All references to "you people" should be interpreted as referring to your mother. Just fyi. I find that "you people" quibble that cited any time the phrase is used to be tiresome. Don't be pedantic. You know exactly what I fucking mean. I defined it several times.
BUT if you can't suss out my identification of that term which is quite clear... then as a short hand it refers to your mother. :)
As to soviets versus chinese... prior to 1969 the soviets and chinese were very tight. The US perceived them as a unified political alliance pushing an equivalent ideology with an equivalent ambition.
Had Stalin been our buddy and not declared his intention to dominate the west and any other scrap of realestate upon the world in the name of communism... if he had not done that... and the chinese had instead been the communist aggressors... the cold war probably never would have happened. And the actual fear of exclusively chinese expansion was relatively minor when divorced from the soviets. It was the soviets we were worried about. The chinese lacked the industrial base to actually be a threat absent Soviet support. Note that the cold war didn't have any major conflicts after the split.
The vietnam war really got going in 1963... and by 1969... the split was dramatically undermining the capabilities and credibility of the great communist dream of global conquest.
As to the north winning... the north simply filled the vacuum created by our departure. Not much of a victory really.
As to the dead... The blood of my own family is in those numbers, little one. I do not disrespect the dead. It was the cold war. You say you understand but then you cite these numbers like they're remarkable in the context of the struggle. Those lives of our honored dead were not shed lightly. They did not die easily. They went down in fury and honor. And it is possible that those live thus shed discouraged further conflicts from the communists and saved more lives still. Without a time machine who can say. But we did what we thought was reasonable at the time to hold the line. And those young men... some of whom had blood flowing in their veins very similar to mine... they held the line.
There was no dishonor in their service.
And if you want to cite numbers... we probably killed about a million Vietcong. We had body counts in those days to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns. It got pretty gory. Statistics... quotas. Slaughter organized into spread sheets.
The Soviets were supplying aircraft and at the very least pilot trainers. They were supplying many other things. Your suggestion that they weren't involved is in error.
As to vietnam being a trading partner... sure... but if they had not sided with the communists it would have come a generation ago... and they might have gotten assistance. Today... there's no reason for us to do that.
The communists... soviets and otherwise were not good to their acquisitions, allies, and conquests. The soviets famously demanded reparations from every country they conquered during WW2. This retarded their recovery setting back their development by a generation.
The US to the contrary pumped money into such nations with the result that the recovered much more quickly and the US ultimately made a much greater return than if it had punished them through trade... and course, because we were good to such powers they didn't end up hating us. Which is the case of pretty much anyone that had to deal with the soviets being in charge. No one likes them.
To this day, Russia has a hard time making friends because people don't forgive them for what they did during the soviet era.
The US does... we've tried repeatedly to bury the hatchet. The Russians can't do it. They can't let it go. That's a mistake.
As to moral authority... who has claimed it then, cupcake? You can't even begin to comprehend what we deal with and you presume to write the moral codes we're supposed to follow? You don't even understand why we do the things we do much less are you able to judge the philosophies and moral laws by which we must obey.
I've little patience for being judged by people that don't even understand what they're talking about.
