Vietnam was lost, but we really didn't lose. We gave it away for a variety of reasons. One thing about the ARVN. They don't get the credit they deserve. Some stat's.
There are many loudly touted, absurd misperceptions about both the willingness and the ability of the South Vietnamese to fight. Between January 1965 and October 1972, the South Vietnamese Army lost 183,528 killed and another 499,026 wounded. Simply stated, during the period when the United States lost roughly 58,000 men, the South Vietnamese suffered 183,000+ battle deaths. This, out of a population base averaging fewer than 16,000,000, which is less than 10% of the average US population during that period. If America had bled its population at the same rate South Vietnam bled its population, America would have to have sustained 271,000 battle deaths and 730,000+ wounded every year for the entire seven year period that US combat troops were committed in Vietnam. That would have meant 1,875,000 American dead in Vietnam, along with 5,122,000 wounded.
This is one of the better websites if you care you educate yourselves on what actually happened. Several articles on the main page as well.
http://vnafmamn.com/VietnamWar_facts.html
A good article on TET and the media distortion of the actual facts.
http://vnafmamn.com/legacy-of-tet.html
The facts: In the early morning hours of 1 Feb 68, communist sappers blew a small hole in the outer wall of the US Embassy in Saigon, entered the embassy grounds and engaged in a brief firefight with embassy guards. They never entered the embassy, and all were doomed. Later, an investigation revealed that these sappers had no mission other than to enter the embassy grounds and make a psychological gesture for the benefit of American television. It was a suicide mission aimed at the American psyche. It was a total success. Astounded viewers back in America were being told that the Communist had captured the US Embassy in Saigon. This was a false report, and it mattered not that this false report was later corrected. In the words of General Dave Palmer, though the communists were to suffer "...thirty thousand dead in the first ten days of the Tet offensiveânone would achieve as much as the twenty who blew a hole in the embassy wall and survived inside for four hours." As one US observer noted "The Americans might not understand the power of television propaganda, but the enemy sure as hell did." Peter Arnett[also filed the infamous report supposedly quoting the US officer in the Mekong Delta as saying "We had to destroy the town in order to save it." This was another sensational fabrication. The full story of Arnett's deceptive reporting of this incident is covered in depth by B. G. Burkett in his book Stolen Valor.