"It took us eight years of bitter fighting to defeat you French ... The Americans are much stronger than the French, though they know us less well. It may perhaps take 10 years to do it, but our heroic compatriots in the South will defeat them in the end."

That was Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese revolutionary, Communist, and venerated "Uncle" to his people, explaining to writer Bernard Fall how he evaluated the coming conflict. He was speaking in late 1962. It did not take 10 years.

In the end, the United States was defeated; it did not, nor could it, win the war in Vietnam. America, helped by no major power as an ally, was engaged in what much of the rest of the world saw as a war of imperialism, and emerged from it spent.

Vietnam was a quicksand for America, and the more it struggled, the more deeply engulfed it became. Now, it's over two decades since the last B-52 dropped its earth-shattering load of iron bombs through the jungle tree canopy, since the last Phantom flew MiGCAP, and the last 'Wild Weasel' went downtown trolling for SAMs. Some of the scars have healed; some of the lessons have been learned, and others have been forgotten already. Too many of the latter, if past wars are any criterion.

America started in that war by forgetting—or choosing to ignore—all the lessons the French learned so very painfully along the Street without Joy, or in the Hell of Dien Bien Phu.