Vietnam War and the Tet Offensive Vietcong guerrilla fighters violated the temporary truce they had pledged to observe around the lunar new year celebrations, and surged into more than one hundred towns and cities, including Saigon. Shifting the war for the first time from its rural base into the new arena of South Vietnam's supposedly impregnable urban areas, it was a campaign of 'enormous breadth, speed, and scope.' It shook US imperialism to its …showed first 75 words of 1414 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1414 total…of my party for another term as your President." He also announced that air strikes would be confined to below the twelfth parallel and authorized the opening of negotiations with the North Vietnamese. However, troop levels remained at about 500,000 and the war would drag on for another five years. More American soldiers would die after Tet than before, and the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century.