Historian David Chandler, like most historians today, believes that the second Indo-China War was a conflict that the United States could never have won. French President Charles de Gaulle said to President Kennedy in 1962, ‘ I predict that you will, step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmir.’ Even General Westmoreland said to writer Peter MacDonald, ‘The politicians in Washington just had no idea about the complexity of the situation in South Vietnam.’ The same could be said for the U.S military.
The US underestimated the force and strength of nationalism, supported by communism, in the war. At the same time they overestimated the threat of communism in the context of the Cold War rhetoric. Similarly, the military genius of Vo Nguyen Giap was completely underestimated. After centuries of domination by the Chinese, French and Japanese, the Vietnamese had emerged as one of the most potent military/nationalist forces in history. The US misread
The inability of the Americans to achieve a decisive victory meant that they became bogged down in a widening and open-ended war which began to alarm many in the administration. This allowed the anti-war movement to get the upper hand in America and thus undermine the morale of the ‘boys’ in Vietnam. No army can fight a successful war without the support of the home front. This had been proved in the two World Wars. Many US servicemen did not know why tjey were in Vietnam or what they were fightng for. They made almost no attempt to understand the vietnamese: “I Know there is no way you can talk civilised to these people”(Corporal Mike Brown USMC at Khe Sanh). People in the administration such as Defence Secretary Robert McNamara began to doubt the war.
Media coverage made the people at home aware of the contradictions between the propaganda and reality. This was the first televised war. Nightly images on television, especially after the Tet offensive, radically altered pub
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