Of course, as Washington’s military engagement ramped up, Hanoi was hardly in a position to do anything about Indonesia. The Vietnamese communists did eventually win against the Americans, but at tremendous cost. Three million Vietnamese people were killed in that war, and two million of them were civilians.5 Many more were killed in Cambodia and Laos. In Indochina, Washington’s anticommunist crusade erased human life on a truly colossal scale, with no appreciable positive results.
