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is that we "lost" the war but . . . nothing bad happened! There was of course some violence as the war wound down -- but less than the ongoing violence during the war and nothing like the "blood bath" we were promised. Collaborators had to spend six months in reeducation camps then they returned to society. Vietnam went into Cambodia, deposed the Khmer Rouge, left a tolerably decent government in place, and left.
Today Vietnam sells us a lot of our coffee and shrimp, and does a small business in tourism from the U.S. That's it. If the U.S. had never gone into Vietnam at all, we would have saved all the blood and treasure, the Khmer Rouge never would have happened in the first place, and we'd probably otherwise be about where we are now.
So "losing" was just fine, whether it absolutely had to happen or not.
