I was inspired to read Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald

When you look at the protests at the time our parents' generation knew how wrong Vietnam was

But when you factor in Vietnam's history of slowly squeezing out all colonial powers, you realize how colossally wrong we had it

My mother said she remembers working at a hospital in the Bronx while going to City College and seeing kids coming back with limbs blown apart, not ever hearing that there was even a conflict abroad (this was early on obviously).

The fact that they thought they could keep this war in some far off jungle a secret from the American public shows you how much they underestimated the Vietnamese