The VC won fair and square against the occupying and invading forces, and despite all the doom predictions of the time, they appear to still be a functioning state.
As someone who lives in Vietnam, I'd disagree with this statement. It functions at the whim of all of the foreign investment, not of any particular genius on its part.
As for who won what, it's way more nuanced then you are presenting.
The US wasn't really in Vietnam to win anything, but there to stop the North from capturing the South, which it did quite easily until the money dried up. There was a reason the US never went north of the 17th parallel and it wasn't because the North was beating them back. Saigon didn't fall until two years after the US pulled out.
Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out. The NVA rarely won a battle in military terms. The Tet Offensive was a failure too, from a military perspective anyways.
I don't personally believe the US should have been here and am anti-war in most circumstances, but growing up in a household with three Vietnam vets (my grandfather served in Saigon for 8 years as a Colonel, my dad, my uncle died in Danang) I'm fairly studied on the situation. I don't think anyone "won", especially after living here for five years. Everyone was a loser imho.
It's weird: on one side, killing more people than your adversaries is not as important as it once was, but this means that conflicts are now harder to solve on the battlefield, so they tend to be longer and more bloody than before.
This ratio makes no sense and would imply almost 8 million dead NVA/Vietcong combatants by the end of the war.
And anyone that has lived here can tell you that the ruling communist kleptocracy is no friend of the Vietnamese people.
Centralized economies encourage corruption and stifle growth. Vietnam is no exception.
And Vietnam doesn't have a centralized economy any more. And neither does China. Your rants sound like the standard rants of everyone who wants to be willfully ignorant of development in these countries. "They aren't progressing because their stats are false. Why? Because I said so!". Nevermind the rise in real wages and standards of living.
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> Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out.
But that's just not how wars work. No politician goes to war to get a good kill ratio. It's a question of strategic objectives. AFAIK, the dominant theory on the US side was that once the incompetently-led South Vietnam fell to the North, the "domino effect" would turn the rest of Southeast Asia into a bastion of godless communists. The US lost due in a large part to political factors, but anyone thinking that military factors are the only important thing in war shouldn't really be allowed to take any strategic decision. There is just no question that North Vietnam, on the other hand, achieved its own strategic objectives and won.
And, as an anecdote, as a guy how grew up in Eastern Europe in the 1980s things like Michael Jackson's music or Coca Cola bottles had a lot more lasting effect on "winning" the Cold War for the US then the nuclear warheads from North Dakota or the Nimitz-class carriers. Too bad that know-how has not been translated into trying to "win" over the hearts and minds of the Arab people.
Interestingly, none of them on their home territory.
The closest anyone's been able to point out to me are Pearl Harbor (which -- though striking -- was just a single attack) and some practically uninhabited islands Japan took over for a while.
The last time foreign soldiers invaded the US proper was when Canada marched into Washington.
Side note: a few Canadians marched into Washington with their British overlords. I have never understood why Canadians always seem to reference 1812 and never mention Dieppe when they talk about Hosers on the warpath.
Sure, war is hell. But a war at home is an entirely different category of horror than a war overseas or off the coast. Its effects on the collective psyche are entirely different.
A foreign army invaded the South decades after that.
Same with all of the other "wars."
The advantage in weaponry is staggering, and this weaponry has been bought with unprecedented military spending.
So, there are some kinks in the ideological goals and imposing those on others, but the killing machine seems to be fully optimized.
It seems to imply that because of the higher body count, we should consider the US the winner?
Or take WWI, where the collapse of the government was the death knell for the German military effort.
And to come back on the original point, you do War to kill enough people to make your opponent give up or until it is completely destroyed. In the case of WWII, even if Russia kept losing soldiers 10:1 vs German soldiers, Germany would have still run out of soldiers to fight with anyway because of Russia's massive supply of men behind the frontlines - And even if Russia did give up at some point, there would have been no way Germany would be able to control a country as large as the Soviet Union with the army they had on site. Germans were clearly bound to lose no matter what.
If you are talking about recent or ongoing wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria), indeed the goals are much less clear, so it's hard to see how anything currently being done is really helping.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm
The New York Times reported the US Air Force did the AWACs on this particular job and other sources report that the administration used mercenary contractors and supplied the invaders.
Check out Serb population in Kosovo, too.
I am not sure I agree. According to what I heard, the western leaders didn't know what was going on when Gorbachev let the Berlin wall to fall. Sure the U.S. built lot of weapons, but calling it a strategic victory.. you could then call peace a military victory as well.
It's a difficult war to understand because it was not only a struggle to end colonialism in Vietnam but also a land and power grab by the northern communists.
Do you have a source for this? I don't personally know anyone that thinks either of those things.
https://newrepublic.com/article/64982/the-other-vietnam-synd...
[NB I'm not in the US so I have no idea how popular these beliefs are - I suspect they aren't that common and perhaps quite understandable given the impact Vietnam had on the US].
Even the pop culture doesn't seem to put out a vibe that suggests the US won. Most of the popular movies about Vietnam tend to highlight the horrors of war in general and not some romantic notion of victory, patriotism, glory, etc. Almost all of them feature scenes with the US soldiers talking about how misguided and poorly run the war was.
At best, there may be some people that think "we could have won" had the war been waged in a different way, but I don't even hear that often. In fact, the quagmire of Vietnam was used repeatedly as an argument against the war in Iraq.
Typical complaint is that Congress wouldn't let them do enough bombing, and/or placed too many restrictions on it, in addition to choosing to withdraw rather than keep fighting.
There are definitely some who believe 'were forced to declare defeat by Congress'. I have heard a Vietnam Vet say the military won the war, but the government forced them to pull out.
Here's a video explaining that thesis - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hqYGHZCJwk - which places the blame squarely on the Democratic Party for the US losing the war. You'll see that some in the comments also believe this to be true.
FWIW, 'Prager University' gives an American conservative perspective, and was set up to 'combat liberal bias and teach Judeo-Christian values'.
Sure, and the video you linked to is a great example of that. "Some who believe", though, is a far cry from the "majority of Americans"
Edit: Not saying you made that leap..more for the parents of this comment.
First off, in the context of the Vietnam War, VC stands for Viet Cong. I think that you mean North Vietnam, instead, because the Viet Cong were spent as a fighting force after the Tet Offensive. Thereafter, the Vietnam War was mostly a fight between regular armies.
In 1969, Richard Nixon began a modest pull-out of US troops from Vietnam.
In 1972, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam with 150,000 troops. They had support from the Soviet Union in the form of tanks. Lots of tanks. Zhukov would've been proud of that force. South Vietnam defended themselves with help from the United States in the form of air support.
Result: Fewer than 50,000 North Vietnamese soldiers made it back North. American KIA: 650.
Perhaps not coincidentally, peace talks improved for a while before breaking down in mid-December 1972. Nixon then ordered North Vietnamese cities to be bombed for eleven days (the "Christmas Bombings"). Perhaps not coincidentally, peace talks resumed. On January 27, 1973, both sides agreed to a cease fire, America would withdraw all of its forces, all POWs would be released, and South Vietnam would remain independent (of the North). By the end of 1973, all US troops were gone.
Being a bunch of communists, the North Vietnamese lied about their end of the deal. How's that for fair and square? They kept fighting to subjugate South Vietnam with the full support of the Soviet Union. South Vietnam fought on with aid from the United States... until August 1974 (thanks, Congress!).
So, strictly speaking, America didn't lose the Vietnam War in much the same way that tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. See? History can be complicated.
As for "doom predictions of the time," well, North Vietnam proceeded to aid communists elsewhere in Indo-China, just as the war hawks predicted (cf., Domino Theory: http://thevietnamwar.info/domino-theory/ ) By 1975, Cambodia and Laos had fallen to communist insurgents. In all of these places, they instituted revolutionary socialist reforms to overturn the legacy of foreign colonialist occupiers. These reforms so impressed the locals that more than a million of them took to the high seas in hand-made boats in order to return to those self-same "occupiers."
Here, in America, we have a number of Vietnamese neighborhoods made up of those people and their progeny. The grey hairs among them would take issue with your evaluation of modern Vietnam as "a functioning state."
Give or take 1,000+ civilian deaths:
In just one night, more than 2,000 homes were destroyed around Kham Thien, a busy shopping street in Hanoi. About 280 people were killed and at least as many again injured. Ha Mi had a friend, whose house was hit.
"There were a few houses still standing, but most of it was just rubble, flattened on the ground - or even just a big hole. Houses were just gone, it was horrible. I remember seeing people just standing there looking at it - but there was nothing there. Everything was just gone."
At the time the communist authorities said about 1,600 Vietnamese were killed, but many suspect the true figure is far higher.