“..God bless all who served, but if you want a one-sentence analysis of why we lost, there it is.”
And it was a war “fought” by politicians who were not interesting in WINNING the war and ending it. Our brave men were NEVER allowed to fight the war to WIN it. So many lives and much treasure could have been saved, on both sides, if we had been allowed to fight it to win it in the shortest time possible. A sad tragedy.
President Johnson campaigned in the 1964 election with the promise not to escalate the war. “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
One reason why I NEVER trust a Democrat.
Private conversation between Goldwater and Johnson (related by John Wayne in a Playboy interview)...
Goldwater: “Lyndon, you know we will HAVE to send troops to South Vietnam!”
Johnson: “I know that, but I am trying to win an election.”
Recall that the “insurgents” were almost all killed off in the Tet Offensive. From then on, it was a pure invasion of South Vietnam from North Vietnam.
When the Democrats passed a law to remove all US troops from SV, NV invaded SV with tanks. The US Navy stopped that invasion in its tracks with air strikes from aircraft carriers.
After the Soviet Union replaced all the tanks, NV tried again. They had more trucks supporting the mechanized invasion than the US had in the “Red Ball Express” supporting US forces in France exploiting the Normandie Invasion.
In WWII we firebombed cities to destroy the enemy and win the war. Post WWII we became “civilized”.
One flight of B-52s could have carpet bombed the dikes around Hanoi and destroyed the infrastructure that supplied materiel to the NV invasion force, stopping it in its tracks. It would have also displaced and killed hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese people ... and we were too “civilized” to do that.
The cold hard facts are that the Democrats valued being “civilized” more than honoring US commitments to an Ally, They valued the lives of 100,000 NV more than the lives of more than 1 million SV citizens.
The grunts of that war were right - they won every battle, but the politicians gave it away so they could think of themselves as “civilized”.