My brother fought that war, and died there. With all due respect to your 'direct knowledge and experience', unless you were a high ranking General or Secretary of Defense, you probably don't know what you're talking about, with regard to the reasons we had to fight that war. History has proven nothing, except that it was a disastrous mistake for us to give up on the war and lose it. Millions of people died needlessly, at the hands of the Communist regimes, in the wake of our departure, and history has recorded it as our worst military failure. It created the conditions for a 40-year Cold War with the Soviets, costing us trillions in an insane nuclear arms race. Had we resoundingly defeated the Vietcong, and shown our military might in the manner which we were indeed capable of, the history of Communism may have been completely different. The "mistake" in Vietnam, was failing to go balls-to-the-wall and win it.
You can not post-analyze war in a vacuum, and far too many people tend to do this. You assume that Communist aggression wasn't a big deal, because after Vietnam, it wasn't a big deal, but things happen as a result of other things happening. If we had not fought the British in the War of 1812, the British may have backed the Confederates in the Civil War, and the outcome of that could have been dramatically different. There is no way to say, Communists wouldn't have taken over the entire South Pacific, had we not drawn the line in the sand at Vietnam. Because of the protraction and attrition of that war, it stifled the Communist expansion, and as the 70s brought economic challenges to both us and the Communists, the motivations changed, and therefore, history was changed. To look back and say, well, the Communists didn't take over the South Pacific, and that proves they didn't intend to, is foolhardy and stupid. Had we not confronted them in Vietnam, what would have prevented them from expanding further?
