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GENERAL 1982 CLIMATE: The U.S. military with its nearly limitless supply of state-of-the-art aircraft, bombs, and other weaponry, has just suffered a humiliating defeat on the other side of the world; at the hands of a scraggly bunch of individual soldiers armed primarily with captured weapons and fighting on their home turf. 1982 is six years after our Bicentennial, and Vietnam is a replay of what went 200 years before, when Americans were the individually armed citizens facing a world-class army.

John Ross should (and may) know better. The Viet Cong and Viet Minh may have been armed with capture weapons early on, but by the 1960s they had new production AK-47s, Katuska (sic) rockets, motors, and so forth. The NVA had everything mother Russia and China could ship them. Up to and including Mig-21 fighters, tanks, and of course the heaviest air defense system outside of Moscow, with radars, heavy AAA and SAMs. Even with all that, they didn't win on the battle field but rather on the campuses of the United States and in the halls of Congress. The end, for South Vietnam, came with the second of two conventional all arms invasions, with armored divisions that would have made Patton or Rommel envious. The first was stopped with the help of US airpower by the ARVN, when the second came, US airpower was either gone or forbidden from interviening, while the ARVN was starved for supplies.