[editor-surveyor]

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The US war effort in indo-china began in the mountains of Laos in about 1956.

For about half of 1955, a few hundred special ops men were trained in the languages of southeast asia at the Monterey linguistics school.

There was absolutely nothing dishonorable about any part of the military effort there, from beginning to end.

The pull-out is what was dishonorable.
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[Ohioan]

The military were compromised by the Leftwing Secretary of Defense, and the general foreign policy of Secretary Of State Dean Rusk. I tried to get Rusk charged with something, via my friendly Congressman in 1962, over what the Kennedy Administration was doing in the Congo.

Rusk & McNamara were not on our side; rather they were pursuing their own version of a Leftwing Revolutionary ethos, on a a global scale. I deal with this in the Chapters in the Conservative Debate Handbook on Foreign Policy & Democracy In The Third World.

No our career military were indeed honorable men. The Government under JFK & LBJ were not.

[Pelham]

Laos is addressed in McMaster’s book.

Kennedy’s willingness to accept a defacto partition of Laos, giving Communists allied with Ho Chi Minh control of the border with Vietnam, set up Vietnam as their next target. And one that would prove much harder to defend than Laos would have been, had Kennedy not suffered a failure of will.

This was one of Kennedy’s great failures as President. It set in motion the Vietnam War.

“There was absolutely nothing dishonorable about any part of the military effort there, from beginning to end. The pull-out is what was dishonorable.”

Nothing dishonorable, but it was doomed by the defensive, gradual, start and stop nature of Johnson’s strategy. Neither Johnson nor Nixon was willing to win the war by doing to North Vietnam what we had done to Tokyo and Berlin only twenty years earlier.