alt Hacker NewsFTA: the defeat of American troops and fall of Saigon in 1975
This is a bit misleading: Yes, strategically the U.S. was defeated in 1975, but U.S. troops had pulled out in 1973, having essentially never been beaten on the battlefield — not that it matters, of course.
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A gesture of good will as they say. They never wanted to get to redacted in three days anyway.
That’s really splitting hairs. The Republic of Vietnam was a dead man walking, but it was a United States puppet state, and they finally collapsed in 1975.
The cope stuff of “never beaten in the battlefield” is just bullshit. The point of fighting a war is to win. The military bureaucrats tried to apply kill counts as a proxy for victory.
The army pulled out but everything didn’t just end. There was a variety of covert and semi-covert American presence remaining, both in terms of CIA people and “sheep dipped” contractors.
You can indeed lose a war whilst having won all the battles.