The Vietnam war was the longest war of the United States was involved in and lasted longer than any other conflict. The Vietnam war had over 60,000 American casualties and 2 million Vietnamese casualties. Although I did not learn much about the Vietnam war in school, I know just from its portrayal in the media how brutal it indeed was. So basically, Vietnam was under French colonial control since the 19th century, and the Vietnamese wanted independence from France. A man named Ho Chi Minh advocated for Vietnamese independence and was initially a socialist/nationalist. Ho Chi Minh eventually turned to communism out of necessity, and the United States opposed this. Ho Chi Minh even modeled the Vietnamese declaration of independence after the American constitution, but Americans did not care because he was a communist. The U.S. went on to support France and began funding the French-Indochina war between 1945-1954 to keep communism out with "domino theory." The united states then began to support Ngo Dinh Diem as a leader in South Vietnam to oppose Ho Chi Minh in the North. If anything, Ngo Dinh Diem was way worse than Ho Chi Minh in his ways. Ngo Dinh Diem was a brutal dictator who was opposed by the Viet Cong in South Vietnam AND North Vietnam. If his people can't even stand him, that is saying something! Diem's brutality was eventually brought to media attention when Buddhist monks set themselves on fire in protest to his cruelty. In 1963 America began to oppose him after learning of his brutality, and the next year Lyndon B. Johnson became President and took over the burden of the war.
President Johnson deepened involvement in the war, and U.S. troops got sent over to fight. Many people expected the conflict to be over by 1967 but did not expect the Vietnamese resistance to fight back so well. By 1967 over half a million American troops were in Vietnam, and the war became more brutal than ever! President Nixon eventually took over the war in 1970 and tried to withdraw soldiers slowly and let the South Vietnamese fight instead. Between 1968-1973 efforts were made to end the war, and in 1973 U.S. forces were removed, and prisoners of war were released. In 1975 South Vietnam surrendered to the North, and Vietnam has reunited again! So what I have learned from this is that the U.S. entered a war that they could not win, forced Americans to fight for the cause, lost over 60,000 American lives and millions of dollars for 19 years, all for NOTHING!
Well, we at least got the War Powers Act, which states that Congress must approve before shipping soldiers out to fight in a war, which is good because with the President we have now, we would probably all be drafted.
The Vietnam war brought so many movements and protested across America, such as the anti-war movement and the peace movement. More Americans were against the war than the ones who supported it. Many Americans opposed the war because they thought it was unnecessary. Many of the soldiers were regular people getting drafted and shipped out to Vietnam and had no motivation to go to war and risk their lives for a cause they did not care for. The fact that most people probably cannot even tell why the Vietnam war started in the first place says something.
An American soldier from the 1968 documentary, In The Year of the Pig.
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