I have two uncles that were in combat during the Vietnam War, one marine and one soldier, both wounded. From the first time I heard of this and figured out what the war was about I became infatuated with it. I read every book, watched every movie, heard as many stories as I could. I studied the weapons used, the tactics, the daily life and routine of the grunts............everything. And in my mind America was awesome, we were right and had the might, we were confronting communism at every turn.

And then I read a book on the history of Vietnam and it completely changed my perspective. I can't remember the name of the book, but it went over the entire history of Vietnam and I became "aware". I think this new "awareness" coincided with my newfound at the time, mis-trust of our government during about '96, how convenient right?

Then I caught part of an interview with former SecDef Robert McNamara and some of the things he said reinforced my new revelations. I learned that Vietnam was tired of foreigners raping their country of natural resources, namely the Chinese and Europeans, namely the French. To end this raping of their land they sought the help of many countries, one being the United States. Ho Chi Minh admired America and even recited the American Declaration of Independence when he took power. We were apparently too busy to listen to their concerns and we didn't want anything to do with offending France by interfering in their affairs after what they had just been through after WWII.

While pleading for help from democratic countries produced no real assistance, it was the prime opportunity for the Communists to provide any help they could to harm their capitalist cold-war enemies.

Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex, that we should be weary of military and political alliances, that it was a dangerous partnership and should be avoided at all costs. It essentially is an agreement that the politicians provide the conflicts so the military could engage in them necessitating the use of military resources which military contractors provided for. This created jobs, the politicians and generals invested in the corporate contracting companies and then awarded them the contracts. A war is started, munitions are used, equipment is destroyed thus requiring replacement. Thus the contract companies went into full production swing enhancing their value, stock values shoot up and guess who gets rich? Guess who goes to war?

What threat did Vietnam have on the national security of the United States? None of our allies at the time thought it was a good idea to get involved there. The token troops supplied by allied nations were just that, to not anger their "sugar daddy". So what if Vietnam went communist? Had we not learned the lesson from Korea? We could have beaten Korea, Korea became a stalemate due to soft progressive politicians and the restraining of our military leaders in doing their job.

I'm not so sure WWI or WWII were a justifiable cause, neither were a threat to our national security in the short term. No one can predict the future, our involvement was all predicated on predictions and fears, justifiable possibly. We saw where WWII was going, and the Germans were sinking our supply ships heading to arm their enemies. But WWI? There was absolutely no threat to the U.S. by Germany, everyone fighting was spent, I think what we did there was to put a limp horse out of it's misery.

So, these are my thoughts on our country and our involvement in conflicts around the world. I am glad my uncles came back alive and that I can still talk to them and enjoy them. But there are too many that didn't come home, too many that came home damaged irreparably. And I ask why? Why are we so bent on going into these places and fixing nothing. Iraq and Afghanistan is the same thing, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi and invading Iraq and Afghanistan has fixed or changed nothing except making life more difficult for US to live.

This needs to be fixed, before we get all gung-ho to go somewhere to kick someone's ass, we better be sure we're kicking the right ass for the right reasons. American lives are valuable and for politicians to throw them into a fire, any fire, without a second thought is criminal. I am in no way against those in the military, I am a 10-year military vet myself, but I value my life and although was all about getting involved in the first Gulf War, but I didn't know any better at the time.

This is what we really need to consider in a person when we decide to cast our vote for them, would they senselessly send our kids to some far away country to get killed for no good reason but to line their pockets with corporate contract stock values?

Bottom line-

Russia had to be stopped.  The domino theory was correct.  

It doesn't matter what country the war was in, the goal had to be to stop the spread of communism.  That goal is correct.  How that goal was implimented proved crappy.

The war in vietnam was never about vietnam in the larger sense.  

Vietnam became communist after all and it didn't affect us at all. You think our involvement there stymied others that might have been "thinking" about it? Because otherwise, I see it as a misguided mis-adventure with much lost.

ETA: The right reaction to Vietnam's predicament would have been to leave them to their own devices and ignore them. Or we could have helped them rid their country of those stealing their resources and establish a proper and fair trade atmosphere with them. We would have had a civil and business oriented footprint there and it would have been a bastion of capitalism on China's back door.

You got it all figured out.....

We lost, and the massively negative things we were told would spin out of that loss mostly didn't happen.

In strategic terms, Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia didn't count for very much, and their Communism didn't get exported to Thailand.

We paid a very high price that events have shown we did not have to pay.

Vietnam was never more than a blip on the radar screen to the Soviets.  They really didn't want that much to do with it, they had much more important things on their agenda.  The domino theory proved to be a myth.  Communism in general is showing itself to be a political dead end.  I'm not sure China could even be called communist anymore.

That our "leaders" pushed so hard to get involved in this needless conflict is simply criminal. Eisenhower had it right by severely limiting American aid and involvement to the French rather than being embroiled in the conflict during the early '50's. However, with hindsight, it would have been better to just get it over with then if we were to be involved at all. Hindsight also disproved the much-vaunted "Domino Theory", as this was, first and foremost, a nationalist struggle.

LBJ should be buried face down in a unmarked grave.

Well of course hindsight is 20/20, but simply refusing to help the French in 1945 would have led to their defeat even earlier than happened, and a unified Vietnam by 1956 or so.  Following this, China and Vietnam would have been at war before 1960 without question, and Communist or not, they'd have turned to us (like they tried to in 1919 and 1945, and got snubbed).  Make no mistake, Ho was a communist, but in retrospect he was certainly far less doctrinaire then those who succeeded him, and while I think it's pretty naïve to think that there would have been any form of democracy in a Ho-led Vietnam, without the horrors of the long wars for independence and unification it's pretty likely that the Vietnamese would have gotten off more lightly than they actually did- even the post-1975 repression in Vietnam, while quite horrible, certainly isn't in the same league as Pol Pot or the Cultural Revolution.  

With all that being said, the incredible level of deception, corruption and outright stupidity displayed by the US Government throughout 1954-75 certainly can't be blamed on the Vietnamese or even Communism.

It seems to me that the freedom of the Vietnamese people (i.e self-determination)
was our stated goal to France after the end of WWII.

The US knew that Soviet and Red Chinese influence had to be stopped, but we had no
"legitimate" reason to go to war- until the "Fake News" incident at the Gulf of Tonkin.

While I agree with trying to stop Communist-influenced revolutions, I don't think it
was worth the lives of 57,000 American men and women.

Those servicemen took the brunt of the shift of American sentiment, and I hate the
fact that they were treated so shamefully.

They should have been greeted as heroes and patriots, but due to the Leftist-controlled
press, they were spat upon and disrespected as "child killers".

In the end, although the intentions were good, it was a total waste of human life and capital.

The domino theory was right in the fact that Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia all fell one right after the other.  Thankfully Thailand didn't.

As for communism being a political dead end, maybe not.  All the kids at the Universities seem to think it's great.  They're our future leaders.

Hell yes he should. Lying son of a bitch. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident that precipitated our build up in Vietnam was almost entirely fabricated.

Vietnam was always Communist.  In fact, or OSS was shot through with Communist sympathizers - they were playing patty-cake with Mao in China.

In order to cause trouble in Japan's rear areas, the OSS helped arm and train 50k-100k Vietnamese Communist guerillas.  I guess no one told them about the Bomb.

*BANG* - *BANG* - Japan up and quits.  The Frenchies come rolling back in and say, "Guess what? We own your ass again!".

Those armed Communsit guerillas did not just go "Awe - shucks" and quit.

OP you could not be more wrong the true history of the  Vietnam War is post '72 thereeducation camps of Vietnam , the  Kymer rouge in Cambodia the civil War in Thailand that still flares occasionally today.

MY OPINION the only truly ethical way to fight a war is in the style of Sherman . hyper violent & very fast. the least ethical way is  Sanction & blockade.

the goal of any war should be to end & minimize  human suffering on all sides by keeping violence as short as possibel. but to do that during the violent period you must be as violent and ruthless as you can.

The US loss in Vietnam caused the suffering & death of millions of people for a decade & longer.  for similar examples- see how Obama's refusal to support the Arab spring & Iranian recent revolution has led to the deaths & prolonged suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.  with no political gains

Remember war is politics by other means the instant you are not gaining on the political goals, you are losing

OP spelled Marine wrong.  The rest is just a wall of unread text. 

Gulf of Tonkin incident was not fake news, rather it was the US Navy claiming something happened that really didn't..........that's not fake news.........that's being dishonest about the incident...........the news was the news............the news was the truth..........just reporting a fake incident as to opposed to distorting or misrepresenting an incident from the start.

Obama did support the Arab Spring............the US bombed Libya and gave support to the revolutionaries that over threw the dictator...............

Why did Korea end in a stalemate and Vietnam didn't? One thing for sure, peninsulas are cursed for war fighting.

I am not wrong, engaging in war with Vietnam was wrong. We had no business being there, the politicians responsible for it should be criminally charged, at least the ones still alive.

Wrong war, right reason.

Totally mismanaged from the top down.

The politicians involved in the Iraq war should be charged...........faulty intel and flawed strategy drew us into a mess............If you put America's involvement into Southeast Asia.........into perspective ....it was an extension of the Cold War.........and the US strategy at the time was "containment" Stop the spread of Communism...........

And don't underestimate the impact of poor training (I went through it in 1969-1970), corruption and drugs.  The Army was really messed up then and it was not just the draft.

My father spent 4 tours in southeast asia, and that was 10 years after he enlisted.

Per his own words "you think by now we would know what to do when we decide to send our boys overseas" (per the middle east).

I'm getting to the point where I believe it's not about a war, but about the money.  I had 4 uncles serve in WW2, 1 who died in Belgium. Seems to be a different set of rules between a world war and a "conflict".

Politicians are idiots, why would anyone risk their life on the advise of an idiot.

I think that the reasons for getting involved were wrong but that the US gained a lot of valuable unconventional war fighting experience that will help to keep us on the top of the food chain geopolitically in the future.

However, I think that there should be more severe repercussions for politicians that lie/don't tell the whole truth and get us involved in meatgrinders that are not easily exited from.

OP, as far as books on the Vietnam War go, I too have read quite a bit. I love The Short Timers, The Phantom Blooper, Dispatches, and SOG.

Those leaders lied to us to get us involved in a war where many good people died on both sides for political and monetary gain. That is murder, yet we continue to honor them and name streets and parks and buildings after them.
I'm not an anti-war peacenik, I am all about going out there and demolishing those that need it. But a crime is a crime and history needs to reflect it.
I am through with our government treating us like expendable assets, they need to realize that they work for us and that we will ultimately decide when to risk our own lives.
It's getting easier to consider risking it to make them learn it. I know they'd happily oblige, but the line needs to be drawn, our lives matter and worth more than they can understand.

OP'ers question raises more questions and speculation. It is not a simple one and reasoning for involvement or interference changes with the attitude and actions of other countries as well as on going changes within our own Govt. The decesion to get involved or not is a huge chess game. Played years in advance with a thousand people on each side trying to decide the next move. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, mostly for the wrong reasons but sold the people as a do or die situation.
The bottom line question. What happens later (years) if we do nothing now .

Vietnam ! As someone that was to young to be there but having it be ingrained into my youth. I was in Ho Chi Min City (Saigon) not too long ago. I met several old men that were part of the conflict. I asked what their thoughts were ?
Every single one said the same thing. They are great full that the US intervened. Without the US getting involved the population would have been enslaved or killed out right. The oppressors were that brutal.

So how do you judge successful intervention. Only by your own loss ? Only by what you gained ?
Maybe we would be looking at 2 North Koreas instead of 1 ?
No easy answers. No easy questions. From my travels.. A Win !

Agree

That's a really goo reason not to join the military: Your employer sucks.

You join because of your country, not the politicians

You can join for whatever reason you deem appropriate. That reason is rendered absolutely irrelevant when your life is now in the hands of self-serving incompetents who have little regard for those in their care. Choose wisely.

This. It was all too little too late though. Communism is rampant and you're considered a, name an ism or ist, for not buying into it.

Fuck communists. Kill em all.

Well, I Was There - 69/70!  B55 Mike Force, 5th Special Forces Gp.  I ran operations in western II & IV Corps.  
The VC was largely no longer an operational organization except on small scale.  In my opinion the reason that the NVA got involved by about 69 was because of that.  They had to come in and pick up the slack.  
And in about every single instance where the US Army butted heads with the NVA we kicked their ass!!!  You want proof - Name me one instance of a battle with large numbers of US & NVA forces where the NVA controlled the battle field when it was over!  The US was the one who was still on the battle field and the NVA were the ones who had left the area.  WE policed up their weapons and equipment and counted their dead - NOT the other way around!  
The political establishment is the one who managed to give away everything we had won on the battle field!!!  The politicians refused to let the military win that war!  Even at the end when we had left we could probably - most likely - have stopped the NVA from over running the south IF the USAF/Navy had been permitted to conduct unlimited/unrestricted bombing raids on the advancing NVA!  Hell we had the entire NVA out in the open where they would have been dead meat in short order.  
Sarge

Thank you for your service Sarge, but I have to disagree. I was there in 68/69. Army helicopter pilot A co., Comancheros, 101st. Airborne. I believe we would have had to kill every single man, woman and child to win that war and we weren't prepared to do that.

Thanks for your service, and I'm glad you're around to retell your experience.

The VC/NVA never had to control the field after a fight. Taking and holding territory, for them, was only of secondary importance; controlling the population was key.

Stopped the widespread spread of Communism, so the original goal was, inelegantly, achieved.

Lots of derp in waging/running the war.
Lots of good people lost for many dumb reasons.  
Bad PR/image for the military (caused primarily by Communist subversives within our own population - but enough legitimate mistakes, errors and blunders to affect it negatively without that influence).

Could have been won following Tet if we had kept bombing the shit out of the North.



I never understood and still don't understand the 1 year tour thing when in an active war.
Peacetime deployments are another thing entirely.  
You can't keep troops on the front lines for a year or longer without a break, but I don't understand the logic behind taking seasoned troops completely out of theater.  
They know the terrain, have combat experience, know the local populace.

What did we stop except the lives of 58,220 Americans?

I think that to respond to this thread you should have served in the military during the Vietnam years, to understand it.I will start off by saying we should have not engaged in Vietnam.

No disrespect to those that were there, but being intimately involved in one aspect of the episode does not automatically bestow special insight into the conduct and scope of the entire conflict.

Over 58,000 Americans and one million Vietnamese, most of them civilians, lost their lives.

What good came from that?

I have come to realize that war is when your government tells you who the enemy is, revolution is when you find out yourself who the enemy is.

I dig.

Our government has proven adept at pissing away lives for little or nothing.

One of the biggest problems is that no one in the military was willing to throw away their career and tell the simple truth - given the RoE and RoVN government, there was simply no possible way to force North Vietnam to ever accept defeat.  So long as we supported a corrupt, completely discredited government and were unable to physically occupy North Vietnam, victory was unobtainable.  Perhaps completely unrestrained bombing of the North's civilian population would have done the trick, but that was obviously never on the table.

^ I think that's the most succinct reasoning on the topic I've yet seen.

"Doing one's duty" does not mean being a yes man.

The Vietnam War didn't happen in a vacuum. While South Vietnam had the active support of the US Military (and a few additional allies, like Australia and Korea), the South Vietnamese insurgents were actively supported by the North Vietnamese, who were supplied, trained, advised by the Soviet Union and the PRC, meanwhile the US was locked in a nuclear Cold War with the communist USSR and PRC. Vietnam happened right in the middle of the Cold War, escalating the conflcit could have started WWIII. This was a major concern of LBJ and the reason he micromanaged the war as he did, especially the way he picked and choosed air strike targets in the North, he was afraid if he delegated control to his military advisers they'd bomb something that would piss off the Russians or Chinese, who would themselves retaliate somewhere, somehow, causing a snowball effect, escalating into a shooting war with the commies, which LBJ wasn't willing to start over Vietnam. LBJ did not want to fight the Vietnam War, he only continued supporting the South Vietnamese because JFK and Ike had done it previously, and he was politically worried about the backlash of Vietnam falling (which had happened to Truman when China fell). He wanted to win elections and promote social justice, not fight wars. Bradley said it best about the mindset of both presidential administrations viewing the Korean War, it being "The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy", and this mindset of the LBJ administration. He was willing to help the Vietnamese, willing to see American servicemen die, but was unwilling to possibly escalate the conflict because he wanted to win the '68 election (which died after realizing he'd lose his own primary after the Tet debacle).

Now let's talk about "Unrestrained bombing of civilian population". It sounds bad ass but the reality, that unless done with tactical and strategic nukes, conventional bombing (to include firebombing) does fuck all to end a war. WWII proved it, both Strategic Bombing survies conducted after the European victory and in the Pacific victory utterly proved that despite wiping out entire cities with days long firebombing raids we hadn't come close to breaking the morale of the people. Targeting morale doesn't work, unless you use nukes.  And trying to win by attrition of human lives doesn't work either unless you're talking about democratic institutions which will vote out leaders performing unpopular policy measures. But all enemy regimes during WWII and the Cold War were totalitarian, ie. their govt DIDN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE PEOPLE. If it took another million or two million dead Vietnamese to ultimately win, they had no issues. Because commies don't care about human lives. With them, the ends justify the means, and more dead is simply the sacrifice necessary to live in their future distopia.

What would have broken the North wouldn't be targeting its people/subjects, but strategic targeting of the North Vietnamese logistics system. This means bombing all staging areas, all depots, mining coastal harbors, destroying all rail junctions and railways leading into the country. The ultimate goal is to choke off the military supplies coming into North Vietnam (estimated at tens of thousands of tons daily) and then their war effort dries off. They can't very well funnel entire divisions of newly raised recruits, well armed, fed, trained, with additional arms and supplies, down the Ho Chi Minh trail if they themselves aren't receiving them. Were there any factories in North Vietnam pumping out weapons, equipment, supplies? No. Because EVERYTHING they needed for the war came from Russia or China (both of whom were antagonistic to one another, unbeknownst to most Americans until Nixon and Kissinger found out).

Linebacker and Linebacker II essentially broke the North Vietnamese war effort by doing exactly that, and there were quite a few more steps we could have taken in a game of brinksmanship with the Russians and Chinese. Neither the US nor the Russians or Chinese wanted to start WWIII over Vietnam, so mining Haiphong harbor or attacking rails and shipping coming into the country might have pissed them off, but done with some balls and resolve we could have bluffed it so they either quit shipping in weapons long enough for the South Vietnamese to largely break the insurgency (which happened anyway by '70), or limit it so they were getting shit all.

Nixon could have doubled down (and he actually did, when he invaded Cambodia and Laos). But what really killed the war was not US failure in combat strategy and operations, it was the betrayal of the South Vietnamese people by the Democratic Party controlled Congress. You know how hard it is for a Republican president to get anything done with a Democratic controlled Congress? The entire time Nixon was president Congress was controlled by them. And when it became popular to oppose the war, the Democrats shut off funding, despite both Nixon and Ford wanting to continue.
This is what caused the fall of Saigon. At the same time the Soviets and Chinese were flooding North Vietnam with supplies and support, the US contribution to South Vietnam dried up. We couldnt' do shit. We weren't even allowed to give them fuel anymore (which they needed badly since we turned the ARVN into a mechanized/air mobile force). When Ford tried to intervene by Veto'ing more restrictions placed on funding the Vietnam War, the Democrats overturned his veto. Let that sink in for a moment. The Republican president was trying to save the South Vietnamese while the Democrats in Congress were saying "South Vietnam can go fuck themselves."  That's what cost us the war.

Militarily, there are a billion ways we could have improved the war footing of South Vietnam, or conducted more efficient US military operations (whether that be ground or air). But the reality was that the US as a country didn't have the political resolve to stick to it, to beat the insurgency, to stay in it longer than the enemy. And we failed because Democrats forced us to fail. Just like Obama did in Afghanistan. Just like Iraq, which is probably the best comparison, since the US occupation more or less broke the insurgency, then after we pulled out prematurely all our positive efforts were reversed, and veterans had to watch on tv as ISIS took control of cities we'd previously pacified.

Our military efforts on the ground were, at best, a delaying action.  EXACTLY like Afghanistan - the fact that the US was spending lives and treasures supporting a thoroughly corrupt and incompetent government that had essentially no support whatsoever from the populace is the underlying problem everyone wants to ignore.  EXACTLY like Afghanistan - the "insurgents" had access to support and haven in neighboring countries we couldn't shut down for political reasons.  And finally, EXACTLY like Afghanistan, the enemy knows they never have to win a single fight, never need to seize a single village.  If they just keep losing long enough, we'll eventually go home.

A delaying action against what exactly? Do you really believe a communist revolution, with the untold devastation that occurs with and following it, is inevitable?

Let's break this down, while the US was supporting a corrupt South Vietnamese govt, we weren't the only ones. Both the communist Soviet Union and People's Republic of China were both supporting the North Vietnamese's government, which was totalitarian, fucked up, corrupt. Is your objection that we should only be supporting moral govts full of honest and hard working statesman? Sorry, geopolitics doesn't exist. We don't pick get to pick our allies, unless we pull a Diem and then green light his "replacement" too. The US was in Vietnam to deny communist another global victory. Do you deny that was a worthy cause? That Americans shouldn't fight against Marxist, Maoist, Stalinists? At what time is it ever okay to surrender to communists?

NEVER

Communism was the excuse to go in. Ho Chi Minh came to America asking for help to regain control of their country from foreign control. It was after they kicked the French out that they got our attention.

The public was told about the domino theory.  In hindsight, Ike was right.  F*ck LBJ and it certainly help drain our coffers with his guns 'n butter program.  Gold fled our shores and in '71, Nixon closed the gold window.

BTW, good book to read is American Guerilla.  It's by a WW II O.S.S. officer who raised a guerilla force that operated against the Japanese.  He warned we were doing a lot of things wrong in 'Nam.

Wrong. The US was balls deep in Indochina politics long before France signed the Geneva Accords. Ho Chi Minh was a known communist since he went to "study" with other commies at the coffee shops of Paris in the 20-30s. The Viet Minh were Nationalistic but fragmented until Uncle Ho purged all non-communist from the senior ranks.