U.S. History
“One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative affect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.”- Walter Dean Meyers.
The Vietnam war was a very costly, long armed conflict between northern Vietnam and its southern allies, which was the Viet Cong, against Southern Vietnam and its most important ally, the United States. The war had started in 1954 but the conflict had gone back to the middle of the 1940s. Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh party rose to power in North Vietnam and continued to act against the superpowers of the Cold War, United States and the Soviet Union. During the Vietnam war, there were more than 3,000,000 people killed and that included 58,000 Americans being killed. More than half of those deaths were Vietnamese citizens. By 1969, at the peak of U.S. involvement in the war, more than 500,000 U.S. military soldiers were involved in the Vietnam war. Growing opposition to the war in the United States led to bitter divisions among Americans, both before and after President Richard Nixon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. Communist forces seized control of Saigon in 1975, ending the Vietnam War, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.
Roots for the Vietnam go back as far as to World War II. During Wold War II, Japan invaded and occupied Vietnam. Vietnam is a region which is located on the eastern edge of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia which had been under French control since the late nineteenth century. Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam, from the inspiration of the Chinese and Soviet communism. He formed them to fight both Japan and the French colonial control. With the fight, Japan withdrew its forces in 1945, leaving the French educated Emperor Bao Dai in control of an independent Vietnam. Ho’s Viet Minh forces rose up immediately, seizing the northern city of Hanoi and declaring a Democratic Republic of Vietnam with Ho as president. France backed Bao, seeking to regain control of the region, and set up the state of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in July 1949, with Saigon as its capital. Armed conflict continued until the battle at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 ended in French defeat by Viet Minh forces. The treaty negotiations at Geneva split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th parallel (with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South) and called for nationwide elections for reunification to be held in 1956. However, in 1955 the strongly anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem pushed Bao aside to become president of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam.
With the Cold War becoming very intense, the United States started the harden and intensify the policies against any allies of the Soviet Union. By 1955 president Dwight D. Eisenhower had pledged his full support support to South Vietnam and Diem. With training and equipment from American military and police, Diem’s security forces cracked down on Viet Minh sympathizers in the south, arresting100,000 people, most of those who were arrested were tortured and executed. By 1957, the Viet Cong and other opponents of Diem’s repressive regime began fighting back with attacks on government officials and other targets, and by 1959 they had begun engaging South Vietnamese Army forces in firefights. In December 1960, Diem’s opponents within South Vietnam–both communist and non-communist–formed the National Liberation Front to organize resistance to the regime. Though most of its members were non-Communist and they claimed to be autonomous of the National Liberation Front, many in Washington assumed it was a puppet of Hanoi. A team sent by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to report on conditions in South Vietnam advised a build up of American military, economic and technical aid in order to help confront the Viet Cong threat. Working under the domino theory, which was thought that if one Southeast Asian country fell to communism, many people would follow, Kennedy increased U.S. aid, though he stopped short of committing to a large scale military intervention. By 1962, the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam had reached about 9,000 troops, which was way more than they had during the 1950s with fewer than 800 troops.
In January of 1973, the United States and North Korea worked out a final peace agreement ending the conflict between them. But still conflict had continued and war was still going on between North and South Vietnam until April 30, 1979 when it ended with DRV( Democratic Republic of Vietnam) forces captured Saigon. Diplomatic and trade between the United States and Vietnam continued in the 1990s.
In the United States, the causes and affects for the Vietnam War would soon come into affect the United States after the last troops returned home in 1973. The United Staes had put in more than $120 billion dollars with the guns and materials and sending troops in the Vietnam war from 1965-73. This great spending caused the United States to enter great inflation, exacerbated by a worldwide oil crisis in 1973 and skyrocketing fuel prices. Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper. This war had brought great butter and sadness to the soldiers after and had left many people very angry and had left the United States divided in a way. Many returning veterans faced negative reactions from both opponents of the war (who viewed them as having killed innocent civilians) and its supporters (who saw them as having lost the war), along with physical damage including the effects of exposure to the harmful chemical herbicide Agent Orange, millions of gallons of which had been dumped by U.S. planes on the dense forests of Vietnam. In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, D.C. On it were inscribed the names of 57,939 American armed forces killed or missing during the war. Later more names were added and the new total was 58,200.
I didn’t think this war did anything for us positively but really impacted us negatively. It had cause great money problems to our country and had lost too many lives for a war like Vietnam. The men who gave their lives for this war will be remembered forever but these lives shouldn’t have been lost. We should not have gotten involved with this war.