Well that and the fact that we were getting involved in a civil war in a rinky dink country where we had no national interest what so ever. After 50,000 Americans died we turned tail and ran and the civil war resolved itself pretty much like it would have had we never set foot there.
I never held it agains’t the guys who said no I’m not going to get conscripted to go get shot at for no good reason. If they had refused to go to Hawaii to repel a Chinese invasion I would have felt differently.
We are now in Afghanistan doing the same thing with less casualties and a voluntary army. But in the end we will leave having accomplished nothing and Afghanistan will go back to its 7th century existence as though we had never set foot there.
I think the one thing it accomplished, is that it send a message to the Soviets that they weren’t going to be able to take over countries without a fight.
Imagine had we not fought in ‘Nam. Would then the Soviet Union still be in existence today?
Vietnam was a battle within a much bigger war.