and I think the vast majority of historians of the Johnson presidency of the Vietnam War, would say that really it was this sense of despair and frustration around the war that really drove him to announce that he would not run for a second term and that he would devote all of his energy to finding an end to the war. It's the beginning of the end of this theme of American foreign policy, really, that we had fixed the world in World War II. We had addressed fascism, and now we were trying to do it through battling communism. But Vietnam really knocks us to the knees.

But that is as much a domestic fervor as it is a military reality. It isn't a military reality. We could have gone on fighting in that war. We could have increased troops. We could have probably won that war. But the domestic element of what is America's role in the world? had become such a debilitating one that we couldn't come back from it. Exactly. And I think sometimes some of the commentary around the Vietnam War

suggests that this was a great tragedy for the country, that there was this opportunity, you know, to achieve something like victory. But public opinion, the collapse of political will kind of prevented us from moving down that road toward victory. But I would say that we have to be very careful with judgments like that because military operations are always, have to be in a democratic society rooted in public support. Public support is an integral part of what it means for a democracy to assert military power beyond its borders. So this was actually the American process playing out, and the fact that lots of Americans were losing confidence in their political leaders and wanted to see an end to the war is not something that unfairly or inappropriately

impinged on the nation's ability to get things done. It is in fact part of the way the process is supposed to work in a democratic society. To me, that's the really important point to bear in mind about February and March of 1968. This was a legitimate expression of democracy at work. And Americans were making the judgment that this tiny little place on the other side of the world that very few of them could have found on a map 20 years earlier was really worth this kind of expenditure. And that wasn't an unreasonable conclusion to draw. Interesting. It changes the whole strategy, also the presidency. I mean, Nixon ends up being elected on the tail end of what continues to be the Tet Offensive, because that goes into August in its third phase. How does it change the way

the rest of the war is fought by Americans? This is another really interesting question that historians continue to bicker about down to the present. You know, on March 31st, 1968, LBJ most famously announces he's not going to run for another term, and that was, of course, the big headline. But he also, in that same speech, announces that the United States is prepared to hold negotiations. And this is a big turn in the American conduct of the war. It was unclear whether the North Vietnamese would agree with that. Ultimately, they agree with it. And negotiations do open in the middle of 1968.

So suddenly, the two sides are sitting down at conference tables. And I think this naturally gave the impression that a new phase in the war had been reached. It was now all of the energy on both sides was aimed at ending the war. But what's striking, I think, is that both sides still believe that they could score decisive blows on the battlefield. Yes, they were talking. I think both sides viewed the negotiations as a venue where they could reap the benefits of military progress. So it would be a mistake to go too far, I think, toward suggesting that either side had really given up on the battlefield as the main arena where the war would be pursued. But bombing becomes a much bigger part of the campaign. I mean, we'd been doing

a lot of bombing already, but this becomes Kissinger's way and all sorts of new strategies of using B-52s, essentially. That's true. I mean, bombing of North Vietnam is significantly cut back in the spring of 1968, and then for a time ended just before the presidential election of that year. But you're right that bombing in other arenas, especially in Cambodia, in Laos, becomes much, much more intensive in the early Nixon period, and that would become a major hallmark of the fighting in Indochina more generally as the war advanced. But we really need to underscore the fact that this is a perception problem. What had happened was that the United States, I mentioned in my own home, were seeing the war. The reality of the war, it's being covered in ways that were not being managed by the military

as it was in the past. One famous image, which surprised me to revisit, I didn't realize that it was part of the Tet Offense, was the assassination photo, this famous picture by photographer Eddie Adams. Everybody's seen it. It's a horrible image of a man being shot in the head. That's a national police officer who's the head of the national police who's shooting him. And it just like brought home to America how vicious war really is. You know, I say that and then I'm like, wait a minute, you know, there were the films of the Holocaust. I mean, we saw a lot of bad stuff here. It's just was in newsreels instead of in our homes. It really changes things. Yeah, there's no question. One of the assertions that was often made about the Vietnam War

is it was the first television war, and that's true. And the fact that Americans were exposed night after night after night to sometimes very vivid footage of the fighting. And that the assassination is a great example of that. Just the drumbeat of fighting from Huey City across February and early March of 1968 was a spectacular example of the kinds of brutality that ordinary Americans could see really for the first time. You can really draw a very strong line between 68, all the bad things that happened in 68 with the assassinations and so forth, what is happening of Vietnam to even the cultural effects in the music

and the television shows that we started to see. And everything became defined by understanding and processing this very depressing war that just never seemed to end and had no real cause in the end as far as later generations, you know, understood. it to be. That was really what happened. It was incredible. True. I think sometimes there's a sense that that reporting was somehow unfair or illegitimate or, you know, unreasonably undercut American public opinion. I would say, and of course, reasonable people can disagree about this. The reporting was by and large accurate. We owe

those Vietnam reporters and the networks and the Washington Post and New York Times for actually telling it like it was. I think we should all be a little more concerned about what we have now, is a tightly managed media and I'm less inclined to be critical of what happened in Vietnam, which is not necessarily a bad thing for a healthy democratic society. Mark Adwood Lawrence is a professor of history, distinguished fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, faculty fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas is awesome. I always say this whenever we have a returning guest, but in this case, I truly invite people to look and listen to the episode that Mark and I did on

LBJ previously. This is all based on the end of ambition, the United States and the third world in the Vietnam era, his book that had been written. I'm sorry, I'm talking to you like a third person. You're still there, Mark. I'm just, I'm sorry, you've got a great career. I appreciate the plug. I can't help it. And the most pertinent here is the Vietnam War, a concise international history, which was published in 2008, among other publications, Mark. Thank you so much for talking to us. I bet we see you again, and I'll be spouting your resume at the same time. Thanks a lot. Anytime, Don, thanks so much for having me.