Our government quit that war and pulled us out we didn't lose it.
Ron

So in other words we lost.  Let's just admit it and move on.

Post from imposter -

How so?

Eric The Hun[>]:)]

we did loose.  with no disrespect to any of our brave veterans.  virtually every opertation was leaked to vc nva units by 'moles' in the arvn officer corps.  somewhere along the line in 1965 it was decieded to let the arvn's know all our movements. our troops never had a chance.

 by the time we pulled out - the vc were virtually wiped out and it had become a conventional war (which we could of won) - whittness the battles of 1972 and on.  we send the arvn's down the river of no return by not supplying enough ammo for them to keep the fight up.  there were less than 200 rounds per month per arvn m16 in late 1974-75.  ford refused to use buffs on the advancing nva as they swept downtowards saigon.

it was a corrupt infrastructure that was rotten - nothing could of saved it.  the south should of fallen in early 60's  

although in retrospect with our modern technology - thermal imaging, motar locating computers, ground penetrating satellite radar, and the like - we could now surgically remove most of the vc.  but why would we want to defend a 3rd/4th world sh!thole like that anyway - against what?

steve

Eric:

The Vietnamese War IMHO:
1-Demoralized our population, making it more difficult to intervene against communist aggression where necessary (e.g. Central America).
2-Ruined our reputation with allies, becuase we turned tail and abandoned the South Vietnamese.
3-Ruined our international reputation, because of all the negative press (baby killers, etc.)
4-Along with the Great Society, produced stagflation that made capitalism less attractive, both in our own country and abroad.
5-Completed the radicalization of the media and academia, as well as much of the population, at home.
6-Virtually destroyed the morale of the U.S. Army.
7-Limited the funds available for our other defense needs.

If you look at our situation in 1979, it was not looking too good.  Politically and economically the commies and Arabs had us on the ropes.  Our influence was in decline everywhere.

A good book to read on the collapse of the West in the late 1970s is "How Democracies Perish" by Jean Francois-Revel.  He argues pretty convincingly that the only thing that saved the West was the Sino-Soviet split.  Essentially, the West was saved by the competition between two totolitarian powers.

Reagan was eventually able to get things turned around, but without him I think we would have been sunk.  But maybe our collapse in Vietnam was the shock we needed to elect a right-thinking guy like Reagan!

I am not saying we should have let the NLF take the South in 1963.  But if we were going to fight, we needed a strategy that would lead to victory.  The strategy we had in Vietnam killed lots of people, but would never lead to the achievement of our goals.