Exactly. We let them down. And that Domino thing wasn’t just a theory. Look at Laos and Cambodia after we left, and what a horror THAT was. Thanks to angry hippies and a spineless democrat congress and a nation wanting to bury its head in the sand from the war, Watergate and Nixon.
“From the very beginning, The Vietnam War has a sense of impending doom.”
I watched a documentary filmed right after the battle of Ia Drang Valley - in which we lost a lot of men, but were victorious. Our first main battle in the war.
At the end, some famous young broadcaster (Rather? Brokaw? Cronkite was the guy back in the studio that introduced it.) Anyway - the reporter is speaking as the flag draped caskets are loaded onto the plane.
“So while this may have been a victory, it remains to be seen how long the mothers and fathers and the American public will hold out support as this is only the beginning of the number of their sons returning home in a casket.” (Or something to that effect). The leftist media knew right from the beginning how they were going to report on the war. I bet even then they had figured “Hey - as soon as the number of dead reach 1,000 - we’ll start putting the total deaths up in the corner of each news broadcast!”
I was just 13 when we left Vietnam - but I remember those numbers. I think it might have been left on for the entire news cast - but maybe not.
Walter Cronkite even reported the Tet offensive as a great North Vietnamese victory.
Bunch of poopyheads.
I remember Walter Cronkite starting each evening news broadcast by saying, “Today, (insert number here) Americans were killed in Vietnam.”