Why would anyone NOT feel sympathy for a Vietnamese national struggle to achieve indenpendence and self-governance under the heel of first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, and finally the U.S. of A....???? For this you object to Kerry?

It makes not one damn bit of difference whether or not they were Communist. They had no friggin' choice about it, given the situation in the World at that time. When you fought for independence against the USA in the 50's and 60's you had better be Communist, because otherwise no one would help you, and where the hell would you get the weapons to fight them?

To be Communist, for the Vietnamese, was the only game in town at that time. What they were fighting for was not Communism...they were fighting for their own national sovereignty.

Do you note that the South Vietnamese administration needed 500,000 foreign soldiers on the ground and the biggest airforce in the World to prop it up and still couldn't win? The North Vietnamese won without 500,000 foreign troops helping them. That tells you just how legit that puppet regime in the South was. It was basically run by the Catholic minority in South Vietnam, who were the same people who had cooperated with the French colonial administration. The Vietnamese population was mostly Buddhist. That should tell you the whole story in a nutshell. The South Vietnamese government which the USA created after the French left was a puppet on strings, and it did not represent the will of the vast majority of the Vietnamese population. Accordingly, its army couldn't fight worth a damn and it folded up like an accordion after the USA pulled out.

That fight was not about Communism, it was about foreign colonial control of a small Asian country. "Communism" is a word you hypnotize yourself with in order to avoid actually thinking about anything in real terms. Another such word is "Anti-semitism" and another is "liberal". It's knee-jerk BS that relieves you of the need to ever analyze or understand anything.