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 Lijuan, 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, carrier battle groups had come out. And so there

just wasn't a lot of American air power. All that stuff had to be rushed back in and

intervenes decisively. You know, not just tactical air support, but B-52s flown back to Thailand

and back to Guam for quick runs over NVA columns advancing down into South Vietnam. So all that

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