Vietnam was a trauma for the United States, because it could never come to understand how Americans would win the major battles in the field but gradually be losing the war.  How could such a thing happen?  And how did it happen?  Americans have fought difficult enemies in jungles before; the Japanese in particular, in places like Burma (now Myanmar), the Philippines, and also among a collection of Pacific Islands as well.  Ah, but Ho Chi Minh didn’t underestimate the significance of public opinion, that national force which gives a moral force to the purpose of the figh