I'm John Batchel with Jeff Warro. His new book is The Vietnam War, a military history.

We now remember that this is a political war, not a war of existential risk for the U.S.

And what is to be learned from fighting a political war?

There have been a few since.

One of the things is that the U.S. will make promises at the peace table, but those promises

are not easily found in the historical record.

There's money promised.

There's accommodation with the South, but there's no

accounting for the man named two, the president of Vietnam, who is also the commander of the

forces as the defense of Saigon collapses in 1973. And again, there's so much bombing that the North Vietnamese are

bloodied. They're actually damaged. And one of their generals tells Liduan, it's going to take

us maybe a year or two to recover. We've lost so many people. The massacre is obvious from the bombing.

And Jeff includes remarked by a letter found among the remains of one North Vietnamese unit where a young man said that when you see the planes, your heart sinks. You know that you're going to die or that it will be relentless.

We have nothing to defend ourselves.

Well, we come to 74-75.

And again, it's important to emphasize the Arvin wasn't ready.

And the collapse was obvious.

It's obvious reading your book, Jeff, Was it obvious at the time that they would collapse the moment that North Vietnamese came again?

Well, I mean, the couple of things. The Easter offensive in 72, the North Vietnamese were

poised to win the war in 1972, and it's only this sort of last minute insertion of American air power.

Because American air power had been taken out in the sort of in the Vietnameseization program.

So squads, lots of squadrons that come out,

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