Cheryl Isaak wrote:

-- SNIP --

I think you are forgetting that we got into Vietnam when our good friends
the French asked for help defending their former colony and interests. And
like good little allies we went.

Cheryl

Well . . . you're sort of correct.

It is true that our INITIAL move into Vietnam was to aid the French.

HOWEVER, after the French were defeated at Dienbienphu, our decision to
"soldier on" and do a little nation-building, in our own (Western)
image, in Asia made that little war our very own.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/vietnam/causes.htm

"The United States entered that war incrementally, in a series of steps
between 1950 and 1965. In May 1950, President Harry S. Truman authorized
a modest program of economic and military aid to the French, who were
fighting to retain control of their Indochina colony, including Laos and
Cambodia as well as Vietnam. When the Vietnamese Nationalist (and
Communist-led) Vietminh army defeated French forces at Dienbienphu in
1954, the French were compelled to accede to the creation of a Communist
Vietnam north of the 17th parallel while leaving a non-Communist entity
south of that line. The United States refused to accept the arrangement.
The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower undertook instead
to build a nation from the spurious political entity that was South
Vietnam by fabricating a government there, taking over control from the
French, dispatching military advisers to train a South Vietnamese army,
and unleashing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct
psychological warfare against the North."

Sound familiar?