Well, Richie, it might have helped if you'd asked more specific questions about the offensive, such as "Do you think it was a success or a failure?" or "What role did the offensive have, if any, in the North Vietnamese victory?" Since you left it open-ended with "what do you think?" people were free to talk about the war in general.

My opinion is that the Tet offensive made little difference in the long run except to those who died in it. It did illustrate the pertinent material facts of the war: that the U.S. military could win all the battles, but could not win the war. The reason for this is that the enemy had far more at stake than we did. If we lost, what would happen? Despite the ridiculous notions of domino-theory advocates (whose beliefs were disproven, I'd say, by the loss of Vietnam itself, which did NOT lead to the consequences feared), the only thing that would happen was that our troops would come home and the nation would be disillusioned and less likely to commit to further foreign wars for a while. Alas, it was predictable that this effect would be temporary, and it was.

All of this was illustrated by the Tet offensive. The enemy got their butts kicked. They took horrific casualties, while U.S. casualties were very light for such a major engagement. They achieved not a single military objective. But they showed that they were willing to take horrific casualties, while the U.S. was unwilling to take even very light ones.

And in both cases, rightly so. Just as there was nothing significant for us to lose by losing, there was also nothing significant for us to win by winning. We didn't have the will to fight and win that war, because the American people, by and large, have better sense than that. But the Vietnamese had everything on the line. It was their country, and they were fighting for their independence and had been for decades. We may not like the government Vietnam adopted either during or after the war, but that's irrelevant. What's relevant is how THEY felt about their country being subject to foreign rule, be it that of France, that of the U.S., or that of the Soviet Union or China. They didn't like it, and were willing to fight against it, harder than any of those countries were willing to fight for it. And in the end, that was all that mattered.