“My view is much different than yours. If Vietnam was so important why didn’t we fight that war to win?”
Because rarely discussed, but right there in the minds of our leaders, was the Korean war a few short years earlier. Nearly 1.5 million Chinese joined the war when we stormed right up to the Chinese border. We were being very careful to not provoke a similar reaction by invading North Vietnam or something. Not only might they invade to assist North Vietnam, they might start the festivities in Korea again, and god only knows what the Russians would do with that opportunity.
So when people say “we didn’t fight all out”, or “we should have landed and taken Hanoi”, there were some damned big worries besides how the meat grinder was going for our men. Maybe the policy makers didn’t do it all right, but the effort in Vietnam did not exist in a vacuum. It wasn’t and couldn’t be fought as though the rest of the world didn’t exist.
That made it suck more for our guys who knew how it woulda happened in WWII, but it really couldn’t.
A lot of people in charge were very scared about stumbling into a world war, or a giant land war with China. And we were about a decade into a truly credible Soviet nuclear threat. There was a lot of learning this new nuclear world and exactly where the limits were.
In reality, the strategic moves were probably about as good as could be done within the larger world picture. Really sucked for our men, but that’s probably just one more thing that did.
“In reality, the strategic moves were probably about as good as could be done within the larger world picture. Really sucked for our men, but that’s probably just one more thing that did.”
Well, we agree on one thing, “it really did suck for our men!” Especially for the ones that came back in body bags or left their limbs in Vietnam. Tell that to the families that lost their son, husband, or father. It sucked.
You and I will continue to disagree on the “Why” that made that sacrifice. We’ve put men on the moon and robots and drones on Mars. Certainly, the most powerful country on the planet could have found a way to win a war with a third-world country — and they did not do it.
From one Navy vet to another.