[quote=Borat]Dan: Couple of other things: (1) Militarily, we did win Vietnam. Inarguable fact in that US forces never lost a single major battle in the entire war. Vietnam was lost on the home front, not on the battle field.
I always liked the story of the Vietnamese and American generals meeting at the close of the Vietnam war. The American general said, “You know, you never won a battle against us.” To this, the Vietnamese general replied — “That is true, but it is also irrelevant.”[/quote]
Borat: No argument from me on that one. However, my point was that the North’s victory was largely due to the American public’s attitude towards the war and not attributable to force of arms in the field.
Think about this for a second: At the close of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the Viet Cong is virtually destroyed and the North Vietnamese Army is incapable of offensive operations in the South. It is a clear cut US victory and, in conjunction with US air operations, which were wearing heavily on the North, the war is now capable of being won. However, the US news/media, led by Walter Cronkite, solemnly announces that the war is a stalemate and there is no end in sight. The public’s perception, largely driven by what they were hearing on the news and reading in articles by journalists like Halberstam, solidifies against the war.
