Edwin Moïse's "The Myths of Tet"

Edwin Moïse is professor of history at Clemson University. He is a historian of the Vietnam War, and of modern Vietnam and modern China.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War, and reported the following:

Page 99 could function as a useful introduction to the book, but does not make possible a judgment as to the quality of my argument. The page consists entirely of a list of examples of the way US officials and senior military officers, late in 1967, were claiming that the United States was winning the war in Vietnam, and that enemy forces were weakening. These claims were a big part of the reason the Tet Offensive, a few months later, came as such a shock to the United States.

To judge the quality of the portions of my book devoted to this issue, the reader would need to see my evidence both that the claims of enemy weakness did not match the evidence actually available in 1967, and that those claims were strikingly disproved by the combat performance of enemy forces in 1968. None of that evidence appears on this page.

See online a more detailed description of the book.

--Marshal Zeringue