Tet OffensiveVillagers carried coffins filled with weapons and ammunition through towns, accompanied by the sound of fireworks and flutes. Those sounds soon turned into the sound of assault rifle fire and explosions. Green flashes and tracers dart across the night sky like hundreds of fireflies; gun flashes replaced Tet's fireworks and could be seen as far as the eye could see. This major event in the Vietnam War is called the Tet Offensive. After an initial surprise attack, the US and South Vietnamese Army returned to overwhelm the Vietcong and NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and ultimately win all battles. Although the United States and South Vietnam won the Tet Offensive, it was a major turning point toward the end of the Vietnam War. The escalation of the war would end and the withdrawal would begin. The Vietcong and NVA lost the battle on the battlefield but had won an important political battle. The American public was disappointed by what was called military intervention. The intelligence failure, Johnson's overconfidence in the war, and its profound impact on American attitudes regarding involvement in Vietnam are three main reasons why the Tet Offensive was the turning point in ending the war. The intelligence failure was one of the main reasons why the Tet Offensive happened. The allies suffer an intelligence failure before Tet, a failure that helped plan the stages of changes in U.S. strategies. The four parts of intelligence are crucial in determining the enemy's actions. The four tasks consist of gathering information, analyzing information, deciding to respond to a warning issued in the analytical phase, disseminating the response order in the field co...... half of the document... . .. autumn elections. This was not our first intelligence failure. Looking back to 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed. We knew there were indications that Japan was going to bomb us, but the intelligence community did not recognize the imminent attack. The Tet Offensive could be compared to the Battle of the Bulge in which the Germans caught the United States off guard; this was the same for the Tet Offensive, when the Viet Cong and NVA attacked unexpectedly during the Lunar New Year ceasefire. After the Vietnam War, the United States almost returned to postwar isolationism. From the time America withdrew from the Vietnam War until the Gulf War, we as Americans sought to avoid any conflict comparable to the Vietnam War. If only our intelligence information had been fully analyzed, perhaps we would not have had such a dramatic impact on US public opinion.