I have tremendous respect for the boys who fought in all of our wars. But don't fall into the trap of believing the myths. My dad was a WW-2 vet and not everyone who went off to fight did so willingly. Dad was rushed from Texas to NYC at the onset of the Battle of the Bulge and put on a ship to France as a replacement.
Dad told me that every time the train stopped along the way there were more empty seats than before, and that there were quite a few. Deserters simply got off the train rather than go. What happened to those guys was kept pretty quiet and has been lost to history. While I do agree that that may have been the greatest generation, not all of them were great.
I'm just a few years too young to have served in Vietnam, but my views have changed 180 degrees about that war. As a teenager during the final years of the way I detested the protesters. But history has proven they were right. I hold the Vietnam vets in high regard, it is the politicians of the time who let us down.
I digress.
At the end of WWII, the OSS were in contact with and coordinated with the Viet Minh in actions against the Japanese designed to protect Chiang Kai Shek’s flank from Japanese incursions from Indochina. By contemporary accounts, it was a good working relationship and French educated Ho Cho Min was quite pro-US in the hope that the US would be anti-colonialist in its post war policies.
The US was anti-colonialist but its premier policy was containment of the Soviet Union and promotion of NATO, which meant appeasing its European allies. So, the US support for the French in Indochina (and North Africa) soured Ho ChinMin on the US while US policy of containing Communism, especially after the “loss” of China, led inexorably toward confrontation with Communist North Vietnam.
It’s all very well and fine with hindsight saying that our politicians let us down. But what about Ho Chi Min? Are there any examples of the North Vietnamese seeking to reassure the US that they were purely nationalists (and so what, we know for a fact that they were not)? The concept of the “domino theory” was valid. Containment of Communism was a valid strategy that ultimately won the Cold War.
The political and policy issue in Vietnam was that after MacArthur had ignored the threat of Chinese intervention in North Korea to our detriment, Johnson wanted to fight Communism in Vientnam without fighting the Soviets or the Chinese and with strict control over the military. This fear created the absurd rules of engagement and restrictions on military action that cost tens of thousands of US lives with no hope of a possible “victory”. And yet the military pursued a goal of military “victory” without the possibility of ever achieving it.
The war in Vietnam was never “winnable” because Johnson was unwilling (rightly so) to risk widening the war to the Chinese or Soviets. But failing to confront Communism in Vietnam could have lost more than Laos and Cambodia.
The key failure in Vietnam was relatively early, probably with Kennedy still in office (perhaps a reason he was inconvenient) when a settlement with Ho Chi Min
may have been possible. But there is no evidence to suggest that the North Vietnamese were in any way open to such a settlement. Communists want absolute power and view people as entirely expendable assets in its attainment. The Communists wanted absolute power in Vietnam. They had won such power in North Vietnam by fighting the French, the Japanese, and the French again. They fancied their chances against the US as well.
The war in Vietnam was inevitable and unwinnable. But it was actually only a battle in a larger, longer war. As an iteration of the policy of containment, it almost certainly saved Thailand and Malaysia from Communist domination, discouraged the Chinese from further adventurism, and made it clear to the Soviets that our resolve was real. We lost the battle in Vietnam but we won the Cold War against the Soviets. We are now paying the price for not having pursued a similar containment against the Chinese.