Scaredy: I worked with an NCO who had done 3 tours in Vietnam with Special Forces. He had a great expression relative to going to war for peace: “Killing for Peace is like fucking for chastity”.
There is a very strong counterpoint to the argument that we were in the wrong in Vietnam, and that is the actions undertaken by the North following the fall of Saigon in 1975. The North Vietnamese effectively liquidated all of their enemies, including those who had fought alongside them during the war.
We had a former Viet Cong major working with us in Jungle Warfare School. He and his family had fought the Japanese, the French and the Americans and his reward for all this was having nearly his entire family killed by the North Vietnamese in 1978, during a “purge” of “counter-revolutionaries”. He and one of his brothers escaped to Thailand and thence to the US.
Sometimes it ain’t Good and Bad, its Bad and Worse.
