A completely different mindset and political reality. Basically, you’d need to define what winning actually was, then come up with a plan of action and strategy/tactics to move towards that goal. Is having a unified Vietnam the goal and definition of victory? How about having a politically stable and economically successful South Vietnam a la South Korea? What WAS the goal, exactly? No idea…and, that’s the problem. The folks at the time didn’t really have one, instead they were reacting and making things up as they went along. Which is why we failed on all levels, despite basically winning all the military battles.
Tet was a military disaster for the North Vietnamese. Pretty much every historian is going to tell you that. It destroyed much of what the North Vietnamese had been building wrt their local (in the south) military capabilities and cadres in one stroke and would have set them back a decade or more militarily.
Except…that it was a huge political victory, especially wrt the US. For years the US public had been told that victory was in sight and the North Vietnamese and home grown Viet Cong were on the brink of losing. And then Tet happens all over South Vietnam. It was a total shock to the American public (as it was to the military and South Vietnamese military/public), and it really drove home to the American public that the war was ‘un-winnable’. The thing about war, especially war where a democracy such as the US is involved, is that public perception is everything. The US public doesn’t like long, drawn out wars where the goals are nebulous and victory is undefined. What the US public likes is the first Gulf War, where there are clearly defined goals (and bad guys), there is a build up and the war is pretty much over by Christmas. We will do something like Gulf War II and put up with it for a time, but eventually public confidence goes down if there is no end in sight. And that point was reached when Tet shocked our collective system.
No way. We’d have just ground on for year after year. Again, it’s all about defining goals and what victory actually means, and we never did that. Had Tet never happened, it would have been a slow, gradual decay of confidence instead of a shock, but in the end I doubt we’d have won in Vietnam, since what winning meant was never defined. At best what we’d have done was to stave off a Vietnamese unification in a similar manner to what we have in Korea today, with a North Vietnam being, perhaps, the same sort of perpetual festering sore that North Korea is. I suppose that would be winning at some level, but honestly what actually happened is probably closer to victory than that would have been.
Doubtful, though South Korea is certainly an admirable model for what could have been. The trouble was the South Vietnamese government and system were extremely corrupt, and they would have basically needed to have a popular uprising that overthrew that system and brought in a truly representative and non-corrupt government to replace it. Not sure that would have or could have happened with how things were, especially with the North Vietnamese and Soviets and Chinese feeding a perpetual insurgency.
