In hindsight, a most unfortunate, good-for-nothing war, based on a wild mix of good intentions, Western arrogance + naïveté as well as frankly horrendously bad reconnaissance of the political and historical situation both in North and South Vietnam (not that all three haven't happened again and again in wars many years later!). The French obviously gave you the wrong manual to read.
Uncle Ho, an educated and soft-spoken man, was an early admirer of George Washington and the American Constitution, something must have gone wrong badly along the way.
And if you're cynical, you can console yourself with the realization that the US military learned a lot from the Vietnam conflict and that all that gained know-how and experience laid the seeds for the US still having unrivaled superiority for swift ad hoc large-scale military intervention anywhere on this planet. But it came at a very high price of American and Vietnamese lives.
