The South Vietnamese lost Vietnam. You won't believe what those guys were doing.

What do you mean by that? I am not sure if I have a clue what your referring to.

The South Vietnamese government was so damned corrupt and showed so little regard for its own people that it's no wonder that the regular South Vietnamese folk started supporting the North Vietnamese, acting as guerrillas etc. The North Vietnamese weren't exactly angels but the South Vietnamese government... they were acting like the wealthy land owners of Nationalist China.

Yes, I have heard this type of stuff before but I mostly assume that fell on us too to where we would have had to do like now in Iraq, or that we did in Germany and Japan after WWII. We would have had to stay there to clean things up and help establish their National government and identity.

Originally Posted by AikiRooster

I don't think we lost Vietnam at all. Our politicians made it next to impossible for us to win there, then. Had full warfare been authorized, I think it could have been over in a week or two. Probably at least until the Chinese and/or Russians came to party.

We did lose in the sense that people got so sick of the slaughter the support for the war fell away. I don't think we could have won militarily anyway, the best we would have got was a stalement. Remember your're talking about defeating a well organized, well equipped, highly motivated, highly nationalistic army, while fighting them on their own soil.

These are a people who in the space of about 300 years pushed back 4 occupiers, the Chinese, Japanese, French and us. That should be a warning to any invader.

I disagree. Wholeheartedly.

Originally Posted by mmarsh

We did lose in the sense that people got so sick of the slaughter the support for the war fell away. I don't think we could have won militarily anyway, the best we would have got was a stalement. Remember your're talking about defeating a well organized, well equipped, highly motivated, highly nationalistic army, while fighting them on their own soil.

These are a people who in the space of about 300 years pushed back 4 occupiers, the Chinese, Japanese, French and us. That should be a warning to any invader.

Same old story of certain people supplying flawed info to drag us into a war that was none of our business. In those days the bogeyman was "The Domino Effect" in this last fiasco it was WMD.

Well,... we slunk out of Vietnam after suing for peace at the Paris negotiations and the whole of SE Asia never fell to the Communist cause, it merely turned to mush for the next twenty years, which it would have done anyway without our interference.

Even our eventual withdrawal was a farce, because it later came to light that the NVA/VC were on the ropes and would have collapsed in a few more months or so. I suppose it could be said that it probably saved another few thousand lives so I guess the outcome was better than nothing, we just had to suffer being the laughing stock of the world for the next 10 years or so until the Russkies got their fingers burnt in Afghanistan.

It appears we never learn from our mistakes.