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People in the US don't even say that..... thats the primary one considered a loss.

• coliveira 6y ago
  In the US people don't discuss that. The idea is that if nobody remembers, they won't know that the war was lost.
  • vmception 6y ago
    My experience has been different. It was a wildly unpopular war with poor people being sent into a meat grinder. And its the one with the pervasive urban legend about returning soldiers being spat on. Vietnam is still a single-party state run by a self titled Communist Party that follows Marxist teachings while adopting the more modern state-capitalist approach. This is the opposite of American values and the exact outcome the Americans were there to prevent. Although the consequences have been largely muted. I also see memes about it almost every day. I saw a video on instagram about Muhammad Ali talking about the absurdity of people being sent into that war.
    • coliveira 6y ago
      You're right that people remember the opposition to the war. But that's exactly why they don't accept that the war is lost. In American's minds, the war was opposed, and they think that was the reason why it ended. When in fact it was just the opposite. Vietnam won that war of invasion fair and square, with the sacrifice of millions of Vietnamese for their country. Because of that, the American people was unwilling to send more of their children to be killed in Vietnam. The result of the protests is that the government created the illusion that they were retreating because people didn't want to continue the war, not because they lost.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > People in the US don't even say that While they talk about it less now because they’ve got other more current foreign issues for both military chest-thumping and blaming liberals, conservatives used to (at least, IME between about the mid-80s and about 9/11) incessantly talk about the US having won Vietnam “militarily” before political betrayal by the “liberals”. Not endorsing any part of this view, but I certainly got subjected to it.
  • vmception 6y ago
    Interesting! Thats a view I have not been exposed to! Just seems that the whole Vietnam having only a communist party with state capital system would make it obvious that we lost. But maybe people dont even know why we were there…
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Just seems that the whole Vietnam having only a communist party with state capital system would make it obvious that we lost. The alternative explanation is that we won the war, but then handed over South Vietnam anyway. (“We won the war against the VC, but the cost of doing so and the subsequent full-scale NVA invasion led to a determination to not even try to fight the follow-on war with the NVA” is a somewhat more defensible narrative with a broadly similar shape, so there’s arguably something vaguely resembling a point underneath the nationalistic chest-thumping, though artificially dividing the war that way is still a distortion, IMO.)
• the_only_law 6y ago
  I’ve heard it from a number of people. Normally phrased in “we didn’t lose, we just quit” sort of way.