A government to which we had been bound by law under the South East Asia Treaty Organization were snuffed out. With the communist conquest of the South, the Soviet-backed North Vietnamese regime pushed its southern front aside and imposed its own grip on the country. Communists seized Laos. Cambodia fell under the grip of the Khmer Rouge, an exceptionally savage tyranny backed by the red Chinese. They perished in a silent holocaust.
Today there is no democracy in any of the Indochinese countries where communism still holds sway.
What a contrast to those countries where our side managed to defeat the communists, or at least keep them at bay. I speak of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand, to name but a few. In these countries democracy obtains, with real elections, joyous religion, private property, freedom to travel, to read, to publish. There may be rampant poverty in some of them, but the capitalist system provides a hope of getting out of it. At their worst they are better than the communist countries at their best.