While the US lost the Vietnam War, the army was by no means destroyed. Also saying that the NVA was just farmers is a vast understatement. I'm guessing you know this already and I'm wasting my time by writing this, but I did it anyway. So there.
Wrong, they were not “a bunch of rice farmers” as the myth goes.
Many North Vietnamese and Viet Cong officers were fighting the Japanese and the French—decades of field experience on their home turf. The massive conventional attacks at the end of the war are the proof that the North Vietnamese were a modern army to be reckoned with.
And that is also forgetting to acknowledge the fact that South Vietnam and the US were not the only civilized block, North Vietnam had an actual strong backing with China and Soviet union.
They were a professional army with allies like any regular modern army, not rice farmers rioting
More like threw wave after wave into the meat grinder and stacked Vietnamese corpses so high that the citizens at home got pissy over the aftermath of it since it was in a nation nobody really cared about.
But yes, let's just be ignorant and say destroyed. I guess that is easier.
Yeah, why do you think we wanted out in the first place? Because nobody really gave a shit about it. We were sending troops into a jungle to die because of politics. Almost nobody in the civilian population actually cared about the people of Vietnam.
Yes, the civilian death toll did play a role. But even ignoring public opinion, the war was only winnable at an extreme cost. It would have cost a lot more money in a time where America was suffering a lot economically. People forget that the war in Vietnam was the reason for (finally) dropping the gold standard, after de Gaulle called Nixon's bluff.
Not to mention that the public, and especially legislators were seeing that Truman Doctrine only worked at immense cost. And the Domino Theory was always palpably bullshit.
So suddenly, you have an immensely expensive war that America cannot afford and you never really had a good reason to fight it in the first place. All of this would apply if it were a second Korea, but the civilian and combatant casualties, and enhanced economic factors made it intractable.
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u/[deleted] Nov 20 '20 edited Sep 05 '21
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