What I Learned From My Research on the Tet Offensive

The process in investigating the question of “to what extent was the Tet Offensive responsible for the United States’ withdrawal from the Vietnam War?” has allowed me to gain insight and acknowledgement of the problems historians face and methods they develop when conducting historical investigations. Like other historians conducting investigations such as the one I have conducted, it was difficult to determine the accuracy of information in the collection of sources I used.

The majority of my sources were contemporary sources that already analyzed sources from the Vietnam War time period. Although this makes the majority of my sources reliable, being that the authors of my sources had access to various resources to come to a conclusion, the plethora of resources available to the authors would give them a chance to pick and choose specific information that they want to include in their own work. In order to avoid bias, I tried to look at sources that had varying opinions and tried to include information that also had varying opinions.

Another challenge of bias that I faced specifically while investigating the topic of the Vietnam war was getting over my biased conclusion that I made before I even began researching. I, myself, am a second generation South Vietnamese-American. In my case, I have heard many stories from the first generation Vietnamese immigrants I know who had directly experienced the war. Although many of my close-related influences were grateful for the American involvement in the war, they were mainly grateful for the fact that the United States of America allowed them to seek refuge in their land. I, too, am grateful that my family made it to America.

However, I grew up with the opinion that America did not really help out the Vietnamese at all, being that I did not hear many stories about how America help, and therefore the reason why the U. S. pulled out of the war, and the result of the war was the Viet Cong victory. I knew I was very sensitive on the subject of the Vietnam War before going into this research. I was able to overcome this conflict after I read through my sources that provided the different reasons as to why the United States pulled out of the war.

I learned that I should not come to conclusions with the knowledge of only one perspective of the situation. This helped me throughout my research because, as a historian, you should not look into a topic without knowing the other point of view.