Well, I was still in single digits at the time. However, my study of military history was that Tet was a military victory, but a moral defeat. This was the first time that the US public had near instant visual, and very un-censored reporting. It wasn't something that most households were capable of handling - mostly from the females, as a good portion of the male heads of households had been through this in WWII and Korea. There was also a new generation coming of age - one that was the off-spring of the WWII generation. Unfortunately, their fathers did not talk of the war, or maybe these children would have understood that war is terrible, but sometimes necessary.

That said, I've also been on record as saying that Viet Nam didn't need to expand to what it became. Had JFK and subsequently Johnson de-escalated (and perhaps Ike even before then), a lot of social angst in the US could have been mitigated.