Yeah i assume living long enough and not having lost ones memory, one can only think of the waste of human life in Vietnam. ( both sides )
Even if US staied out of Asia back then and it had meant a handful more of commie regimes, i am pretty sure those too like the rest of them would have folded.
you can argue only China have come out on top, or at least not went bankrupt, but those guys have gone from one extreme to another extreme with their own spicy twist on things, cuz that place are as corrupt as many capitalist country ever been.
And i am pretth sure they belly up too one day, and take much of the rest of the world with it as our idiots elect are and do what they do,,,,,, which are pretty muuch not enough and allways too late.
There's been slaughters of various types going on in SE Asia, anyway, no matter who is involved. Cambodia, under Pol Pot. Myanmar? China, and we will never know the full extent of what happened under Mao. I've been wanting to go to Vietnam, since it seems to have rebounded so well, and somewhat independently of most major power influences, until recently. FWIW, the area I live in now has the highest concentration of ethnic vietnamese in thailand, and ho chi minh lived in this province for a while.
Made a morning shopping run, to a store that is kind of like Sams, or Costco, and opens at 0600. (No traffic, and my dumbass wakes up at 0500 anyway)
In the war between bad drivers and infrastructure, infrastructure lost a battle. One streetlight gone, but good entertainment value for the locals.
I live on the far side of a large Border Police base, which I think has a training center or boot camp. I see very clean cut young guys walkig to from the bus stop with suitcases to go home for the weekend...not in uniform but in clean white shirts, gray slacks. Look more like Mormon missionaries than cops. I've also seen Helicopters landing and taking off, and APC's running around within view, and can hear a rifle range, somewhere.
Here is a monk crossing the highway in front of the main gate to the BP Base, and later you see the fuselage of an old airliner they use for training.
There are little border skirmishes in SE Asia we never hear about, and in the South of Thailand there are some Moslem insurgency problems near the Malaysian border. These guys aren't just chasing down 18 year old Burmese farm workers, they take some casualties.