Although history puts America's war in Vietnam in the "lose" column, the United States actually won every major conflict including the infamous Tet offensive. The demise of the United State's presence and power in Vietnam was not due to losses on the battlefields but to the loss of support of the American public. The North Vietnamese were unified in their determination to win and America was not. For America it was a limited war and for the Vietnamese it was all out war in defending their homeland against American aggression to exert hegemony over South East Asia. The Americans underestimated the resolve of the Vietnamese who had for hundreds of years already had been fighting off the Chinese, then the French and now the Americans. They were not about to give up. President Johnson could not put everything into the war because of the fear that the Chinese, which had also got involved with the Korean war would get involved, or even Russia. So it was a half way effort doomed to failure.

In Vietnam it is called the American war. It was an immoral war that the intellectuals, progressive Christians and newly enlightened young people of America just could not accept. The duped older generation that remembered the glory days of U.S action in WWII was blind to the truth of what was really happening there. Calling the war a "police action" was just another lie to hide the fact that it was an illegal war as well as immoral. President Johnson escalated the conflict to a murderous campaign of American aggression that extended to the brutal bombing of neighboring countries.

Most people think that Richard Nixon got us out of Vietnam. Nixon did not end the war, we did. For every thousand of American lives lost in the conflict, millions protested back home. The fact is that it was Nixon that got us into the war while Vice President under Dwight Eisenhower in the fifties with the "Domino Theory" and it was the American people that got us out. If it was up to Nixon, he would have carried out his campaign of terror in Vietnam until he stepped out of office. This is not an exception to U.S. foreign policy but is endemic of it. Vietnam was an overt action, when Ronald Reagan came into power, wars became covert. Reagan used the Vietnam war as an reason to keep everything secret concerning his foreign policy so the American people could not react like they did in the sixties and seventies.

I was in Marine Corp Boot Camp in 1964 just as the Vietnam war got hot. I was a reservist to avoid the draft and the Drill Instructors asked us all to voluntarily go active, they said that we would all be called anyway, we fortunately weren't. I scored high on Officer's Candidate testing and was one of the few that was offered a Commission. I declined, that high score didn't come from being stupid. I had a buddy from San Francisco in the same unit as I was, private Bill Wheatley. I had met his family at a going away party we had at his house before boot camp. I remember him saying that he didn't have much going for him at home and he respond to the call to go regular Marine. He was the only one I remember that shipped over, he was sent to Vietnam and came back in a box. None of us knew what an immoral war was at that time, we just did our duty and fulfilled our obligations without question. Later on in the sixties, I joined other Marines that marched against the war. I think of Bill from time to time and wished he had been there with us. We finally won the protest in 1975.



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