It’s not as though Thailand was a vibrant, wealthy democracy from 1960 to 1990, though…
MASH was set during the Korean War but it was about the Vietnam War. Sort of the way The Crucible or High Noon (both of which were produced in 1952) are about McCarthyism even though they’re set in an earlier time.
Ah yes, of course. I stand corrected.
I thought it was because of that charming movie we made for them…
Whatever the merits of the war, the united government that emerged from it was thoroughly unpleasant, at least for the next decade or so. In the ‘80s my mother employed in her pottery studeo a couple of very nice women who were “boat people” of ethnic Chinese descent, and their stories of escaping from post-war Vietnam following the Sino-Vietnamese war strongly resemble my mother’s relatives’ stories of escaping from Nazi Germany - so they had a lot in common!
Who knew that kind of thing happened after civil wars.
I didn’t realize that in addition to supporting dictatorships you were cool with ethnic cleansing as well.
Well, for one, the ethnic Chinese Boat People fleeing wasn’t as I understand it itself a result of the civil war, but of a different war a few years later - the border war with China. Plus, I understand, some long history of ethnic tensions re China.
I don’t think you can lay that one on the Yanks, the Vietnamese have had issues with the Chinese for centuries. Though I guess one can make the case that the conflicts were somewhat related in that they dealth with the situation left by the Vietnam War, this one I think had much more to do with tensions between the various communist countries involved (the Soviets, China, Vietnam, Cambodia) and with long-rooted ethnic and national conflicts between China and Vietnam.
You fail to understand the mindset of the “average” Vietnamese citizen at that time. The vast majority wanted two things. They wanted to raise rice in peace, and honor their ancestors. They weren’t resisting the NV invasion, they could care less. The resistance was a French, then US fostered effort to prevent unification of Vietnam. They could care less about politics and government.
I’d suggest reading Stanley’s Karnnow’s Vietnam, A History. Start reading after Dienbienphu, at about page 215 or so. You’ll gain an understanding of the problem as it was seen by Eisenhower with respect to Southeast Asia. You’ll understand what Kennedy felt and why the relationship between McNamara and Johnson helped poison a successful war effort.
The lesson we should have learned is simple. If it’s necessary to go to war, let the generals run the war. Politicians should never micromanage a war.
There were also ideological tensions. Just as the Chinese and the Soviets argued over whose version of communism was the best, so did the Chinese and the North Vietnamese. Mao felt Ho was doing it all wrong. The disputes were bad enough that during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards attacked the North Vietnamese Embassy. (Of course, they also attacked the embassies of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Mongolia, Indonesia, Kenya, and Sri Lanka. Those Red Guards were quite the scamps.)
I’d have assumed everyone would have agreed that the Cambodian version was the worst, if it were not for the fact that the Chinese were supporting them. 
But yeah, what a rat’s nest.
I earlier recommended Karnow and Buttinger, but he apparantly prefers Conservapedia.
Interestingly, during WW2 the US supported the Vietnamese nationalists against the French.
Hooker’s book was not an anti-war book, and the Hawkeye in Hooker’s subsequent MASH books would have punched Alan Alda in the snoot. Altman’s movie (which follows the book reasonably closely) was considered a Vietnam War/anti-war movie, but so were any war movies made then which did not star John Wayne. People called Patton an anti-war movie, which is bizarre.
I think you came up with the only good positives - said as someone with a draft lottery number of 11 in 1970. Tricky Dick kept me out of war.
Yes, the Cambodian version of communism was essentially half Karl Marx and half Charlie Starkweather.
There was no such country as South Vietnam so stop saying there was.
Geneva Agreements and response
The USA interfered in a Civil War, backed a weak, corrupt dictatorship against a vietnamese hero who fought the Japanese occupation and then kicked the French out. The USA then got its ass kicked. Get over it.
Laos and Cambodia were directly destabilised by the spillover of the war. The VC ignored their borders and the USA bombed the shit out of them while interfering in internal politics in a destabilising manner. None of those circumstances applied to Thailand.
BTW, I ran a thread back in 2007: “Is Vietnam better off today than it would have been if the U.S. had not pulled out?” Only one Vietnamese (as in, actually living in Vietnam) Doper chimed in, Geekmustnotdie, and his answer was an unqualified yes.
The feeling is that if the US had not kept the communists busy in Vietnam, it would have spead much farther than Laos and Cambodia. When the Thais saw what happened to the Lao royal family, they became especially convinced that they would have been next. Again, this is what is – or was, what with the passage of time – commonly believed and is one reason Thailand has been such a fairly staunch American ally.