Permit me to slightly edit my post #16.
I said that the war in Vietnam was necessary. It is better, I think, to say that it appeared to be necessary at the time. So I do not fault those who said back in the early 1960s that we must stop the communists from taking over South Vietnam.
Well, the communists did take over South Vietnam. And no more dominos fell. Would that have been the case all along? Who knows?
There were four critical mistakes made during the Vietnam War:
1. We essentially took over from the ARVN because we perceived them as "too weak/corrupt" by our standards. That gave the enemy the opening to portray it as an "American war".
2. In the 60s, we had the wrong equipment and training for a Low Intensity/long haul war to protect and support the locals - which was our primary mission.
3. The American government did a crappy job of communicating to us and the world why we were there, what we were supposed to do, and what the End Game was supposed to be. As a result, the Left metastasized it's "antiwar" (pro-enemy) movement unopposed. The government should never have used draftees in combat. We had to draft people but they should have gone to Germany to cover the Fulda Gap and not been sacrificed in combat.
4. Lastly, our government insisted that we continue the "Space Race", pushed the War on Poverty, supported the Israelis in their wars with the Arabs, the expenses of manning and equipping a huge Cold War, and generally acted as though nothing was happening as we carried on a desperate, bloody fight 10,000 miles from home. We were not there to "conquer" Vietnam, we were not there to establish a colony or the 51st through 54th states, we were not there to secure oil or mineral rights. We were there to support a good bunch of people stay free and to live their lives the way they chose to.
As we get older, we get less patient with the antihistoric interpretations of us and our war.
Pol Pots reign of terror didn’t happen?