Could any strategy have worked in Vietnam?

Keeping the media and Jane Fonda out would’ve probably altered history.

When politicians fight wars, you can never win.

If we didn't make mistakes it actually might have just dragged on longer.

Never underestimate the will of people in their own country. The Viet-Cong were in it for the long haul and totally committed.

Our piecemeal deployment showed the top brass didn't have that at the expense of the common soldier and that was the common complaint from soldiers who came back.

Actually declare war on North Vietnam. Actually try and hold land we gain. Don’t stop the B-52 strikes on Hanoi. Get involved in Laos and Cambodia and break up the Ho Chi Minh trail. And keep the media out of it.

When you’re watching tv and see little Johnny from across the street getting shot in Vietnam, you’re going to want out. The reason Korea was successful was that it was still riding off the coattails of WW2 ie Most of the US GIs in Korea had combat experience from WW2 and the war media was still very controlled.

They didn't want it to end. To much profit.

My best hindsight, and I've studied this for all of my adult life, is more or less based on Harry Summers book, On Strategy. With U.S. support, the ARVN could likely have handled the VC, but not the NVA (and certainly not both). SO, we should have let the Diem government run wild in the interior and deal with the VC as they saw fit. If U.S. involvement had been focused exclusively on 3 things:

1. Air/artillery support of the ARVN

2. Interdiction of supplies and reinforcements coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail

3. Fighting the NVA regular units and infiltrators at the Northern and Western frontier,

...then the press coverage wouldn't have portrayed the U.S. involvement in such a negative light, the U.S. body count wouldn't have been the only story the U.S. press wanted to cover and public opinion wouldn't have soured nearly so quickly. The draft would have still been escalated, but not nearly as much and at not nearly the cost in casualties.

At least that's how I've seen it for at least 20 years.

We could have turned Hanoi into Dresden if we wanted to, but the optics would have been bad.

Strategically it was a very winnable war. But was it a war worth killing that many innocents when we didn’t have a chance of being invaded by a country?

Personally, I feel communism and forcing people to live under it is as much as a human tragedy as the holocaust, but the reality was that North Vietnam wasn’t the worldwide threat that Nazi Germany was.

Yes. Bomb North Viet Nam to a pulp. We almost won that war. But we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. General Gap (head of North Viet Nam Army) admitted we almost forced them to surrender after a relentless bombing campaign by our Air Force. But our pal Walter Cronkite turned the tide in their favor. We wasted the lives of 60+ thousand men. A couple of those were my high school classmates. Many of those brave men who survived are now dying from exposure to agent orange. I know a few.

This is going to be painful for those who served or who lost friends in Vietnam, but were the protestors right? Was the war immoral? I honestly am struggling with this as I watch this series.

We don’t fight wars to overwhelm and occupy anymore. That ended in WW2. Our aim now is to destabilize threat and install leadership sympathetic to our interests. And sell weapons. Lots of weapons.