In any war, victory is defined as the successful accomplishment of a series of conditions, goals and end states.

What no one tells you is that those conditions, goals and end states are fluid and time dependent. They change. So if you define victory by keep event X from occurring until at least Date Y, if you do that then you won. Regardless of what happens after that date.

So technically we didn't lose, we just stopped playing because it wasn't important to us anymore. Remember Vietnam was just one part of the larger Cold War conflict.

We lost in Vietnam the same way you could beat Lenox Lewis in checkers. It was jungle skirmishes with ground troops.

At any point we could have removed it from the map.

What people don't realize is that it was America assisting the Vietnamese in a civil war.

Which means the US entered it with its hands tied.

It wasn't really a war is the point. It was always a "police action"

The humiliating part of Vietnam was the lack of any support from the people, and how the war was being portrayed. The actual fighting itself was a fucking massacre. The death count for vietnamese was well over a million, with hardly 50,000 for the americans. It was a slaughter, and that's the reason why it got no support. There were no tactical flaws in that war, and it's pretty common opinion that the US would have been able to secure vietnam with another two years at the most.

It was a political blunder by all means, but not a military one.