Mark Moyar

some of the just the language that's in the document you know the vietnamese are very attuned to language and um he had signed off on these terms that he didn't he had no idea that the vietnamese were going to attach some importance you know for example how do you describe the demilitarized zone between north and south you know the us and thing was a big deal but the semantics of this were huge to both vietnamese and so uh he just put tied the us to this deal that had all these problems without even getting the the

concurrence of our allies, and it just, yes, it just did not go at all well.

Yes, great question.

So I think it's first worthwhile, you know, one of the big problems of the Vietnam War is oftentimes people don't

understand the different phases.

I mean, it goes from 60 to 75.

And a lot of times people think the world's kind of static.

But in fact, the world's vastly different in 65 when the U.S.

goes in than when South Vietnam's overrun 75.

What you see in 65 is that, in fact, there are lots of countries under threat from communism.

The most important one, which doesn't often get

its due attention is Indonesia.

At this time, there's a civil war brewing between Sukarno, who is a communist, essentially, and his military.

And that will actually come to a head in September of 65.

And the military will end up overthrowing Sukarno, but they will actually say,

later that the reason they took the stand was because they realized the americans were not bailing out and had we given up on south vietnam um i mean no country in asia is going to want to be your ally if they see you send 50 000 troops to country and then leave when the going gets rough so it was actually i think very important in the case of indonesia also thailand

Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew has very explicitly come out and said that Vietnam bought time for Southeast Asia to solidify and build up its strength against communism.

And another thing that happens is American intervention will drive

North Vietnam and China apart for a few reasons.

One, as I mentioned, there is now all the Soviet aides coming in.