I think we won in Vietnam…a long term perspective from the 60’s to today

Why should I even bring this subject up? We all know America lost the war in Vietnam…right!

Losing the war is written and in pictures and video, so it must be right! The evacuation pictures and video of Saigon says it all, right! The shots of panic are particularly disturbing, right! The North Vietnamese conventional army won, right! The South Vietnamese government was corrupt enough to deserve to lose, as it did! In the end the nationalists from the North won this civil war through determination and nationalistic objectives when throwing off the colonial restraints, right!

And back then the western “falling dominoes idea” had validity as part of a “containment of communism strategy” we were acting on. The communist politicians, mostly in the USSR, were aggressively trying to expand their influence and political power in the world. In hindsight, this seems hard to believe knowing the problems they had. The North Vietnamese were being used as pawns by China and the USSR to try extend communist hegemony over the entire South East Asia area. This meant Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma should fall to the North Vietnamese.

Now that reason for the USA engaging in war is long forgotten and seldom taught to younger people educated in conventional history.

And I will never forget Douglas McArthur’s advice about avoiding a general land war in Asia.

Fast forward to today.

Maybe the South took over the North. The entrepreneurial instinct bred in the South has taken over the whole country. Vietnam as a whole seeks to enter the world wide economic market, the communists and their dictatorship and failed ideas from the North be dammed. But the old nationalists and communists are the same today, I think, and did win; so today’s entrepreneurs must work through the obstacles the old time leaders continue to put up.

Just become friends with young Vietnamese forced to live and work in the USA. They communicate with family and friends in the “Old Country”, and many would generally go home but for the stupid communist dictatorship’s ruin of “their” country through its policies. Fortunately this dictatorship group is aging, and will die off. I also don’t think nepotism will survive against the entrepreneurs in this tribe.

Let’s go on. My suspicion back then that the North Vietnamese communist leaders were as much imperialists as civil war nationalists was confirmed when they did not stop in South Vietnam. Their successful efforts to take over Laos and Cambodia confirmed this to me. Thank goodness time and North Vietnam’s limited strength caused them to leave later, and the people of Laos and Cambodia threw off their latest yoke. Apparently, North Vietnamese civil war fervor was best appropriate to themselves, and not the neighbors.

Are these communist party people starting to sound like imperialistic politicians and not nationalists?

One thing really does bother me in all this discussion. It is the waste of all the mostly young men from North Vietnam whose lives ended in the war. In my mind a big chunk of a whole generation of young people died in this war. It is on such a scale that there are profound impacts decades later within the Country. What a waste. And Vietnam is still suffering from this gap in number of young men being killed in the war. Damn the old French Vietnamese revolutionaries who sent these young men to their deaths.

And the Vietnamese are a sharp tribe. As a retired Marine, I can say in my opinion that they are respected.

And we Americans are a sharp tribe, too. I think that all who went in harms way, to include those killed, injured, maimed, and served without injury should be thanked. They "done good".

If war is imposing one’s will, then I think we won from today’s perspective. The “falling dominoes” never came to pass, and Vietnam is becoming more prosperous and an economic ally of the USA. We have more in common than not. The nationalist forces deserve some credit (some in the South I would say), but so do some of our USA leaders at the time.

They imposed the USA’s will in their political judgment, and I think most of us are pleased with the results.