3. The North Vietnamese Air Force Actually Made Quite an Opponent
The US were forced to find ways to keep up with loss of aircraft quickly. The Navy’s Top Gun tactics school, founded to train strike fighters, was in response to losing one aircraft for every thousand sorties in Operation Rolling Thunder.
The US couldn’t catch up to the NVAF. By the end of the war, the US only had three fighter aces, while the NVAF had 17.
2. A Majority of the US Troops Had Volunteered, They Weren’t Drafted
A fairly surprising number of troops were volunteers, not draftees. In fact, more than three-quarters of those who fought in Vietnam were never drafted. Between 1965-1973, only 1.8 million of the 8.7 million troops weren’t volunteers. And of those numbers, 2.7 million were fighting in Vietnam during this time, of which only 25% were drafted and only 30% of combat deaths were draftees.
1. The Media Was Blamed For Showing a Different Version of the War
Media during the Vietnam War was led by the infamous Walter Cronkite, a trusted face on every American television screen. And until 1968, the media was serving more as a mouthpiece for American policy, disregarding any concept of disengaging from the war.
The Tet Offensive was widely seen by veterans as only a media success, and it was during this time that Cronkite himself even believed the war to be unwinnable. Overall, it’s been suggested that the media was boasting of more success than was ever truly happening in Vietnam, and many weren’t aware of questioning the government as an option yet.