Viet Nam was not a war. It was a political chess match engaged in by a U.S. government that had deluded itself as to what the real threats were to the U.S. The U.S. was at that time run by a bunch of elitist Ivy Leaguers who had a macho mentality, but had never been in a fight, not even in grade school or high school. The "domino theory", now long proven to be wrong, was used to project American power overseas to counter what was eventually shown to be a nonexistent threat to the U.S. As a result, about 58,000 U.S. soldiers died. I knew some of them. The VC and North Vietnamese were never a threat to the U.S. How could they have been? No Navy and no Air Force of any consequence and an army confined to their little peninsula? This was a guerilla ground war on insignificant piece of ground, fought on the U.S. side by politicians who did not understand the enemy, saw a nonexistent threat to the U.S., and, sadly, did not let our military do what was necessary to win the war, which was, quite simply, to cross into North Viet Nam and take the war to them. Any student of warfare knows that you can't win a war if your leaders forbid you to fight on the other guy's turf. The sad thing is that the U.S. won almost all of the battles, but lost the war because the politicians would not let the soldiers do what was needed to win, which was, go into and decimate, North Viet Nam. Personally, I was against that war from the beginning, but I always thought that if one is going to fight one should fight, and be allowed to fight, to win. For a soldier's government to allow anything less is a disgrace to the nation and the ultimate sin against the soldier.