ABSTRACT

Thucydides wrote in his history The Peloponnesian War a passage about the Athenian campaign in Sicily that summarizes not only the conflict between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 b.c. but the war between the United States and Vietnam from a.d. 1965 to 1973. The American military liked to boast that it had not suffered a single major defeat by enemy forces during the fighting in Vietnam, and the brag is largely valid. Although various episodes of the Tet Offensive of January 1968 would drag on for weeks, the first stage of the fighting in Saigon was essentially over in less than a month. The Americans' war lasted another five years after Tet and would eventually cost us $150 billion in 1973 and 58,000 lives. The record keeping of the US military in Vietnam was notoriously inexact in assessing enemy dead, but it was mostly accurate in reporting American fatalities.