“They really didn’t want to win”
I suspect that Washington was getting some pretty nasty threats from China and/or Russia and was stuck not wanting a rerun of the Korean War, where we sat on China’s border only to get rammed in the middle of winter.
So the goal was to leave and let South Vietnam try to fight it alone - but Watergate empowered the Democrats to pull the rug from South Vietnam and let their Commie friends in the North win.
But, in hindsight, we got millions of PRODUCTIVE refugees thanks to that policy, far better than virtually all immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.
For those of us who served, we really wanted to win, or just get the hell out of that God forsaken place. But we saw examples such as being forbidden to return fire into rubber plantations because the French owned the trees, and were compensated (by the US $1 million for each tree that was destroyed). Towards the end, thousands of shells were used just to get rid of them. God bless the French. God bless the Industrial (Deep State) Complex. How many folks are killed when it is considered enough?