Mark Moyar

And so this theory has been essentially destroyed.

And so now McNamara realizes that it's not going to work and the war is getting bigger and bigger and he can't really figure out a way out of it.

Now you have the military in this point continuing to say,

We need to either invade Laos, invade North Vietnam, bomb in a much more powerful fashion.

But the war will continue to go pretty well for the Americans for the next several years.

And there's still...

I think a pretty strong feeling among the troops that this is something worth fighting for.

But there is also this growing realization that the politicians are tying our hands behind our back and not letting us win this conflict.

And that will increasingly become the sentiment of American troops.

the well officially it was to protect south vietnam uh against north vietnamese aggression the uh you had the model of the korean war where you had north korea invading south korea and so the hope was that we could maintain independent south vietnam um now once once the american troops go in you know again there is pressure from the military let's go into the north uh lynn john said well we tried that in korea and the chinese came in

Now, it turns out to have been a huge miscalculation because we now know the Chinese, they had taken a terrific beating in Korea and they said, we're not doing that again.

But the United States, again, decides to limit itself to the southern half of the country.

And so you're playing defense all the time and you have an enemy that can keep infiltrating through the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Ultimately, the hope is we can build up the South Vietnamese to the point that they can deal with most of this conflict.

on their own, which will bear some fruit later in the war, ultimately runs into trouble.

Yes, well, I will say that the South Vietnamese government was quite a bit better than what we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But on the other hand, the enemy was also much stronger.

And the U.S.

shot itself in the foot several times in Vietnam in terms of promoting, especially this coup in 1963.

You know, I do think...