In time, the term "Vietnam syndrome" expanded as a shorthand for the idea that Americans were worried they would never win a war again and that their nation was in utter decline.
A long-simmering internal leadership dispute within the ruling Marxist-Leninist party on the Eastern Caribbean island had suddenly spun out of control, leading to political executions and innocent civilian deaths in the capital city on Oct.
Reagan pushed past the hesitancy of the Pentagon leadership, and the expected domestic and international blowback, to authorize a surprise U.S.-led intervention at dawn on Oct. 25.
His presidential directive specifically instructed the Pentagon to take strict secrecy measures to head off any pre-emptive action by the Cubans or the Soviets.
I suspected that if we told the leaders of Congress about the operation, even under terms of the strictest confidentiality, there would be someone who would leak it to the press together with the prediction that Grenada was going to become 'another Vietnam.'....
"[7] In the later 1970s and the 1980s, Ronald Reagan talked about the aspects of the Vietnam syndrome but argued that it could be overcome if Americans adopted a more confident and optimistic posture in the world, with him as leader.
[citation needed] Asserting a need for a more aggressive and activist foreign policy, Reagan also suggested that Americans could have defeated the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, alleged that the American public had turned against the war from the influence of North Vietnamese propaganda, and implied that officials had let down the soldiers and had been "afraid to let them win" the war.
A small country newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest.
US President George H. W. Bush triumphantly declared after the war, "The ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.