That was not there in Nam. You can't draft the boy next door and tell him it's somehow or other his patriotic duty to go into harms way for some sort of a game. That's why there was zero political supportfor the Vietnam war by 1968. A real war between the US and Noreth Vietnam would have been over by 66.
Look on the bright side.
We killed a million Communist cadre in the field and destroyed their ability to project power for the next generation. Singapore, Bangkok, Rangoon and the Indonesian archipelago are free today because of what our people did in Vietnam and what Gen. Suharto did in Indonesia, when he wiped out the PKI.
The North Vietnamese Army that took Saigon was hollowed-out by what we did to their best formations around Khe Sanh and the DMZ in 1968, and again during their 1972 offensive, when B-52's caught their armored columns on the road with nowhere to run. We gutted them.
They won the war, but that's all they won -- and that barely, thanks to the moral cowardice of liberalism and the well-meaning, morally smug, patronizing treachery of people like Clark Clifford, Daniel Ellsburg, Neil Sheehan, and Walter Cronkite, and half-a-hundred liberal Representatives and Senators who denied President Ford's appeal to Congress for medical supplies and ammunition when the South Vietnamese began to run low.
But the war wasn't all on one side of the ledger. We accomplished a few things.