First of all, a well made war film, is, in itself, anti-war. If a film tries to be anti-war, that means it misses the truth of the fighting soldier.
Second. there was great heroism in the field by the NVA. Of that there is no question. My siblings who served in the war can attest to fighting the NVA, and how they respected them. But the U.S. forces were not rejects that were drugged out or messed up as the uneducated filmmakers love to spout off.
Historically, the US forces never lost one single battle during the entire conflict in Vietnam. Not one battle. Not half of a battle. Not even a small skirmish. The military forced the north to agree to peace talks in Paris, because the north was utterly destroyed by the U.S. forces. The Tet offensive was a dismal failure, as a majority of the north's forces were killed, many before the offensive actually took place, because of a premature launching of the assault by some of the forces out of contact with HQ. The north was a mess by 1968, and shot their load on Tet.
However, before the meeting took place in Paris, the U.S. Congress convened and rejected funding the war any further, forcing an almost immediate unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, and the U.S., who had won the ground and air war, were forced by its own government to walk away with it's head hung low while leaving two-million people behind to be brutally murdered by the Khmer rouge, factions of the north as well as the Cong.
By the way, Tunnel Rats was garbage, not because he didn't actually do better than on any other films, but because he has no knowledge of what he was writing. It was like watching porn made by a eunuch.
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