Well, George Bush (41) did, despite a generally good environment for employment, which has always been seen as competition for Armed Forces recruiting. I'm not sure you're right about that at all.
As for the Vietnamese being so bad, a) they didn't own the jungle, as the Australians and the LRRP's proved -- in fact, it was the Australians who owned the jungle; they just let the NVA play in it, and b) the enemy had human limitations of their own, which led them to hate coming into contact with the ROK's. The ROK's were very tough in hand-to-hand combat (every man a black belt in tae kwon do), and the Viets really disliked having to go up against them -- and would have equally disliked going up against similarly well-trained U.S. troops, such as those we deploy now to Iraq regularly. Then, c) a change in warfighting tactics from Westmoreland's "search-and-destroy" operations that didn't work to something that did, such as fully-backed LRRP's might have paid big dividends. American use of LRRP tactics would have been much more successful if we had had the hosses to counter the NVA anti-LRRP tactics of observers everywhere and 10-man rapid-reaction HUK squads to counter and follow up. If we had made a real study of it, we could have made the NVA pay a very high price for chasing our Ranger and Marine LRRP's around.
Serious, purposeful application of our resources in Vietnam would have made that war another study in "screw with the best, die like the rest." We didn't try -- we didn't try at the top, we didn't try in the middle, and no wonder people didn't try at street level, either.
But then, that's the kind of leadership we had back then, with Lyndon Johnson in the White House supported by roomfuls of Harvard "warriors" who looked down their noses at him -- and us.
Quite right reply...
But basically we were working our way PAST the "lessons" of Korea... and we succeeded. We brought Korea on ourselves by one of our less considered speeches.. and then brought the Chicom on our own heads by ignoring their backstairs communications and MacArthur's mistake...
I can really relate to the pussyfooting confusion over VN policy in that environment. But we put the big stall in... and it worked... and then we slipped into the Afghan war against the Russians (I was involved in that) and even then we made a mistake of turning ISI from a quonset hut into a huge operation by trying to use them as a cutout.
Even so THAT worked as well.
One loses a lot of embarrassing battles in a war... the key is not to lose the war and to hold the principle strategic points... and not lose sight of what they are.
Leftist media/academic thinking tends to obscure it. And Lipscomb reminds us WHY we went into the swamp.
Thanks for your great postings.
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Still moot, the military Bush 41 had he inherited, he didn't build. And, most importantly there was no senseless war costing thousands of lives a year during the 80s that would have scared 18 year olds away.
I don't think it's accurate to compare saddam's forces with the VC and NVA on a toughness level. The Iraqis gave up faster than the French (who had been whipped by Ho's peasant army). The VC went underground (literally) for years and the NVA kept the Ho Chi Minh Trail moving in spite of daily B-52 poundings.
I am not arguing that we could not have won, of coure we could have with different leadership. I am arguing that the VN War was unique in far too many ways, including the home front, to be analagous to any other conflict in our history.