A
And I got a feeling that some of that was involved in the, uh, early decisions of the Vietnam war. That the, uh, people saw the cold war as, uh, you had to draw a line and, and defend it. Otherwise there'd be, they'd get you someplace else.
B
Uh-huh.
A
Looking back, it seems like that was only partly true. That, uh, there might have been a better place to draw the line. Uh, I guess you can, I guess you can say that a, a certain amount of resolve and willingness to fight, uh, brought the cold war to an end. But I don't think you can just fight anywhere just, just in order to, uh, call the bully out and beat him. And I have a feeling that that's part of what was involved in the Vietnamese war. They felt like this was a place where we could draw a line, beat them and they wouldn't come forward. And, uh -- -- we were wrong. But I, uh, you know, the, like I said, the more I hear about it, the more I can see each decision that was made as being understandable. But the accumulative effect was to really get into a, a hopeless situation where, and as you say, uh, going halfway was probably worse than, uh, committing, uh, committing to a completely and, uh, winning it, whatever that would mean.
B
Yeah. Well, I, I, I think we did, I think we did learn some lessons that we weren't, uh, we weren't prepared for, I guess the best word would be the atrocities of war.
A
Yeah.
B
Uh, I mean the other wars seemed like a valiant war. I mean --