re: #15 EPR-radar

As I recall, Ho did not start out as a Soviet puppet. Instead, he took aid where he could find it, first to fight against the French, then against the US. Decades of war hardened the ideological lines such that the eventual victory of the North meant a full dose of totalitarian communism for the South.

To win, the US would have had to wage a war of extermination, and there was never the political will (or moral justification) for that.

No, Ho was always Communist. And he actually started out fighting the Japanese during WWII, truth to tell.

We wouldn’t have needed extermination, though. Things like earlier mining of Haiphong Harbor coupled with a amphibious invasion of the North a short ways North of the DMZ would likely have forced the North to back off for a time, thus giving South Vietnam time to blunt the popular grievances that fed the growth of the VC. It might not have worked ultimately, but such a strategy would have had a good chance and it would have actually cost far fewer lives on all sides in the long run.