Good post, but I disagree somewhat about Vietnam. Yes, we lost that country to Communism, but we slowed the Communists greatly, and cost them greatly as well. The tragedy is that we had victory in our hands more than once, and a lot of South Vietnamese paid an awful price for siding with us.
Actually, if I had written that post a short 10 years ago, I would have mentioned the Communist aspects to the war, but I have changed my views a bit on it after studying the history of it, especially Ho Chi Min.
Chi was created by the French occupation. He became a Communist later in life after he decided to create a revolution. This happened in Russia.....where he studied the Russians. Chi actually hid his Communist ideology early on in his revolution in hopes that he could get some aid from the West to force out the French who were treating his people like so much cow dung. Killing, maiming, torture...the whole ball of wax. This all occurred in the 1920s-40s
Had we intervened then, and he asked several times, the last time was to Roosevelt, the war would never have gone the way it did, with his revolution having to go to the Chinese. We unfortunately ignored his pleas for help.
Prior to that he had actually spent some time in the US. he started out pro-west and was forced by circumstance to allow the Chinese in for their weapons and supplies. After that the peoples revolution took on a more communist political stance,and subsequently a communist government was formed in the North.
Personally, after much thinking on this, I now take a different position in that I believe the anti-communist angle we used to sell the war at home, has failed the test of time. It did not begin as a Communist expansion. it only went that way because we let it and it was one of those, “if Only” moments of history.
I think that since Communism did not spread much beyond Vietnam after re-unification, I see that as proof that what we were involved in, was civil war caused by a line drawn by negotiators where only 2 million people took the southern end, and the rest went North. many of those two million people were actually Northerners faking their allegiance.
I think a mistake was made to have gotten involved on behalf of the French colonialists and we should have involved ourselves much earlier in the process and helped them to get the French out via diplomacy. France being a ally complicated post WWI. But in short, it was not the Communist problem that we thought it was. Through a unfortunate series of mishaps and missed opportunities, it became a Communist issue in part but the primary issue was a civil war for independence and we backed the minority side, installed a puppet government with a catholic leader, and mucked it up causing China to become Chi’s benefactor.
The rest is history, as they say.
I did not fight there, I ended up in Germany for 2 and a half years. I enlisted because a couple of my friends were killed there. But the Army decided my fate and future.