Americanization, Tet, and the War at Home

Johnson authorized the deployment of the first American ground combat units in March 1965; American troop numbers surpassed 184,000 by the end of that year and peaked at more than 536,000 in 1968. Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained aerial bombing campaign against North Vietnam, began that same March, while General William Westmoreland directed ground operations under a strategy of attrition that prioritized maximizing enemy casualties ("body count") as the primary measure of success. A mandatory draft generated growing social controversy, and Vietnam became the first war extensively televised into American homes, with images of combat and civilian suffering significantly shaping public perception even as the war's costs increasingly strained Johnson's "Great Society" program of domestic reform.