IÕve said that Vietnam was an unwinable war just like our present day Iraq war. And by learning about the history of Vietnam and the loss that the US and South Vietnam took, I understand more fully why we lost and are loosing.

The Iraqi war and the Vietnamese war are very alike. First, we where/are fighting a state of mind in a culture of people. We have Vietnamese that are communists or nationalists, and we where fighting communism. Not a communist government, but the idea of communism. Where at any time a person of Vietnam could decide to kill Americans cause he believed in communism or stand by Americans and fight against communism. Did the majority of the Vietnamese understand fully what communism is? Even I, a college student fail to know what exactly communism is. Terrorism is an extremely easy idea to understand. If you take a communist and a terrorist and compare the behaviors of them I doubt that you will find any difference to what they will do to fight for their country, cause ultimately that is what these people are fighting for. They are not fighting atrocities, or for their government, they both are fighting for their land. Which brings me to my second point, popular support. How can we win a war that the people our solders are coming from do not support with a strong majority? If we do not learn from our history we are doomed to repeat it and that is exactly what is happening now. Our presidents approval ratings have hit and all time low of 31%, just as LBJÕs and NixonÕs approval ratings slumped during wartime. Moral is the single most important weapon a solder with ever have, and we send our troops to foreign countries with little to none.

Bob Gabriel had a very eye catching account of the Vietnam War. He was a man that solely didnÕt believe in the war but went to honor his father and fight for his country. Another turning point to a war is when commanders ask their solders to do atrocities that their consciences disagree with. BobÕs unit was known as a unit cut off from support, with the Tet offensive creating even more ciaos than that. Tet was the turning point of the war. When an enemy is in your fortifications, you lose the ability to make war.

The end of the Vietnam War was put in a very unique view to me by Truong Tran. When I thought of the Vietnam War I always thought it was a great loss for the US. This account really makes me see it in a different light. The United States was fighting the war for the people of southern Vietnam. We lost the war for them and ourselves. Truong chose to fight alongside of the US against communism, why he did not go into detail about and I wish he would of. The collapse of the war was brought upon by the victory of the hearts and minds of the people of South Vietnam by the north. Vietnam has been resisting foreign domination for thousands of years, China and France. We lost cause the Vietnamese finally figured out that we where foreign invaders too.