I know this isn't a 'Who lost Vietnam?' thread*, but it is a Vietnam thread.
I think the common misconception of LBJ's 'micro-management' of the war is most effortlessly demolished by Eliot A. Cohen in
Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. He the makes the case that LBJ lost the war in Vietnam worse than it otherwise would have been lost because he didn't exercise
enough control.
And as for the bombing maps in the White House,
this article by NR and Hannity-show conservative Rich Lowry summarises Cohen's position:
'When it comes to Vietnam, Cohen's perspective leads him to defend LBJ's notorious review of bombing targets as an appropriate exercise of oversight, given the strategic and political consequences of the targeting choices. In Korea, the military had heedlessly prompted a massive Chinese intervention, and a repeat was obviously to be avoided. Besides, LBJ approved most of the targets anyway. It is hard to blame Johnson's interference for the failure of the war, Cohen writes, when military leaders were also clueless about how to fight it: "There is no evidence that they understood any better than the civilian leadership the mentality of friend or foe, or that they had any ideas for bringing the war to a conclusion on terms acceptable to American diplomacy and bearable for the American public"'
Just my 2c.
(BTW, that big face-plate thingy on the M14 bullpup stock, it's there because God didn't intend for that weapon to be modified thus. Without it the shooter obviously gets a face full of brass--the Steyr or the FAMAS don't have that feature, because I imagine they expel the extracted cases properly.)
* I avoid then like the plague. Too revisionist for my tastes.