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The Vietnam war was a French colonial conflict. The US was mistaken to get involved.

There are theories out there that suggest that we got involved with Vietnam as an atonement for not aiding the French when they were attacked by the Germans in WWII....politics make for strange bedfellows and your remarks on this thread have been ignorant......

Vietnam had been fighting for independence since before World War II. They sustained the war throughout the French empire, and the Jap empire. After 54 and Dien Bien Phu Ho Chi Minh decided matters on the battlefield. Eisenhower himself said that Ho would have won an all Vietnamese election. There was no reason for us to assist in partitioning the country. The war was lost.

For Christ sake Ho was our ally against the Japs.

Get your history straight....Vietnam was a ridiculous, and unessessary war.

There are theories out there that suggest that we got involved with Vietnam as an atonement for not aiding the French when they were attacked by the Germans in WWII...

I've also read another theory that our aid to Europe via the Marshall Plan wasn't enough to forestall domestic communism in Europe and the French were whining that they would succumb to communism entirely if we didn't help them to regain their colonial empire, especially Indochina. According to these accounts, we transported the entire original French expeditionary force to Indochina using our heavy transport ships and paid something like 80%-85% of their expenses there early in the war. And when they lost it all, they came running to us to ask us to nuke the Red military forces in Vietnam. When Ike (sensibly) refused to nuke Asians twice in a decade, France gave in and tried to really screw us in the peace talks after which Kennedy started ramping up military 'advisors'.

Anyway, I've never found that accounting of French failure and perfidy to America in their failed postbellum Indochina adventure to be entirely satisfactory but haven't found any better accounts yet.

I think the question of how we 'lost' Vietnam has a lot to do with how the French lost it and how we slowly slipped into a full land war there over the course of four presidencies. And I think the old who-lost-China question played a strong role in the minds of the policymakers of the time. Another interesting chapter is how Ho Chi Minh tried to see FDR and was turned away during one of the post-war planning conferences held in '43 and '44. Perhaps an opportunity was missed there.