re: Could any strategy have worked in Vietnam?

Although I didn't agree with sending troops in the first place, the media fricked it up along with our unwillingness to go all out.

A war is a war. You either take it easy and lose your own troops or you stomp on the enemy's throat at the beginning.

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I am finishing up “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns. I have never done this in-depth a look of the entire war. But this series seems to show that everything we could have done wrong we did do wrong. Damn. Was there anything we could have done other than not getting involved at all?

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I think our history, especially, and history, generally, shows it's a bad idea for a foreign power to get involved in another country's civil war.

Vietnam was the first war we really cared about civilian casualties. In WWII, we didn't give a frick. We killed civilians on purpose to break their will (see Dresden and of course Hiroshima/Nagasaki). No one cared back then, but in Vietnam people did, which is why we "lost."

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No one cared back then, but in Vietnam people did

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Civil wars are tricky, it's not the same as two nations going head-to-head, there's always an element of winning over the populace to your side.

If our strategy wasn’t to declare Vietnam attacked us in Gulf of Tonkin, it would have been a very different chain of events.

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Should have stayed out of the war.

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The whole "domino theory" didn't really play out.

Should have started in the north. Made the North Vietnamese Army protect its territory.

The Viet Cong was mainly in the south and in Cambodia. After taking North Vietnam it would have been much easier to defeat the Viet Cong.

Once the Noth Vietnamese army hooked up with the Viet Cong it was pretty much over in jungle warfare.

We studied the Vietnam War in one of my ROTC college classes. That is the conclusion the professor believed(24 years ago).

I've done quite a bit of reading on this and I just started ken Burns doc on this.

The politicians fricked our men over. Period. The fact that they liked about the gulf of tonken incident that Drew us in should tell you. People should be tried with murder imo for the one that got so many of our people killed.

Air power being let loose would have echnaged the course of the war. The fact we could o my come in one way and bomb allowed them to concentrate what limited anti air power they had in one shooting gallery. frick that you let them do as they are trained and let the south Viet army fight the ground we would win.

Pull out all the stops. Wipe out their ports. Crush the ho chi trail. Act like you want to WIN the fricking thing. The north would have collapsed. No way in hell they would have lasted.

Guerrilla fighting would have been inevitable but I still feel like over time there would have e been a victory.

Much of the norths resolve was due to the idea America was an in another imperial conquest just like so many they dealt with before. Having their people on the ground I think would have been much better for optics and perhaps many of the guerrilla fighters would not have existed. The south looked like them because they were them.

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But after watching this series I am beginning to question some of my previous beliefs about the “rightness” of this war.

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The Burns series very cleverly focuses in on the Vietnam vets who later vehemently opposed the war - the Kerry comrades. I think this was on purpose to give more credibility/gravitas to the anti-war movement.

We're also ignoring the obvious flaw in many of these theories - the United States - by any objective measure won the Vietnam War. The North seized upon the opportunity provided by Nixon's resignation to undo that and the U.S. Congress, in a display of bipartisan cowardice the likes of which this nation has never seen and will likely never see again, threw that victory away with a not-so-subtle, "frick you" to a pleading Gerald Ford and all the wasted lives to that point.

So, there's all of that.