"The VC had the North to help them"???

You missed my point. Vietnam was always one country. It was one country before the French, it was one country under the French, it was one country under Japanese occupation in WWII, it was one country under the French again in the 50's, it was intended to be one country upon their departure. The USA interfered in that process and established a new administration (under their control, run by Vietnamese Catholics) in the southern half of that one country. They abrogated the nation-wide elections that were supposed to occur when the French pulled out! The USA denied Vietnam its national elections.

The rise of the VC was the response to that situation. The assistance of the North was the assistance of one half of Vietnam against a puppet regime in the other half, supported by a foreign power which had violated and blocked the legal arrangement to hold country-wide elections.

This doesn't got talked about in the USA, but it's real history. Look it up. You'll find that I am correct.

The Vietnam war was a war of national liberation from foreign control by the majority population in BOTH halves of that country, and it ended with a victory scored BY Vietnamese soldiers without the assistance of 500,000 foreign troops and without the assistance of the World's biggest air force.

The South Vietnamese government was a fraud, from day one. It was set up in direct violation of agreements made at the peace conference between France and the Viet Minh, shortly after the final French defeat at Dienbienphu.

No foreign ground troops assisted the Vietnamese in the 60's and 70's, aside from a paltry number of Russian technical advisors, I believe, who helped them set up their SAM missile sites (purely defensive weapons).

My point was that the puppet regime in the South needed gigantic foreign forces to protect it and fight for it in the field. Their opponents did not. They did it all by themselves, because they were fighting for their own country, not for somebody else's interests.