The reason we were there was because prior to the communist takeover, Vietnam was a friendly nation, and they needed our help. Unfortunately, that help was strangled and cut off by foolhardy politicians who were trying to run everything from D.C.
That's
definitely wrong. Vietnam was not a friendly nation at all, it was a French colony. The French were trying to stamp out the Vietnamese culture and bend them to French will, but the natives finally got sick of it. Ho Chi Minh founded the Viet Minh(the organization that later became known as the Viet Cong), and they revolted against the French; let it be noted that they made several attempts at peaceful rebellion prior to this action. The French were getting their butts kicked, so they asked the United States to help, which we did. The United States paid for nearly 80% of France's military expenses in Vietnam, provided military equipment and aid, and they still lost! So the United States, worried that if Vietnam became communist it would trigger a domino effect and cause all of Asia to become communist(vastly inaccurate, although Cambodia and Laos did make the switch after the United States left Vietnam), stepped in and started fighting Vietnam. Cue one of the lengthiest and most expensive conflicts in American history.
In the words of one American general, "We won the battles but lost the war."
You're misinterpreting his words. The United States most definitely defeated North Vietnam in terms of the military; their casualties were far, far higher than ours, they never won a major battle(not that there was one in Vietnam), and they never really stood a chance to win, militaristically speaking. If wars were only about the military, then the United States won the Vietnam War. We lost in terms of politics: American morale was incredibly low, whereas Vietnamese morale was high. Many Americans did not think that the United States should be in the Vietnam War at all, and finally the United States government conceded to the wishes of the population and left.
We had the firepower, technology, and men to soundly defeat the enemy, but we were not allowed to use that power because the politicians thought that they could better command our forces with armchair quarterbacking as opposed to letting experienced generals and field commanders decide when, what and how to attack.
We
did soundly defeat the enemy. But again, we lost the war on a political and socioeconomic front, not on a military one.
Then-President Johnson said that "[they]... can't bomb an outhouse without my say-so." Many targets of high strategic value, including the enemy capitol and anti-aircraft defense systems, were placed off-limits to attack because of political pandering.
The United States still tried its very best to bomb the North Vietnamese into submission. Millions of tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnamese locations such as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but they rarely hit anything. The problem was not that the politicians weren't giving the generals free reign, it was that the Vietnam War was a conflict unlike any other the United States had ever faced in the past. Instead of being the underdog guerrillas(American Revolution), or duking it out against an evenly-matched opponent(the World Wars), American soldiers were forced to fight in a foreign land against guerrilla forces who attacked with pit traps and ambushes. On top of that many American soldiers didn't even want to be there.
Had the politicians just sat back and let the military fight the war the right way, we could have routed the enemy in less than a year.
We should have backed out of the war right after Dien Bien Phu, and never sent American troops in there at all. The United States was destined to fail in Vietnam right from the get-go.
You do have some truth in your words, though...President Kennedy(and Kennedy alone) did not trust his advisers in the
CIA, after they led him to the Bay of Pigs disaster. He put all of his stock into his advisers in the military, and they were horribly wrong whereas the CIA turned out to be right.
