I was only born long after VN war ended. I never understood why the USA simply didn’t march west from Khe San to the border of Thailand. Have our Thai allies reinforce their Norther border, and cut the Ho Chi Minh trail in half. At that point, Laos is only 100 miles wide.
Would the North vietnamese have wanted to start a full on frontal war with the USA? I highly doubt it.
Op Lam Son 719. Using S. Vietnamese supported by US Troops. Utter disaster. Nearly 40k KIA both sides.
It’s easy (and interesting) to debate 50-plus years later what we would have done. Are you right? Maybe. But keep in mind that we have more intelligence than Gen. Westmoreland could have dreamed of. Yes, we can definitely put a lot of blame on the LBJ administration, which hamstrung our military by sending them to war but kept them from actually doing anything that would have a strategic benefit. But in all fairness, we didn’t know what the Chinese or Soviet Union would have done if we went all out against the communists. We are fortunate to live in a world where atomic/nuclear weapons have only been used once, and that was to end a war. Had we fought to win and had the NVA on the ropes, that might not have been the case.
Got Netflix? Watch the Vietnam War. We should wave never gotten involved in their civil war. And after we got in, half the people were NV sympathizers. Our troops were given an impossible job to fight an enemy they couldn’t identify.
At that point in the war the Ho Chi Minh Trail was only a goat track compared to what it would be later on. Early in the war the North was using freighters and sampans to move supplies into the South. Once the seaborne resupply was shut down, the Trail was greatly expanded.
But yeah, that war was amazingly stupid from a strategic standpoint.
General Bruce Palmer, Commander of U.S. Army Vietnam and Chief of Staff of the Army believed that we should have done exactly that. The details of his plan were provided in his book: The Twenty-five Year War.
The United States Government and the politicians were spooked by the CHICOM intervention in Korea and feared that the same thing would happen in Vietnam if we expanded ground combat into North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They preferred to let 50,000 U.S. soldiers die and accept stalemate or defeat rather than put their careers at risk.
I was at the Wall for the first time over the 4th and I was just speechless and sick.