That wasn’t the point. The Vietnamese were Soviet clients, and conquered or converted both Cambodia and Laos. The Vietnamese are still in Laos, by the way. And they fought a bitter war with Thailand. The only reason the Vietnamese didn’t win that war is that we had already bled them before it started, and we’d given massive support to the Thais.

I’ll leave this here …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w-cv2CJbfI

Personally, I think we should have told the South Koreans “Hey, ya know what…? We’ll cover your backs here in Korea, put a couple divisions of draftees in place… And, you guys go do your thing in South Vietnam, while we do the heavy lifting…”.

Basically, we should have leveraged the South Koreans into being our Gurkhas in South Vietnam, gotten them to coach/teach/mentor the ARVN, and then used the ARVN the same way once they had their sh*t together.

Woulda worked better than what we did, in my mind. The Vietnamese weren’t Communists because they wanted to be, they were Communists because the Soviets and Chinese sponsored and indoctrinated the cadres who were–The majority of the Vietnamese were exactly like any other Southeast Asian ethnicity, viciously interested in getting ahead. Natural capitalists, if you will–Look at what’s been going on there since the North won. Bastards are doing exactly what they would have done if we’d have actually lived up to our commitments and done what we promised.

The South Koreans are an interesting bunch. I don’t know how the current generation is going to do, but the post-Korean War bunch were something else. You talk to the guys who spent the early ’50s crawling up and down the hills in pursuit of the Norks and local Communists, and you develop a deep desire not to continue the conversation because of the matter-of-fact way they describe atrocities committed against their opponents, and because you really don’t want to think about the necessities of dealing with these things.

May not be too much longer before we have to do the same thing, here in the US. The likes of Antifa are only about a notch or two removed from the cadres who ran the guerrilla war for the Norks, and they’re going to have to be dealt with in a permanent manner. Once a creature runs feral like that, there’s no getting them back. All you can do is put them down–It’s like dealing with a farm dog that’s gotten a taste for blood. ROKA veterans of that pre-Vietnam era knew that.

And they probably had a good idea some of their translators were spies.

Only?

That’s about the same death rate as we suffered.

The Turks had a heavy brigade there, too, as well as the Australians. How did they fair?