“...when the architects of the war in Vietnam later admitted countless mistakes...”
The McNamara documentary called the fog of War is a shameful exposé/admission.
The War Of Numbers was a good read on ignoring good Intel if it doesn’t meet the agenda or when cooking a budget. Tet was completely avoidable if the numbers secured by Intel through a network of trusted regional contact collection efforts were not cooked. The MACV appears to have been suckered into not believing the hard raw.on the ground data. Why? It didn’t support Westmorland strategy of victory through a war of attrition. When “body counts” become an indicator of a successful op and the troops are officially recognized for body counts, the race us on and numbers creep sets in.
They cooked the numbers deliberately to deceive the American people that we were “winning”; Tet showed that we weren’t - and the scales fell from the public’s eyes.
Millions of people died in that war, and we destabilized Cambodia in the process (leading to “The Killing Fields”). I could understand if there was a more sincere effort at the top (I believe we were right to try to help South Vietnam in the same way we helped South Korea ten years before), but it doesn’t appear there was.