A couple of years earlier in 1965 the high school I had attended held a retirement party for one of its long-time English teachers - before coming to our school she had taught at another where one of her students had been James Michener, author of "Tales of the South Pacific", basis for the Broadway show - on the same night as the retirement party Michener had been scheduled to attend a soiree at the White House honoring him and other artists of the time - proclaiming the great debt he owed his old high school teacher for how she had contributed to his success, he stood up LBJ and instead attended the retirement party amid glowing press reports about the inspired way he had sacrificed to honor his teacher in spite of the status of the president he had ignored - I wonder still if he would have been quite so noble had JFK still been in the White House that evening.....
Kennedy’s involvement was miniscule in terms of troop numbers; we weren’t doing the brunt of the fighting as we would later. Also, the fact that it was composed primarily of advisers would indicate these were career soldiers, not draftees, serving there.
Comparisons to today’s quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan don’t stand for one simple reason alone: None of us or our sons are being drafted to go to these places. With all we now know about the war in Vietnam, I would be livid if I lost a loved one there. The reason Tet was so earth-shattering was because even as a VC disaster (which it certainly was), it exposed the lie that the enemy was on the ropes - according to our military, they would NEVER have the capability to launch those attacks after years of Americans fighting & dying there. That was Cronkite’s point, rather than concealing the VC disaster; if it was possible for the communists to still launch attacks on this scale in 1968, then we were no closer to winning the war that we were in 1965 (and had lost a lot of American lives already).