Not weird at all. Your remarks are quite revealing. We lost the Viet Nam war, our first defeat. But remember, we lost "only" 60,000 soldiers. Over a million Vietnamese died while we were there, mostly civilians.

The Vietnamese now welcome normal relations, tourism and trade with the US. Hell, most of them weren't even born when the war ended, and to them we were just one in a long string of enemies, the French, the Japanese, the French again, their own civil war against the South, and after the US left, the Chinese and the Cambodians. And their country has a long history of fighting off invaders, stretching back to the Bronze Age.

For us, it was a symbol of our decline, the big turning point in our history; which is nonsense, of course. Even the Romans at the height of their Empire got whupped occasionally by their enemies.

For them, it's not a grudge thing or a personal vendetta, like it is with us. It's over now. They got over it.

Besides, even if we suffered a tactical defeat, we can always claim a strategic victory: Asia did not become Communist. That was our stated reason for going there.