re: How many battles did the US lose in the Vietnam War?

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Kicked the shite out of the British in the 13th century, the British again in the 18th century and the NVA in the 20th.

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No mention of the Turks in the early 20th?

Interdasting.

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Never even heard of that movie.

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Mel and his boys were ANZACS in that film. I don't want to ruin the movie for you (because it is a FANTASTIC anti-war film), but - it didn't go well for them.

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Mel and his boys were ANZACS in that film. I don't want to ruin the movie for you (because it is a FANTASTIC anti-war film), but - it didn't go well for them.

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Probably the most historically accurate war movie Mel ever made. With the possible exception of Mad Max, but we'll have to see what happens in the future.

One Vietnam combat veteran told me that if it wasn't for the jacked up R.O.E. that we could have "bombed Vietnam until it was a mudhole."

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The Viet Cong was wiped out as effective combat force during the Tet Offensive.

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Based upon the news coverage of the TET Offensive, American public opinion was that we were losing but in fact as Darth pointed out we ended up crushing them.

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I’m not sure that would have been possible even if it was our war aim. The Soviets and China would’ve still poured munitions into the north and I think the Chinese may have done what they did at Chosin in Korea and come to the aid in military strength for the north.

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COL Harry Summers wrote an excellent (albeit dry for you non-practitioners) analysis of the entire thing called, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (1982). I read it while in ROTC.

Sure hindsight makes everyone a genius, but the answer to this war was quite simple: U.S. forces secure the border and block routes in from Cambodia and the HCM trail. Let the ARVN handle the VC cohorts with U.S. QRF backup and air support.

Far fewer day-to-day U.S. casualties - more like the occupation period of German and Japan after WWII - and an occasional pitched battle near the border that we would have overwhelmingly won.

South Vietnam's problem was that the ARVN was good enough to fight the VC, but not the entire north.

Doing what we usually do - we tried to take over and be everywhere, all the time, which wasn't possible. Frederick the Great told us that almost 300 years ago.

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The US got their asses kicked. Plain and simple. They were unprepared and unmotivated. Should have never been there.

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Not quite. In fact, we know now that the Tet Offensive was a desperate move on the part of a teetering movement that was severely weakened. US Forces pushed it back and, frankly, beat enemy arse. The US won that campaign by a large margin. The enemy was losing.
Television coverage and the length of the war, combined with the question of "Is it worth it?," are what ended the Vietnam War.

It is certainly fair to question whether we should have been there in the first place, but to say that "The US got their asses kicked" is flat out factually inacccurate.

The U.S. only lost one battle in the Vietnam War but it was the Battle of Propaganda which ultimately was the most important one. The main problem was we had politicians trying to make strategic decisions instead of trained military experts. It resulted in Vietnam becoming the clusterfrick that it did.