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Originally Posted by Overlord1191
Also, the US did not "lose" Vietnam. All of the military objectives of holding the soviet advance were in place years after the US withdrew. Plus the US forces inflicted horrendous casualties against the North Vietnamese (nearly 10 to 1). It was years later when North Vietnam broke the truce and took South Vietnam and that was mostly the failure of the ARVN. It's pretty unfair to hold the US accountable for a military loss while we were not actually in the country at the time.
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I believe it was LBJ who said the war in Viet Nam was to stop the spread of communism in SE Asia, and guess what? Viet Nam is a communist country, That's a loss right there. Inflicting horrendous casualties has nothing to do with winning a war, I'm more impressed the North could sustain the manpower to absorb those numbers.
The US also lost because they didn't understand it was a civil war, the NVA and VC were fighting for their country, their home, whereas the US didn't know what it was fighting for, other than what the politicians back home told them, and by the time they figured out it was a civil war, it was too late to do anything about it.
Ahh yes you see the US may not have been 'in country' when Saigon fell, but they sure played a big part in it. Let's see denying emergency aid to help the South fend off the North when it was most critical they get said aid, running from the country after 10 years of war and abandoning allies to save face. So you see there are many, many factors as to why the US lost in Viet Nam.