Bear in mind that Jerry Pournelle is a very right wing guy and was right wing at the time of the Vietnam war, so he looks for confirmation of his own pro war views.<p>The big problem we had in vietnam is that we backed the wrong side from the beginning, and we did it for blindly ideological reasons (Ho Chi Minh was an avowed &quot;communist&quot; therefore evil). If Ho Chi Minh had been a race supremacist (South Africa) cannibal (idi amin) drug dealer (too many to mention), we&#x27;d have been happy to back him.<p>The Viet Minh, who fought the Japanese and largely defeated them with little outside help during WWII were disarmed by the French with US and British help after WWII. (Roosevelt appears to have wanted to let Vietnam be independent after the war, but he was dead.) So Vietnam went back to the French who created a hot mess, got their asses handed to them (despite a lot of US help) and then we stepped in and picked as our clients the bizarre collection of mobsters and thugs the French had been backing. And while your correspondent appears incensed that some people didn&#x27;t get a parade (you know that they had reeducation camps in the South after the war? I would have led with that), from what I&#x27;ve heard and seen, Vietnam didn&#x27;t end up too terrible, and certainly in no worse shape than places the US &quot;won&#x27; in like Columbia, Chile, Honduras, etc.<p>No Buddhist monks burned themselves alive to protest the _north_ Vietnamese government.