"The final pull out from Vietnam was disastrous. An army which was half a million strong, trained and armed to the teeth, could not hold back the thrust of the Vietnamese patriots. Saigon, the colonial capital, today called Ho Chi Minh City, was embarrassingly abandoned by the occupation forces and their accomplices, some of them holding to helicopters. The United States lost more than 50 thousand of their precious sons and daughters, not counting those that were wounded.  They had spent 500 billion dollars in that war without taxes, always distasteful in their own right. Nixon unilaterally revoked the commitments of Bretton Woods setting the foundations of today’s financial crisis. Their only achievement was a Republican Presidential candidate 41 years later".