I should also mention that the communist insurgencies of Malaya and Burma were still fresh in everyone’s minds, and the fall of China was also not too far in the past at the time. Thailand was biting its nails for a while there, feeling itself surrounded. It largely viewed the US as something of a hero savior.
Laos and Cambodia got a lot of [free] kgs of scrap metal.
Perhaps the “re-education” camps await any in Vietnam who give a different answer. 
Really? Then how was the Viet Cong always able, and so easily, to find more recruits to make up their losses?
After the Tet offensive?
What the Pho?!
Just to pick up on this point, how much did the Vietminh actually fight the Japanese in World War II? I’ve been unable to find specific references to casualties or even battles. In the past I’ve read that, seeing which way the wind was blowing and that the Japanese were living on borrowed time engaged them a bare minimum - that the Vietminh essentially ‘strung along’ the OSS to get equipment and techniques for booting out the French (the Vichy regime tolerated by the Japanese) after the Japanese Empire was history. Lessons they put to good use, judging by Dien Bien Phu.
On Vietnam being a decent place - well, don’t misinterpret me, Vietnam has a great deal of problems. What I mean is, a decent enough place to make the US losing the war not the total nightmare that would have justified the killing and carnage. It’s democracy index is pretty poor, but better than neighbouring Laos, and who would suggest that tens of thousands of Americans should die for the sake of Laotian liberty? Its HDI too is pretty comparable to the rest of SE Asia, India and China, so US involvement didn’t seem necessary on that front either.
Probably inevitable in this case. The Vietnam War was (from the American POV) only one theater in the Cold War, which was the most political war ever – a global hearts-and-minds struggle, each side fighting not only for strategic advantage in a material sense, but to convince everybody they were the Good Guys.
I’m not so sure the last point is obviously true. Vietnam is no hell-hole today, but the war was nearly four decades ago. The government in the aftermath of the war was pretty abysmal.
Granted that the experience of the war itself probably radicalized the Vietnamese Communists more than they would otherwise have been, the experience in Vietnam for the decade of so after the war was unpleasant, what with reprisals, re-education, and ethnic cleansing of the Chinese.
Of course, the Americans could not foresee (for good or bad) what a future Vietnamese government would be like, but the evidence of other successful communists in Asia - the main one being the Chinese - would not be encouraging at all, what with the “great leap forward” and the “cultural revolution”.
However, that is slightly beside the point, as saving the Vietnamese from the horrors of Communism was only part of their motivation for the war, and probably not the major part. The primary issue was “containment” of communism, and the largest failing on the American side was the initial failure to realize that the communist world had just as many fissures internally as there were differences between communist and non-communist - Nixon of course later exploited this, wooing China.
Ironically, Nixon and Kissinger missed how this was a factor in Vietnam itself. When they wanted to negotiate an end to the war they approached Moscow and Beijing rather than Hanoi. They apparently regarded North Vietnam as just a puppet regime (which probably reflects their true views on the American relationship with South Vietnam).
The reality was that the Soviets and the Chinese knew they couldn’t give orders to North Vietnam. Hanoi had its own agenda and it would accept foreign aid but not foreign control. If the Soviets or the Chinese made an agreement that Hanoi didn’t like, it would just publicly denounce the agreement.
But China and the Soviet Union didn’t want to admit this. They liked the fact that the United States believed they had full control over their satellites. So they made agreements with the United States even as they knew there was no way they could make those agreements stick.
So Kissinger made what he thought was a deal that the Americans would withdraw from South Vietnam and the North would wait a “decent interval” before exploiting that opportunity and invading the South (presumably after the 1976 election when Nixon and Kissinger would have left the White House). But Kissinger made this agreement with Zhou En-lai, who had no way of holding back Hanoi.
Sure seemed like a country. Had its own government, its own laws, its own currency, sent and received ambassadors and such.
Shame it didn’t have anyone who could be bothered to fight for it. Ho and his lot forced the French out and as the victorious national liberation movement held more legitimacy than the bunch of catholic French collaborating kleptocrats defying the Geneva Agreement and strutting around in the trappings of statehood.
While you’re being sarcastic, you’re right. It is a shame that they didn’t have enough people willing to fight for it. It’s a shame that people like Ho Chih Minh and Le Duan took over and did the stuff they did.
Well, 250,000 people died fighting as part of the ARVN.
That’s certainly a significant number. That said, it was really only a country in the way Vichy France, Northern Cyprus and East Germany were countries, though just based on longevity, East Germany had a bit more legitimacy than the others.