Cronkite was Jane Fonda's pimp.

I'll miss Walter he was a fixture in our house every night at 7:00p.m. I remember seeing Walter in color for the first time back in the late 60's....

He was quite the character around these parts after his retirement. A Coast Guard friend told me WC used to go out on his boat and get so trashed they had to tow him in. Many times. And they always gave him a free pass.

My brother had dinner with him aboard the Eagle. Said he was a really nice guy.

It was but it was also an indication of their apparent willingness to continue regardless of the costs. I'm not sure they would have ever quit.

IOW, please help me, I have nothing intelligent to say.

I don't know how you came to that conclusion, or how that conclusion relates to Cronkite's pronouncement shortly after Tet the war was unwinnable.
It was apparent by 1970 the NVA was willing to take heavy casualties, but there was no such evidence in early '68.

Let it go before I rant.
This was a war I was in the tail end of as a kid, watching the chaplain comes down the street to peoples' houses once a month or just often enough so you couldn't forget it.

Buddies of mine were in Saigon during Tet, I happened to be training the ARVN later.. The real shock of it all is how it clashed with the reality we had known to that point, from the 50's and 60's . And how it clashed with the generals' assumptions. Why do you think Mac Namara went? He didn't know what to do and couldn't admit it to anyone.

As bad as Iraq has been, the DEATH toll of VietNam was FIFTEEN times the toll in Iraq!. The WW2 tactics which people used would not work, nobody even knew what low-intensity asymmetrical warfare was in those days except the Brits, because their colonies used that strategy on them to gain independence.

Go put on a uniform for a few years and then you can be an armchair general. Otherwise,... never mind, this is pointless.

You can rant all you want. I was in Viet Nam for Tet.
So Welcome Home,

and shove your insults.

That would be from a study of Vietnamese history. They'd been fighting off the superior numbers of the Chinese for around a 1,000 years. They persisted against the French and heavy odds for quite a while, decades and then the last war - '46 to '54.

And then there was Ho's declaration, which I'm pretty sure we knew about early on, that they could and would, if need be, lose 10 to our 1 and still go on.

They had nowhere else to go. Our guys had the luxury of knowing they would, or might rather, go home oneday. Their backs were against the wall, ours weren't.

Except for the Chinese, the Vietnamese citizens always outnumbered their advisaries. I don't believe their backs were to the wall. As I posted before, most of the people I saw were more concerned about feeding their families than who was the g'ment. The VC lost the Tet offensive in a big way but Cronkite's claim the war was unwinnable gave them a PR victory.

The govt. of the South didn't strike me as being all too concerned about the Vietnamese peasants feeding their families. The peasants hated the damned model villages and burned them when they finally got the chance to leave.

French atrocities against the peasants there are rarely spoken of. Things like lining their warships along the coast and shelling villages to soften up the oppositon.

Diem and Thieu (sp) were corrupt and unpopular. Neither came close to the sort of public support that Ho had.

That's about the way I see it too. But Ho did say he would rather sniff French farts than kow tow to the Chinese.

The way I heard that was that he said he'd rather sniff French $h!t for 5 years than eat Chinese $h!t for 1,000 years, and this said to explain why he was entering into a deal with the French (which he believed would be temporary), just after WW2 I think, but I'm not certain.