This past January 27 was the 49th anniversary of the Peace Accord that officially ended America’s engagement in the Vietnam War. It’s no surprise that the anniversary was largely unnoticed — Vietnam was the hated war we’ve been trying to forget for all these years.

Never forget it. There are 58,276 names engraved on the long, black granite Wall that is the central feature of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC — names of the fathers, sons, brothers, and loved ones who never came home.

The underlying details reveal the depth of our loss. Over 41,000, seven of every 10 fatalities, were teenagers. Eight were women, all nurses (in those years, women did not have the privilege — or burden — of serving in combat). The Vietnam War dead include every color, creed, and ethnicity. All were lives cut tragically short. Half a century later, the wounds are still deep.

The horror of the Vietnam War is not at all unique. Every war savages both combatants and society at large. But now more than ever, as storm clouds form over Ukraine and Taiwan, the lessons of our Vietnam experience deserve serious attention.

The Slippery slope. It’s far easier to get into a shooting war than to back out of one. An uncommitted president can lead an uncommitted nation down that garden path with little appreciation for its ultimate consequences.

I’ve often wondered if the national nightmare of Vietnam would have been averted had President Kennedy not been assassinated. JFK initially supported our military presence in Vietnam, and he’d dispatched about 30,000 U.S. troops there. But in the months before his untimely death, there were indications that Kennedy had become increasingly wary of the chaotic and seemingly uncontrollable circumstances in that region.

By that time, Kennedy’s foreign affairs mettle had been forged by the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crises; in both cases he’d learned to push back hard on his military and civilian advisers.

Not so his successor. Lyndon Johnson repeatedly acquiesced to Defense Department pressure and over time increased U.S. military presence in Vietnam to more than 500,000 troops. By the time Johnson’s presidency ended, we were hopelessly entangled.

The power — and price — of protest. I still gag whenever I read that Vietnam War protesters stopped the war. They didn’t — they protracted it, at hideous cost.

The pivotal battle of the Vietnam War was the Tet offensive early in 1968, the NVA’s last ditch, go-for-broke effort to turn the tide against superior American forces. They failed; we won that battle decisively, on all fronts.

But the American press, in tune with the growing anti-war sentiment at home, portrayed Tet as a serious and worrisome setback. The NVA was paying attention as well. They understood the political power of the American anti-war movement and recognized that what they could not win on the battlefield could ultimately be won at the negotiating table. After Tet, they elected to continue the fight in ways that would steadily sap America’s will to keep going.

Their attrition strategy worked. The war slogged on for another five long years, and in that time another 38,000 Americans — nearly two-thirds of the names on the wall — were killed in action.

Our sacred American right to protest carries with it enormous responsibility. But in the years since Vietnam, instead of exercising that right with restraint, we’ve sharpened our protesting tactics. Time and again, well-orchestrated “mostly peaceful” protests have sown violence, death, destruction, economic disruption, and social discord across the American landscape.

Necessity of the will to win. The Vietnam peace process was a charade — five years of tedious, fruitless blather in Paris while combatants and civilians half a world away bled and died. Meanwhile, we hampered our own forces with arbitrary war-fighting constraints that put them in danger and prevented decisive victory.

Only in late 1972, when we accepted the reality that it would take extreme military pressure to break the logjam, did we make progress. The notorious Christmas bombing of previously off-limit targets in Hanoi — unleashing our own brand of wartime terror — finally precipitated a viable cease fire agreement. And even that was hardly a win; Americans came home, but we abandoned our South Vietnamese allies. The inevitable end came two years later with the fall of Saigon.

Today, we don’t know if Russia’s and China’s saber-rattling will lead to war. If hostilities erupt and if we are drawn in — both to be avoided if at all possible — our leaders must hold fast to those hard-won lessons from Vietnam: get the public on board, commit to clear and achievable objectives, turn our military loose to achieve those objectives, and stay the course.