People shouldn’t discount the endemic corruption of the South Vietnamese regime. It becomes magnitudes more difficult to win when your key ally, the one who you are shedding blood and treasure to defend and protect on their own soil, have a national leaderships that is so completely unworthy of help.
All too true. A friend of mine fought several tours in Vietnam and was a friend and colleague of John Paul Vann’s and part of his body detail. Oz liked the Vietnamese as individuals but saw them as mostly having little sense of responsibility for the fate of their country. Sadly, many of Oz’s stories about his Vietnamese friends ended with a report of them being killed in reeducation camps.