Read "Dereliction of Duty" by H. R, McMaster.
We had no real objectives in that war. LBJ just wanted to keep the lid on until after the 1964 elections and Congress approved his Great Society BS. The joint chiefs thought we would need 500,000 to 700,000 troops for five years but were afraid to say so very loudly. McNamara tried to help out his boss LBJ by agreeing to only a fraction of the troops they needed, saying he might consider more later. The South Vietnamese government was corrupt and incompetent and had little popular support. At one point, General Ky's air force even bombed his own central government. For a long time we maintained the fiction that we were "advising" the South Vietnamese instead of fighting the war ourselves. McNamara thought it was important to put up a good fight and then, even if the North won, everyone would credit us with backing our friends. He thought of the war as a means of diplomacy--don't bomb any important targets but show them that we can do so and they'll negotiate. They didn't.
All that preceded Ia Drang.
Dick Nixon ended the war. He pulled out, gradually, telling the South to fish or cut bait. When the North wouldn't give us our prisoners back, he bombed the sh-- out of them and we went home. That was the Paris accords. If we had bombed the sh-- out of them in 1964 or 1965......?
The US troops fought competently and bravely but they had no chance to win. Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert Strange McNamara saw to that.
The lesson of Viet Nam was if you fight a war, go all out to win. Kill all enemy personnel you can and destroy all their works. Unfortunately we've forgotten that lesson many times since then.
