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Vietnam War Essay | Essay on Vietnam War for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Vietnam War Essay: The Vietnam War is considered to be one of the most memorable and long-standing conflicts that involved the U.S., with a major role to play in it. The Vietnam War was primarily the consequences of the U.S. anti-communist foreign policy in the year 1960.

It was the military conflict between communist North Vietnam and their allies, against South Vietnam and other countries including America, Australia, Britain, France and New Zealand. Australia’s alliance with the USA was the main reason for the commencement of the Vietnam War. The USA had been a part of the war since 1959 and needed Australia’s assistance. It was a long, costly and divisive conflict. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

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Long and Short Essays on Vietnam War for Students and Kids in English

We are providing essay samples to students on a long essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on the topic Vietnam War Essay for reference.

Long Essay on Vietnam War 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Vietnam War is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

The Vietnam War is also known as the Second Indo-China War and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America. It was the second of the Indo-China Wars that was fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies.

On the other hand, South Vietnam was supported by the United States, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and the other anti-communist allies were also there for support. The war lasted 19 years and was also called the Cold War by many. The war had direct U.S. involvement, and it ended in 1973.

During World War II, Japanese forces had invaded Vietnam. To fight it off, both Japanese occupiers and French Colonial administration, the political leader Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh, being inspired by the Chinese and Soviet Communism. The Viet Minh was also known as the League for the Independence of Vietnam.

Following its 1945 defeat in World War II, Japan withdrew its forces from Vietnam leaving the French-educated Emperor, Bao Dai in total control. Seeing this opportunity to seize control, Ho’s Viet Minh forces immediately rose to take complete control over the Northern city of Hanoi and declaring it as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with Ho as the president.

After Ho’s communist forces took control over the North, armed conflicts between the northern and the southern armies continued until a decisive victory of Viet Minh took place in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The French loss at the battle and almost ended the French rule in Indo-China.

Vietnam was split along the latitude known as the 17th parallel based on a treaty signed in July in the year 1954, with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South. The Vietnam War with active U.S. involvement in 1954 was due to the ongoing conflicts that dated back several decades.

You can now access more Essay Writing on Vietnam War and many more topics.

The Vietnam War led to outcomes like economic downturn and political isolation for Vietnam, which was only supported by the Soviet Union and its allies located in Eastern Europe. It also led to the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975 that resulted in a unified communist government in the country. The war also led to the death of almost 2 million Vietnamese civilians, 1.2 million Northern soldiers and many service members. Emigration of Vietnam soldiers took place around the late 1970s from Vietnam.

North Vietnam was communist, whereas South Vietnam was not. North Vietnamese communists and South Vietnamese communist rebels known as the Viet Cong wanted to overthrow the South Vietnamese government together and reunite the country.

South Vietnamese troops waded through the water to flush out communist rebels in 1962. The cost and casualties of the war were too much for America to face; thus, the U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973, and in 1975 South Vietnam was fully invaded by the North.

Short Essay on Vietnam War 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Vietnam War is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The Vietnam War (1954-1975) is referred to the period when the United States and other members of the South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) joined forces with the Republic of South Vietnam to contest communist forces that were comprised of South Vietnamese guerrillas and the regular force units called the Viet Cong.

The United States possessed the largest foreign military presence and had directed the war from 1965 to 1968. Thus, for this reason, Vietnam today is known as the American War. It was considered as the direct result of the First Indochina War between France that claimed Vietnam as a colony and the communist forces which were then known as Viet Minh.

The Vietnam War was one of the longest wars in the history of the United States and was extremely divisive U.S., Europe, Australia and elsewhere. The U.S. suffered a casualty of 47000 being killed in action with the addition of 11000 non-combat deaths. Over 150000 were wounded, and 10000 were missing.

10 Lines on Vietnam War Essay in English

1. The Vietnam War was a conflict between the communist and the capitalist countries and was a part of the Cold War. 2. The Vietnam War was a controversial issue in the United States. 3. It was the first war to feature in live television coverage. 4. The war became extremely unpopular in the United States, and President Nixon sent American soldiers home in 1973. 5. Viet Minh waved their flag at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. 6. The French defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu led to the Geneva conference. 7. France began to colonize Vietnam between 1959 and 1962. 8. France also took control over Saigon. 9. Laos was added after the war with Thailand. 10. In 1940 the French Indochina was controlled by Vichy French Government.

FAQ’s on Vietnam War Essay

Question 1. What is the main cause of the Vietnam War?

Answer: Spread of communism during the cold war along with American containment was the main cause of the war.

Question 2. What was the effect of the Vietnam War?

Answer: The most immediate effect was the staggering death toll of almost 3 million people.

Question 3. Why was the Vietnam War fought?

Answer: The USA feared the spread of communism, which led the war to be fought.

Question 4. When did the military fight occur in the war?

Answer: The fighting occurred between 1957 and 1973.

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The Vietnam War Outcomes Essay

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Introduction

The Vietnam War was and is still considered the longest deployment of the U.S military in the history of U.S wars. It took place when John F. Kennedy was in power in the 1960’s. Over two thousand military soldiers were deployed to the South Vietnam where the number increased gradually over time.

President John Kennedy’s intention was to preserve an independent as well as a non communist state in South Vietnam but failed to do so due to the harsh resistance that he faced. The U.S, headed by president Dwight D. Eisenhower was unable to neither contain nor regulate small unit and terrorist attacks that were being carried out by troops popularly known as Vietcong (Brocheux, 2007).

A diplomatic negotiation is a term used to describe the process where different countries carry out a dialogue with the aim of generating a consensus. During the talks that preceded the Vietnam War, an agreement appeared to have been reached by the negotiating parties, or so it seemed. The sham peace deals and fabricated diplomatic dialogues bore no fruit but resulted to false results and hope. The war took a turn for the worse when U.S. reinforced its military grip and they dug their claws deeper into North Vietnam.

It was the year 1967 that beckoned the birth of the failed negotiations that would result in massive losses to both parties involved in the Vietnam War. However, the real trouble begun brewing two years earlier. In 1965, the year that the last of the rational diplomatic negotiations appeared to have taken place, Premier Pham Van Dong established the four point program that sought to weaken the hold of the U.S on Vietnam (Palmer, 1978).

The recommendations appeared to bring bad taste in the mouths of those in U.S., and they did not let the moment slip right through their fingers. They retaliated by saying that the recommendations were undemocratic as they insinuated that the National Liberation Force was the only representative of the Vietnamese People. At this point, no agreement could be reached and both parties resorted to taking matters into their own hands (Herring, 1979).

The Vietnam War seemed to have begun with the ‘honorable’ intentions of serving the American people’s interests but as is the case with any war, its brutal aftermath brought about both cultural and social devastation among people. It brought about social unrest among students and the young activists who frantically campaigned for the end of the killing of innocent persons in Vietnam (Moss, 2010).

In the U.S., the deep hatred for the way the war had been conducted and the way it had ended caused the people to give a cold welcome to their troops as they came back from the war. The war also caused the American people to lose faith in their leaders when they learned that Lyndon Johnson had lied to them regarding the war.

Back in Vietnam, the war had catalyzed the defeat of the South and its subsequent absorption by the North which had been persistently seeking to impose its will on the South. Millions of Vietnamese were killed, displaced and some were even completely disabled as a result of the war.

To date, vast acres of land still remain wasted as they were destroyed by the poisonous herbicides that were used during the war and the government of Vietnam still struggles to cope with the needs of its people (Moss, 2010). In a nut shell, the Vietnam War brought more harm than good both to the people of America as well as the Vietnamese.

Presidential leadership during the Vietnam War can be explained in ways such as the ethics and efforts that were put to ensure that peace was restored.

President Kennedy had been advised by France president Charles de Gaulle that he would not succeed even if he injected more funds and soldiers into North Vietnam. In the period between 1961 and 1963 his military advisors had requested him to send combat divisions instead of the so called advisors to aid the Diem government.

President Kennedy was in support of a coup where Diem together with his brother died. However, he did not last long in the war as he was assassinated three weeks later. Lyndon Johnson took over and was in power when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution took place. He sent the first combat troops to Vietnam with hope that North Vietnam would give up and surrender to peace talks.

Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson by claiming he had a secret plan to the war. He intended to train South Vietnamese and slowly pulling out American troops (Neale, 2001). Vietnam was headed by Eisenhower who reigned from 1953 to 1961. He did not support the Geneva Accords that were between Vietnam and France thus, led to the division of the country into two, North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

South Vietnam was ruled by Ngo Dinh Diem who won the elections and later on claimed that his country was under communist attack. This marked the beginning of the Vietnam War in 1957 and Diem imprisoned all those who were suspected to belong to the communist and this led to demonstrations and protests (Brocheux, 2007).

In conclusion, both the U.S. and the Vietnam governments have a lot to ponder regarding the outcome of the Vietnam War. Years have gone, but people are still agonizing from the effects of the war. Proper negotiations and good governance should be embraced before any war is embarked on, in order to avoid a repeat of what was witnessed during the Vietnam War.

Brocheux, P. (2007). Ho Chi Minh: a biography . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Herring, C. (1979). America’s longest war: the United States and Vietnam 1950–1975 New York: Wiley publishers.

Moss, G. (2010). Vietnam: An American Ordeal (6 th Ed). Upper Saddle River (NJ): Prentice Hall.

Neale, J. (2001). The American War. London: Bookmarks.

Palmer, D. (1978). Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.-Vietnam in Perspective . Novato: Presidio Press.

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Vietnam War: 6 personal essays describe the sting of a tragic conflict

The Vietnam War touched millions of lives. Within these personal essays from people who took part in the filming of The Vietnam War , are lessons about what happened, what it meant then and what we can learn from it now.

Long ago and far away, we fought a war in which more than 58,000 Americans died and hundreds of thousands of others were wounded. The war meant death for an estimated 3 million Vietnamese, North and South. The fighting dragged on for almost a decade, polarizing the American people, dividing the country and creating distrust of our government that remains with us today.

In one way or another, Vietnam has overshadowed every national security decision since.

We were told that our mission was to prevent South Vietnam from falling to communism. Very lofty. But the men I led as a young infantry platoon leader and later as a company commander weren’t fighting for that mission. Mostly draftees, they were terrific soldiers. They were fighting, I realized, for each other — to simply survive their year in-country and go home.

I had grown up as an “Army brat.” To me, the Army was like a second family. In Vietnam, the radio code word for our division’s infantry companies was family . A “rucksack outfit,” my company would disappear into the jungle, moving quietly, staying in the field for weeks. We all ate the same rations and endured the same heat, humidity, mosquitoes, leeches, skin rashes, jungle itch. We were like pack animals, carrying upwards of 60 pounds of gear, water, ammunition — and even more for the radio operators and machine gunners. I was impressed by how the men endured it all, especially the draftees who had answered the call to service.

I learned much about leadership. I was once counseled by a senior officer “not to be too worried about your men.” Incredible. I was concerned about my men’s safety at all times. Even though my company lost very few, I remember each of those deaths vividly. They were all good men, in a war very few understood.

On both of my combat tours, in 1968 at Huê´ during the Tet Offensive and in 1969-70 in the triple-canopy rainforests along the Cambodian border, we fought soldiers of the North Vietnamese army. They were good light infantry; I had respect for their determination and abilities. But they were the enemy; our job was to kill or capture them.

Though we were conducting a war of attrition, we were actually fighting the enemy’s birth rate. He was prepared and determined to keep fighting as long as he had the manpower to send south.

In terms of strategy, it seemed a war out of “Alice in Wonderland.” The Ho Chi Minh Trail, the enemy’s major supply line and infiltration route, ran through Cambodia and Laos. Yet until May 1970, both of those countries were off limits to U.S. ground forces. We bombed the trail incessantly, but the enemy’s ability to move troops and equipment south never seemed to slack. We never invaded North Vietnam. As demonstrated during Tet in ’68, the enemy could control the tempo of the war when he wished. We, on the other hand, would use unilaterally declared “truce” periods and would halt bombing to signal something never clearly defined — a willingness to talk, I imagined, which the enemy ignored.

Looking back, if our strategy was intended to force the enemy to say “enough,” resulting in a stalemate situation like that at the end of the Korean War, would the South Vietnamese have been able to defend themselves, independently? Unlikely.

Would the U.S. have been willing to commit and maintain American forces in South Vietnam indefinitely? Also unlikely.

Did we learn anything from that experience, which left such an indelible mark on our national psyche? History is a harsh teacher; there are still no easy answers.

Hal Kushner

When I deployed to Vietnam in August 1967, I was a young Army doctor, married five years, with a 3-year-old daughter, just potty trained, and another child due the following April. When I returned from Vietnam in late March 1973, I saw my 5-year-old son for the first time, and my daughter was in the fifth grade. In the interim, we had landed on the moon; there was women’s lib, Nixon had gone to China; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated.

I was the only doctor captured in the 10-year Vietnam War. I was back from the dead.

We prisoners endured unspeakable horror, brutality and deprivation, and we saw and experienced things no human should ever witness. Our mortality rate was almost 50% — higher even than at the brutal Civil War prisons at Andersonville or Elmira a century earlier. I cradled 10 dying men in my arms as they breathed their last and spoke of home and family; then we buried them in crude graves, marked with stones and bamboo, and eulogized them with words of sunshine and hope, country and family. The eulogies were for the survivors, of course; they always are.

On the Fourth of July in five successive years, we sang patriotic songs, but very softly, so our captors couldn’t hear the forbidden words, and we cried. One of us had a missal issued by the Marine Corps, our only book, but our captors had torn out the pages with the American flag and The Star-Spangled Banner .

At my release in Hanoi, I was shocked by the hair and dress of the reporters there. Once home, I saw television and movies with frank profanity and sex. When I left, Lucy and Desi slept in twin beds. I left Ozzie and Harriett and returned to Taxi Driver . What had happened to my country? Why did we suffer and sacrifice?

When my aircraft crashed on Nov. 30, 1967, I collided with one planet and returned to another. The Vietnam War, which had about one-fifth of the casualties of World War II but had lasted three times as long, had changed the country as much as the greatest cataclysm in world history. It had changed forever the way we think of our government and ourselves. The country had lost its innocence — and, for a time, its confidence.

This war, which had such a great impact on my life, is a dim memory today. There are 58,000 names on that wall, and it rates but a few pages in a high school history book.

I am dismayed by how little our young people know about Vietnam, and how misunderstood it is by others. The Vietnam War is as remote to them as the War of 1812 or the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Now, 40 years later, we must try to understand.

Hal Kushner joined the Army and served as a flight surgeon in Vietnam. In 1967, he was captured by the Viet Cong after surviving a helicopter crash. He spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war. He lives in Daytona Beach, Fla.

p.p1{margin:0px;font:19px Times;-webkit-text-stroke:#000000}span.s1{font-kerning:none;background-color:#e0ebf6}span.s2{font-kerning:none} Mai Elliott

Having lived through war and seen what it did to my family and to millions of Vietnamese, I feel grateful for the peace and stability I now enjoy in the United States.

In Vietnam, my family and I experienced what it was like to be caught in bombing and fighting, and what it was like to flee our home and survive as refugees.

During World War II, in my childhood, we huddled in shelters as Allied planes targeting Japanese positions bombed the town in the North where we lived.

In 1946, when French troops returned to try to take Vietnam back from Ho Chi Minh’s government, French soldiers attacking the village where we were taking refuge almost executed my father (who had earlier worked for the French colonial authorities).

In 1954, fearing reprisals from the communists about to enter Hanoi, we fled to Saigon with only the clothes on our backs.

In 1955, we fled again when we found ourselves caught in the fighting between the army of President Ngo Dinh Diem and the armed group he was trying to eliminate, leaving behind our home, which was about to burn to the ground in the onslaught.

In April 1975, American helicopters plucked my family out of Saigon at the last minute as communist rockets exploded nearby.

The fear we felt paled in comparison to the terror that Vietnamese in the countryside of South Vietnam experienced when bombs and artillery shells landed in their villages, or when American and South Vietnamese soldiers swept through their hamlets; or the terror my relatives in North Vietnam felt when American B-52s carpet bombed in December 1972. Yet, our brushes with war were terrifying enough.

As refugees, we could find shelter and support from middle-class friends and relatives, while destitute peasants had to move to squalid camps and depend on meager handouts and help from the government in Saigon. But we did find out, as they did, that losing everything was psychologically wrenching, and that surviving and rebuilding took fortitude of spirit.

Only those who have known war can truly appreciate peace. I am one of those people.

Bill Zimmerman

I graduated from high school in 1958, thinking myself a patriot and aspiring to be a military pilot. Thirteen years later, I sat in a jail cell in Washington, D.C., after protesting what military pilots were doing in the skies over Vietnam.

My patriotism wilted in the South in 1963, after a short stint with the civil rights movement. Simultaneously, as the U.S. slid into war in Vietnam, skepticism nurtured in Mississippi led me to discover that we were stumbling into a quagmire.

The war escalated in 1965, and I became an ardent protester over the next six years. I was fired from two university teaching positions. But my sacrifices were trivial compared with those of young Americans forced into war, or Vietnamese civilians dying under bombs and napalm. With other antiwar activists, I anguished over them all, and seethed with rage at our inability to stop the killing. In our fury, we became more forceful, committing widespread civil disobedience.

That’s how I landed in jail in 1971, trying unsuccessfully to block traffic to shut down the federal government. But our failure that day became a turning point. Antiwar leaders realized that while we had finally convinced a majority of Americans to oppose the war, our militant tactics kept them from joining us.

We changed course. Large demonstrations ended. New organizations sprang up to educate the public and lobby Congress. The work was confrontational but did not ask participants to risk arrest. Millions took part. Richard Nixon escalated the war, but he also felt the heat from a much broader antiwar coalition. In January 1973, his administration signed the Paris Peace Accords, and over the next two years, our intense lobbying persuaded Congress to cut funding for the corrupt South Vietnamese government, leading to its collapse in 1975.

We learned that in matters of war and peace, presidents regularly lie to the American people. Every president from Truman to Ford lied about Vietnam. We learned that two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, cared more about their own political survival than the lives of the men under their command. Both sent thousands of Americans to die in a war they already knew could not be won.

We learned that our government committed crimes against humanity. Agent Orange and other chemicals were sprayed on millions of acres, leaving a legacy of cancer and birth defects.

Most important, Vietnam taught us to reject blind loyalty and to fight back. In doing so, we meet our obligation as citizens … and become patriots.

Bill Zimmerman is a Los Angeles political consultant and the author of Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties (Anchor Books, 2012).

Roger Harris

When I think about the Vietnam War, I am torn by personal emotions that range from anger and sadness to hope. The Vietnam War experience scarred me but also shaped and molded my perspective on life.

As a 19-year-old African American from the Roxbury section of Boston, I voluntarily joined the U.S. Marine Corps, willing to fight and die for my country. I had experienced the tough neighborhood turf battles too often prevalent in the inner city. I had a gladiator’s heart and no fear. My father, all of my uncles, including a grand-uncle who rode with Teddy Roosevelt, all served in the military. I believed that it was now my turn, and if I were to die, my mom would receive a $10,000 death benefit and be able to purchase a house. I saw the war in Vietnam as a win-win situation.

In Vietnam, I served with G Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division. We were called the “Hell in a Helmet” Marines. We operated in I Corps, Quang Tri Province, mainly north of Dong Ha at the Demilitarized Zone, in hot spots called Con Thien, Gio Linh, Camp Carroll and Cam Lo. I vividly remember trembling with fear from the incoming shells in the mud-filled holes at Con Thien, wishing the shelling would stop and we could fight hand-to-hand. I remember those feelings like it was yesterday.

I, along with others, witnessed deaths unimaginable. We picked up the pieces of Marine bodies obliterated by direct hits. We stacked green body bags. I often wondered why others died and I lived.

I become angry when I think about the very young lives that were lost in Vietnam and the Gold Star families who have suffered. I am saddened by the sacrifices of true heroes and the disrespect that was shown to those who were fortunate enough to come home.

When I returned from Vietnam it was March 1968 in the midst of the civil rights movement. I landed at Boston’s Logan Airport in my Marine Corps Alpha Green uniform, with the medals and ribbons I had earned proudly displayed. I approached the sidewalk to catch a taxi, hoping that I wasn’t dreaming and would not awaken back at Camp Carroll to another bombardment.

Six taxicabs passed me by and drove off. I didn’t realize what was happening until the state trooper stepped in and told the next driver, “You have got to take this soldier.” The driver, who was white, looked up at us through the passenger side window and said, “I don’t want to go to Roxbury.”

That was my initial welcome home.

I now have an appreciation for the gift of life. Since returning home and completing college, I have devoted 42 years working in Boston schools. I see it as a tribute to my fellow Marines who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

I am very proud to have served my country as a United States Marine.

I am also very proud of the young men and women who continue to volunteer to join the armed services of our country.

Roger Harris enlisted in the Marines and served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Afterward, he worked in the Boston public school system for more than 40 years. He lives in New York and Boston.

p.p1{margin:0px;font:19px Times;-webkit-text-stroke:#000000}span.s1{font-kerning:none;background-color:#e0ebf6}span.s2{font-kerning:none} Eva Jefferson Paterson

This summer, I attended the 50th reunion of my high school class in Mascoutah, Ill., across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. My dad was a career Air Force man and was stationed at Scott Air Force Base nearby in 1960.

During dinner, before we rocked out to the Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder, a group of us talked about the war in Vietnam. The men remembered the draft system that required all young men to register to serve in the military. While I was in college at Northwestern from 1967 to 1971, a draft lottery was established. Numbers were drawn out of a big bin — similar to the one used for weekly state lotteries — corresponding to the days of the year. If your birthday corresponded to the first number drawn, your draft number was 1, and you were virtually certain to be drafted and sent to war. Most men from that period remember their number.

Some at our reunion had felt that it was their patriotic duty to serve; others were just delighted that their lottery numbers were above 300 and they were unlikely to be drafted. Few of us were anti-war at that time; I fully supported the war. My dad was sent to Cam Rahn Bay and Tan Son Nhut air force bases in Vietnam in 1966, my senior year in high school.

I remember being a freshman in college and actually saying to classmates who opposed to the war, “We have to support the war because the president says the war is good, and we must support the president.” Yikes! I changed my views as I got the facts.

Much of the fervor of the anti-war movement was fueled by the slogan “Hell no, we won’t go!” There was righteous indignation about the war, but fear was a strong motivator.

Now the burden of serving in wars falls on a very small percentage of the population, one that likely mirrors the patterns in the Vietnam era, with predominantly poor white, black and Latino men and women along with those who come from military backgrounds. It would be great to have a national discussion about this, but I fear our country is quite comfortable letting poor men and women and people of color and their families bear the burden of war.

Eva Jefferson Paterson grew up on air force bases and enrolled in Northwestern University in 1967, where she became student body president and politically active against the war. A civil rights attorney, she now runs the Equal Justice Society in Northern California.

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Sample essay on vietnam war.

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The Vietnam War was the longest lasting war in the United States history before the Afghanistan War. This example of a critical essay explores the history of that violent and divisive event. The United States’ presence and involvement in the Vietnam War were something that many people felt very strongly about, whether they be American citizens, Vietnamese citizens, or global citizens.

Known as ‘the only war American ever lost’, the Vietnam War ended two years after the United States withdrew their forces in 1973 and the communist party seized Saigon two years later. This sample essay provides an example of the features and benefits that come from working with Ultius.

Causes of the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War refers to the Second Indochina War, lasting from 1954 until 1973, in which the United States (and other members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) fought alongside the Republic of South Vietnam. South Vietnam was contesting the communist forces comprised of the Viet Cong, a group of South Vietnamese guerillas, and the North Vietnamese Army (Vietnam War).

The war was a byproduct of the First Indochina War (lasting between 1946 and 1948), in which France tried to claim Vietnam as a colony and was met with strong opposition from Vietnamese communist forces.

But the deep-rooted issues surrounding the cause of the Vietnam War dated back to World War II, during which Japan invaded and occupied Vietnam (Vietnam War History). The country had already been under French rule since the late 1800s, and the Japanese presence caused a man named Ho Chi Minh, inspired by communism of China and the Soviet Union, to form the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam.

World War II as a catalyst to the Vietnam War

The Viet Minh’s main purpose was to fight both the Japanese and French administration and to make Vietnam a Communist nation. They were successful in forcing Japan to withdraw its forces in 1945. With only the French to worry about, the Viet Minh quickly rose up, gained control of the northern city of Hanoi, and declared Ho as the president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam War Facts).

This meant France had to take the lead in Vietnam. France sought to regain control in 1949 when they set up the state of Vietnam, also known as South Vietnam, and declared Saigon to be its capital. The two groups, the French and the Viet Minh, struggled for power until 1954, when a battle at Dien Bien Phu ended in defeat for France. This led to the Geneva Agreements , made a few months later, which granted independence to Cambodia and Laos, who had also been under French rule.

However, Vietnam was still divided into North Vietnam, or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Republic of South Vietnam (Vietnam War). There was to be an election to determine the country’s fate, but the south resisted, spurring a cascade of guerilla warfare from the north. In July of 1959, North Vietnam called for a socialist revolution in all of Vietnam as a whole.

United States belated involvement in Vietnam

As the battles became more ferocious, President Kennedy watched from the United States and sent a team to report on the conditions of South Vietnam. In 1961, it was suggested that the president sent American troops to produce economic and technical aid in the fight against the Viet Cong. Fearing the effects of the ‘domino theory’, which stated that if one Southeast Asian nation fell under communist rule, so would many others, President Kennedy increased the number of troops in South Vietnam to nine thousand, compared to less than eight hundred during the previous decade (Vietnam War History).

After the assassination of President Kennedy, it was decided by both his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that more soldiers would be used in the war . On August 2, 1964, two North Vietnamese torpedoes attacked United States destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In response, the United States Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, making the president’s war-making powers much broader (Vietnam War History).

America's military policy during the war

By the year’s end, twenty-three thousand American troops occupied South Vietnam and the United States began regular bombing raids the following February. Both the American military and the North Vietnamese forces came to the same conclusion; a steady escalation of the war would ensure victory. The U.S. believed that quickly increasing force and gaining control was the way to end the war; meanwhile, North Vietnam believed that enough American casualties would decrease support for U.S. involvement, forcing the withdrawal of the military (Vietnam War).

By June of 1965, eighty-two thousand United States troops were stationed in Vietnam. One month later, one hundred thousand more were dispatched, followed by another one hundred thousand in 1966 (Vietnam War History). By the end of 1967, there were almost five hundred thousand American military members stationed in Vietnam, and the death toll had surpassed fifteen thousand.

Soon, the physical and psychological deterioration of American soldiers became apparent. Maintaining military discipline was difficult. Drug use, mutiny, and cases of soldiers attacking officers became regular occurrences for United States troops. Popularity and support of the America’s part in the war decreased dramatically all over the world.

Americans' lack of support for the Vietnam War

On the last day of January in 1968, North Vietnam launched a series of merciless attacks on more than one hundred South Vietnamese cities. Despite the surprise, the United States and South Vietnam forces were able to strike back, making the communist fighters unable to maintain their hold on any of their targets.

Upon hearing reports of the attacks, and that there had been a request for two hundred thousand more troops, the United States’ support for the war plummeted, causing President Johnson to call a stop to the bombing of North Vietnam and vow to dedicate the rest of his term to achieving peace (Vietnam War History).

This promise by Johnson was met with talks of peace between the United States and North Vietnam. When Nixon was elected to take Johnson’s place, he sought to serve the ‘silent majority’, whom he believed supported the war effort.

Attempting to limit American casualties, Nixon launched a program to withdraw troops, increase artillery and aerial attacks, and give control over ground operations to South Vietnam (Vietnam War History). Peace negotiations were not moving smoothly, as North Vietnam continued to demand the United States’ complete withdrawal as a condition of peace.

In the years that followed, carnage and bloodshed were abundant. Meanwhile, in America, the anti-war movement was growing stronger as countless of thousands of Americans gathered at hundreds of protests around the country to contest the United States’ continued involvement in the war, marching in person and writing essays to share their opinions. In 1972, Nixon finally decided to end draft calls, as the numbers of soldiers discharged for desertion or ‘draft-dodging’ rapidly increased.

By the end of that year, North Vietnam was finally ready to compromise; however, they rejected the original peace agreement, causing Nixon to authorize bombings of North Vietnamese cities (Vietnam War History). U.S. troops were finally withdrawn in 1973, though war continued to rage between North and South Vietnam forces until the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975.

By the end of the war, the number of Americans killed reached over fifty-eight thousand, while the number of slaughtered Vietnamese numbered over two and a half million (Vietnam War History). From this point forward, the Vietnam War would be known as America's bloodiest war since the Civil War more than a hundred years' earlier.

The Vietnam War's military tactics

Military leaders once thought Germany's military policies during WWII were the most deceitful until the Viet Cong started employing their tactics. One of the most prominent types of warfare during the Vietnam War was guerilla warfare. This tactic consists of stealthy, surprise attacks aimed to eliminate opponents (Guerilla Warfare and Attrition Warfare).

Widely used by the Viet Cong, this enabled them to sneak up on unwary enemies, kill them, and escape before causing alarm. In addition, Viet Cong fighters often disguised themselves as farmers or civilians before attacking when least expected.

Viet Cong's deceitful disguises and innocent lives lost

This led to the accidental killing thousands of innocent Vietnamese citizens. By 1965, the Viet Cong had gained access to machine guns, which they mainly used to shoot American helicopters down from the sky. They would also utilize American land mines, which they sometimes found undetonated and would steal for their own use (Battlefield: Vietnam).

In a single year, enemy forces obtained almost twenty thousand tons of explosives from dud American bombs. Though United States troops originally aimed to use more traditional forms of warfare, meaning the ‘winner’ would be the one who had claimed more land, it was decided that the only way to truly win the war was to eliminate as many enemy troops as possible, called attrition warfare (Guerilla Warfare and Attrition Warfare).

Domestic response to the Vietnam War

The official position of the United States government on their involvement in the Vietnam War was that they were there at the request of South Vietnam to repel communist forces that were growing during the Cold War (Reaction to the War In the United States).

Before long, however, Americans grew dissatisfied with America’s continued presence in Southeast Asia. While some citizens believed that maximum force was necessary to quickly squash the opposition, others believed that the conflict in Vietnam was a civil one, making our involvement inappropriate.

Upon the revelation that American troops had massacred an entire village of civilians, anti-war demonstrations sprang up all around the country (Reactions to the War in the United States). While most demonstrations were peaceful, that was not the case for all. Many protests escalated to violence, as draft boards were raided and destroyed, production facilities were targets for attack and sabotage, and brutal altercations between civilians and police grew in frequency (Barringer).

Americans were analyzing the war through the lens of justice and morality, in addition to growing a strong distrust for the country’s military (War in Vietnam). Civil rights leaders and the American Civil Liberties Union called for the withdrawal of United States forces from Vietnam. By the time Nixon recalled American troops in 1973, the antiwar sentiment had become overwhelming as dissent for the government reigned (Barringer). Never before had the American public showed such disdain and dissatisfaction with the country’s involvement in warfare.

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While the Vietnam War had some support among American citizens, the overall feelings towards the war were negative. It was widely believed that veterans were the true victims of the Vietnam War, as thousands of Americans were drafted involuntarily to fight in a war they did not believe in and millions of Vietnamese became nothing more than cast-aside casualties of war.

The United States originally aimed to squash the growth of Communism in Asia but ended up participating in the longest, bloodiest war in American history. Regardless of the justification for their involvement, the United States continues to hold the Vietnam War as a lesson and an example for how we, as a country, should conduct ourselves during times of conflict. The memories and aftereffects of the Vietnam War will continue to serve as a reminder for generations to come. If you have strong feelings about this bit of history, for or against, order your own essay from Ultius.

Works Cited

Barringer, Mark. University of Illinois: The Anti-War Movement in the United States. Oxford UP, 1999. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/antiwar.html.

“Battlefield: Vietnam”. PBS.org. PBS. Web. 2, Dec. 2014.

“Guerilla Warfare and Attrition Warfare”. The Vietnam War. Weebly, 2014. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://vietnamawbb.weebly.com/guerrilla-warfare-and-war-of-attrition.html.

“Vietnam War”. HistoryNet.com. Weider History Network, 2014. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.historynet.com/vietnam-war.

“Vietnam War History”. History.com. A&E Television Network, 2009. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history.

“The Vietnam War”. U.S. History. Independence Hall Association. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.ushistory.org/us/55.asp.

“War in Vietnam”. History Learning Site. HistoryLearningSite.co.uk, 2014. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/war_vietnam.htm.

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Exploring the vietnam war: a teacher’s resource essay.

He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined . . . to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” ––Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955) 1

The purpose of this essay is to provide classroom instructors and other interested parties with a review of a range of readings, films, and documentaries about the Vietnam War. The eight areas presented explore the conflict in its complexity, from background to culture to the legacy for US foreign policy. The areas can be shaped into instructional units, with readings and films chosen with a secondary school or college audience in mind.

Vietnam’s French Colonial Background

Before the American war came the French colonial experience, establishing Indochina as a far-flung colonial outpost, enriching the mother country while brutally suppressing resistance. From the 1870s to the 1950s, the French regime raised generations of Vietnamese civil servants, who developed cultural and intellectual ties with their occupiers. A class of Western-educated nationalists emerged in the twentieth century who denounced the foreign occupation and called for self-determination. Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, was in the forefront. Much of Ho’s popular appeal can be read and dissected in Bernard Fall’s edited volume, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–1966 (1967). These primary sources offer an idea of the hope Ho offered to so many Vietnamese who chafed and suffered under French domination. The best biography on Ho is William J. Duker’s Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000). Graham Greene’s graceful novel, The Quiet American (1955), captures the mood of the French under siege, while foreshadowing the American experience. The French were defeated in 1954 by the communist Viet Minh.

A familiarity with the French colonial experience in Vietnam is important for Americans’ study, as the Americans ignored or misread the lessons from the French failure. The French war was also America’s initial entry, as the US funded 80 percent of the war by 1954, as a Cold War fight against communism. The first chapter of George C. Herring’s excellent work, America’s Longest War (1979), “A Dead-End Alley: The United States, France and the First Indochina War, 1950–1954,” is a fine introduction to France’s defeat and America’s entry onto the scene. Indeed, Herring’s book is well worth reading in its entirety, for both high school and college classes. In addition, for this first unit on the war I strongly recommend the 1983 PBS “American Experience” series, V ietnam: A Television History, beginning with Episode I: “Roots of a War (1945–1953).”

US Objectives in Cold War Context, the Case for the War and Reasons Lost

a building with pillars sits above a line of people trying to enter.

The rationale that led America into Vietnam must be placed firmly into the Cold War mindset. In the years after World War II, US policymakers perceived communism as a near-monolithic entity. Thus, the communist and anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam played upon US fears of communist global expansion: Russia, 1917; Eastern Europe and Poland, post-1945; China and North Korea, 1949; Tibet, 1951; North Vietnam, 1954; and Cuba, 1959. As Herring writes, although Indochina was considered by the Americans to be “important for its raw materials, rice, and naval bases . . . it was deemed far more significant for the presumed effect its loss would have on other areas,” otherwise known as “the domino theory.” 2 If South Vietnam fell, then “Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Malaya (and then, successively, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia) would ‘fall to the Communists’ in their proper order.” 3

The answer was the “containment doctrine,” established during the Truman administration, and pursued, with variations, on through the 1980s. Students would benefit from reading George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” sent from the US Embassy in Moscow to Washington, DC, in which Kennan argued that Soviet encroachments be contained at every opportunity, meeting force with force. Kennan’s telegram is a seminal document in Cold War history. 4 Although the threat of communist expansion was the primary concern in Vietnam for Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, additional motives included US credibility and domestic political concerns, with administrations fearful of seeming to appease totalitarian aggression.

For a counterbalance to more mainstream histories, I also find useful Howard Zinn’s chapter, “The Impossible Victory: Vietnam,” in his classic polemic, A People’s History of the United States (1980). Zinn presents a critical leftist perspective, stressing US economic motives behind the nation’s overseas ventures. Focusing on the disconnect between official democratic principles and cynical self-interest, his work can be counted on to provoke lively class discussions.

For documentaries, I strongly recommend Errol Morris’ The Fog of War , which won an Academy Award in 2003. The film presents a series of interview clips with Robert McNamara, Kennedy and Johnson’s Secretary of Defense and a key architect of the war. An eighty-five-year-old McNamara reflects on Vietnam, the danger of too much power, Cold War presumptions, and mistakes that were made, interspersed with combat footage.

While the antiwar movement opposed the basic tenets of why the US should involve itself in Vietnam, plenty of bipartisan foreign policy experts were firmly convinced that America was both morally and strategically justified in seeking to contain North Vietnam. Richard Nixon asserted in No More Vietnams (1985) that the conflict was no civil war, but rather, “the Vietnam War was the Korean war with jungles,” in which a hostile communist force “camouflaged its invasion to look like a civil war,” while undertaking a stream of ceaseless border crossings while supporting the Viet Cong. 5 The American media and antiwar movement are both singled out by Nixon, but also the failure of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to explain “what we were fighting for,” thus failing to secure enduring public support. 6 Nixon also blamed the US Congress for allowing Saigon to fall in the two years following America’s withdrawal.

Nixon’s polemical book is useful in providing an alternate perspective to the antiwar critique, whether in explaining the US justification or in de-romanticizing Ho Chi Minh, whose 1950s agrarian policies sparked “major peasant revolts,” resulting in the deaths of 50,000 North Vietnamese. 7 Additional arguments for support of the war are to be found in Robert F. Kennedy’s oral interviews in Robert Kennedy: In His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (1991), edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, and in Lyndon Johnson’s memoir, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963–1969 (1971).

a billboard with a woman and "Vietnam" on it

As arguments are studied for the war’s justification, so should debates be reviewed on why the war was lost. The issue of whether the American media helped lose the war and the theory of an “oppositional” media are discussed by Melvin Small in Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves . 8 In Nixon Reconsidered (1994), a largely positive reevaluation, Joan Hoff reviews flaws in the 1973 peace agreement, which was essentially forced upon South Vietnam’s President Thieu, with Nixon threatening an “immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance” if Thieu did not sign the document. 9

In We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young , Retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore in his final chapter, “Reflections and Perceptions,” singles out flaws in US military and political policy as to why America failed in Vietnam, including one-year tours of duty and frequent officer rotations. Failure also resulted from losing the hearts and minds of the populace by bombing heavily populated areas. “None of us,” Moore wrote, “had joined the Army to hurt children and frighten peaceful farm families.” 10 Nor would the American people condone the ongoing losses as the years passed, despite superior firepower. Even with a “kill ratio of 10–1 or even 20–1” against the enemy, eventually Americans would demand that the troops come home, mission accomplished or not. 11

The Face of War

As historian John Dower once wrote, “atrocities follow war as the jackal follows a wounded beast.” 12 Vietnam was no different, and, like Dower’s own area of expertise on the Pacific War, the war in Vietnam was carried out between peoples of different races, languages, and cultures; cruelty, racism, and dehumanization followed in its wake. Certainly, atrocities occurred on both sides, from the 1968 massacre by US soldiers in the village of My Lai, to the mass executions by communist forces in the city of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive. For students to form an accurate perception of the face of the Vietnam War, works that present the American soldier’s experience should also include a feel for the camaraderie, the stultifying dullness, the struggles against heat, loneliness, brutality, loss, and fear.

Mark Baker’s Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women who Fought There (1981) is a collection of veterans’ oral histories, at times starkly graphic, and cannot fail to hold students’ attention. “You can’t tell who’s your enemy,” one veteran recalled. “You got to shoot kids, you got to shoot women. You don’t want to. You may be sorry that you did. But you might be sorrier if you didn’t.” 13 Other veteran accounts include Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us (1983), with accounts gathered by reporters Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller; Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977); Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1985), edited by Bernard Edelman; and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk (1983), a fascinating account by a US helicopter pilot who flew more than one thousand combat missions in Vietnam. Of these works, Baker’s Nam is the most graphic, in terms of violence, language, and brutality, and thus should be read carefully by the teacher before the book is assigned, since the material is disturbing. For a popular fictional treatment, many fine examples exist, but perhaps the best remains Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990).

On the other side, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1991) is a novel by a North Vietnamese Army veteran. One of 500 soldiers who served in the North’s 27th Youth Brigade, and one of only ten who survived, Ninh was seventeen when he joined the war and twenty-three when it ended. His novel has become a literary classic. Nor did the decade following Hanoi’s victory bring the longed-for reconciliation for which many had hoped, as Truong Nhu Tang makes clear in A Viet Cong Memoir (1985), written with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. A former guerrilla who served as Minister of Justice after the war, Tang’s bitter disillusionment with postwar Vietnam eventually forced him into exile. For an excellent visual, the National Geographic documentary, Vietnam’s Unseen War: Pictures from the Other Side (2002), offers a series of interviews and photographs by North Vietnamese photographers, giving more of a face to “the faceless enemy” in the jungle.

For American POWs, the war included the nightmare of internment. A useful account of one American POW’s experience in Hanoi’s notorious French-built Hoa Lo Prison is Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr.’s When Hell Was in Session (1976). Lionel Chetwynd’s dramatic film, Hanoi Hilton (1987), offers stark images for viewers unused to seeing American POWs at the mercy of others. The documentary Return with Honor (2001), directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, depicts the POWs’ plight and their return to America.

The Antiwar Movement

image of a pin that says "march on washington, End the war in Vietnam, April 17, 1965"

Much has been written on the anti-Vietnam War movement, and abundant films and documentaries are readily available. Two comprehensive tomes are Tom Wells’s The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (1994), and Terry H. Anderson’s The Movement and the Sixties (1995). Born on the Fourth of July (1976) by Ron Kovic is an excellent choice for high school audiences, presenting Kovic’s journey from an all-American high school athlete who comes home from the war in a wheelchair and becomes a spokesman for the antiwar movement. The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (1984), edited by Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, is an excellent compendium of primary sources that cover six main areas, from the cultural to the political and from the moderate to the extreme.

Although the dominant popular perception of the sixties generation depicts a “politically and socially rebellious” youth, a 1989 Gallup poll found otherwise. Among those surveyed who came of political age during the sixties, “large majorities . . . say they did not get involved in anti-war or civil rights movements, did not smoke marijuana on a regular basis or experiment with psychedelic drugs, and did not ‘dress like a hippie.’” 14 Paul Lyons’ work, Class of ’66 , is a wonderful corrective in this area. Indeed, as Godfrey Hodgson wrote in America in Our Time (1976), the 1968 “swing of public opinion against the war did not mean that the peace movement had succeeded in achieving its dream of mass conversion.” 15 While a growing majority conceded that the war had become “a mess,” that did not mean they were ready to mount the barricades—far from it. Instead, the curious situation arose in which “most of those who disliked the war, disliked the peace movement even more.” 16

A cover for the documentary. Says: "The Weather Underground: We are the outlaws, free and high--a youth guerrilla underground in the heart of honky America"

The collection Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties is a useful resource containing reflections by three dozen former activists. A common theme in the section “Second Thoughts on Vietnam” is how, after 1975 and the ensuing communist repression in both Vietnam and Cambodia, many New Leftists who had cheered communist-driven wars of national liberation later ignored or sought to discredit reports that reflected poorly on the new communist regimes. As one writer stated, “such methods of imposing the Party’s power over a newly ‘liberated’ society have been a part of every Communist victory since 1917.” 17 Another writer spoke of the inherent danger of romanticizing “the other side,” a pitfall experienced not only by the New Leftists but also by “old leftists” who glorified Stalin in the 1930s. 18 A fine study on the evils that befell Cambodia and the danger of romanticizing guerrillas of any stripe is William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), which indicts the Nixon administration for destabilizing fragile, neutral Cambodia, leading to the Khmer Rouge’s seizure of power and the genocidal slaughter of over a million Cambodians.

Perhaps the best documentary of the protest movement is Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), directed by Mark Kitchell. In the previously-mentioned Vietnam: A Television History series, the antiwar movement is portrayed in the episode “Homefront USA.” For a look at the most radical and violent protest group that arose from the sixties, The Weather Underground (2003), directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, shows the radicalization of a small band of revolutionaries who sought to bring down the US government, with their reflections thirty years later. Together these documentaries provide a fine cross-section of the protest movement, from those who advocated peace to those who sought to end the war and change society through far more violent means.

Culture Clash: America and Vietnam

The great cultural, linguistic, political, and historical differences that separated the Americans from the Vietnamese contributed to the war’s tragedy, fueled by the frustration that arose between mutually uncomprehending people. “America was involved in Vietnam for thirty years, but never understood the Vietnamese,” wrote Loren Baritz in his work Backfire (1985). 19 Vietnamese men, for example, had the custom of holding hands in public with their friends. For American youths raised on John Wayne films, this practice repelled many GIs who felt that their Asian allies were either effeminate or cowards, prompting them to wonder “why Americans had to die in defense of perverts.” 20 Baritz’s first chapter, “God’s Country and American Know-How,” is particularly informative as to the clash of cultures, though the entire book offers much insight.

Another excellent place to start for exploring cultural differences is Frances Fitzgerald’s landmark work, Fire in the Lake (1972), in which each culture’s view of the historical process differed, which affected their view of revolution. Traditional Vietnamese view history as cyclical, in keeping with their life as an agrarian-based people, while Westerners view history as a path of progression, with humanity emerging from a state of chaos to eventual order and stability. Thus, whereas Westerners tend to perceive revolution as “an abrupt reversal in the order of society, a violent break in history,” Vietnamese view it as “the cleansing fire to burn away the rot of the old order.” 21 In Vietnam, Americans were in the unenviable position of supporting the old order, a pro-Western series of anti-communist governments, which the French had left in their wake. As for documentaries, Peter Davis‘s classic work Hearts and Minds (1974) presents tragic and starkly contrasting images of cultural differences and the Americans’ involvement in Vietnam. The film should be viewed in advance by the instructor due to images of violence and, more rarely, nudity.

The War and America’s Cinematic Memory: Reality, Fantasy, and Remorse

Far from the more “patriotic” films arising from the World War II and Korean War eras, such as Back to Bataan (1945), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), and Pork Chop Hill (1959), the Vietnam-era films, with the exception of John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), are marked by a suspicion of authority in general––particularly military and political. This was the generation of writers and directors who learned of official lies during the war by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Nixon’s own conduct of the war, including prolonged secret bombings of Cambodia by US warplanes, and capped off by the Watergate scandals, resulted in many Americans en masse experiencing a deep distrust of their government.

Beyond the political perspective of many of these films, Hollywood—and US citizens—were coming to terms with the kind of damage America had wrought on Vietnam, and the kind of harm inflicted on US soldiers, their families, and survivors. Out of a rich tapestry of films, part fantasy, part reality, and much soul-searching, many are worth noting, but I shall mention only a few. Francis Ford Coppola’s fanciful Apocalpyse Now (1979) offers an image of the American war effort’s descent into chaos, though it is likely to raise more questions than it answers. A harrowing depiction is Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), the director himself a Vietnam vet. The scene in which an entire Vietnamese village is nearly wiped out by tense, frustrated, and angry US soldiers recalls the My Lai massacre. Hamburger Hill (1987), directed by Jon Irvin, deals with a specific battle and is brutal in its realism. Coming Home (1978), directed by Hal Ashby, focuses on the hardship experienced by returning veterans and their families. At the end of the film a paraplegic vet, played by Jon Voight, delivers a speech to a high school audience that is particularly moving, in which he expresses remorse for actions taken while “killing for one’s country.”

Lessons learned (or not): “No more Vietnams”

The anguish that the war inflicted upon the American psyche left a legacy that continues to impact US foreign policy, providing a ripe and relevant area for student research. In the thirty years since 1975, with each new military foray, cries are issued on the danger of the US finding itself once more in “another quagmire.” In his account of the Reagan presidency, as Reagan’s former Secretary of State, George Shultz bemoaned the “Vietnam syndrome.” “The Vietnam War had left one indisputable legacy,” Schultz wrote: “massive press, public, and congressional anxiety that the United States—at all costs—avoid getting mired in ‘another Vietnam.’” 22 In 1991, after America and its allies succeeded in pushing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush publicly declared, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” 23 Yet, amid the Serbian and Croatian acts of genocide in the Balkans, Bush “was slow to act” due to “the ghosts of Vietnam” and “the great fear of being sucked into a Balkan quagmire.” 24

Former antiwar protester Bill Clinton would himself face the Vietnam legacy in determining US foreign policy. Clinton pulled out the troops after eighteen US servicemen died in civil-war-torn Somalia. He experienced the same fears of over-engagement when he ordered limited air strikes on Serbia during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, though he emerged successful and limited US objectives were achieved.

His successor, George W. Bush, went deeper. By December 2005, towards the end of the third year of Bush’s war in Iraq, with roughly 2,200 US soldiers dead, many politicians began calling for an exit strategy. “We are locked into a bogged-down problem not . . . dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” stated Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, himself a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. “We should start figuring out how we get out of there.” 25 Former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright struck a middle ground, stating, “The American military [in Iraq] is both the problem and the solution. They are a magnet [for insurgents] but they’re also helping with security.” 26 Democratic politicians attacked each other for fear of seeming weak. 27 For his part, President Bush maintained that US forces in Iraq would emerge victorious, promising “complete victory,” in which US forces would eventually withdraw as Iraqi forces increased their level of readiness against the insurgency. 28 As with Vietnam, politicians of both parties were increasingly caught between their record of past support, public discontent, perceived US interests, political vulnerability, and a faith in America’s potential for good amidst a sea of troubles.

Disputing Vietnam comparisons, military historian Victor Davis Hanson emphasizes that the number of US war dead in Iraq after two and a half years of war in no way approximated the far higher losses in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Since the 1970s, American expectations as to its own capabilities have increased. In a war that seeks to defeat guerrillas and where victories are not measured by ground taken, “our growing intolerance of any battlefield losses” will only meet with frustration when US wars are fought without quick and easy victories. 29

Vietnam Today

As the communist forces neared Saigon in the spring of 1975, the US military’s Stars and Stripes predicted in a bold headline that “AT LEAST A MILLION VIETNAMESE WILL BE SLAUGHTERED.” 30 The anticipated bloodbath did not come, though severe hardship and repression did. For an excellent firsthand account of the prisons and re-education camps under post-1975 communist rule in Vietnam, see The Vietnamese Gulag (1986), by Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff. What followed was an eventual “exodus of boat people, a transformative flotilla that would carry one million South Vietnamese—about five percent of the South’s population,” to lands overseas. 31 It would take years before the country established a sense of normalcy.

I thus recommend closing the unit on the Vietnam War with a glimpse of Vietnam today, thirty years after the country’s reunification and the fall of Saigon. In addition to my own teaching and research over the years, my knowledge was greatly enhanced by a summer 2004 trip to Vietnam with Pacific Village Institute, led by John Eastman. I was most impressed by the sheer energy of the Vietnamese, their friendliness, optimism, and eagerness embracing newfound opportunities currently available through the government’s policy of increased economic liberalism and the encouragement of small private enterprise.

Whatever the instructor’s political views, whether judging Vietnam’s current economic trend as a cause for “free world” celebration or one of leftist utopian mourning, the fact remains that the Vietnamese standard of living and per capita income are both on the rise, after decades of economic mismanagement and stringent government control. 32 Although censorship of the press and restricted civil liberties are as one would expect in a one-party state, a look at Vietnam at the dawn of the twenty-first century provides a positive area for students to discuss and an upbeat note to end on, in a unit that focuses on the grim reality of war. As veteran war reporter David Lamb stated in his excellent work Vietnam Now (2002), the cautious moves by the Vietnamese government have resulted in a country that “remains closer to impoverished Laos than it does to developing Thailand. Yet,” Lamb adds, “the Vietnamese have always had staying power and been good at capitalizing on opportunity; their country brims with potential.” 33 This potential, which the country is in the process of realizing, is reason enough for an in-depth study of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese people, and the nation they are becoming.

Vietnam War

Vietnam war essay questions, vietnam to world war ii.

1. Describe the politics, economics, social structures and culture of medieval Vietnam. How did ordinary Vietnamese people live prior to the arrival of Europeans?

2. Discuss Vietnam’s contact and relationship with the West, up to 1850. How did this contact shape or affect Vietnamese society?

3. Explain how the French assumed control of Vietnam in a relatively short space of time. What methods and justifications did they use to increase their power?

4. How did the Nguyen emperors attempt to rid their country of foreign influence, particularly religion, in the 19th century?

5. “French colonialism in Indochina was motivated by a desire to civilise and develop the local population.” To what extent is this statement true?

6. Explain how the French colonial regime maintained its political, economic and social control over Vietnam. What role was played by Francophile Vietnamese?

7. What was life like for Vietnamese peasants and workers during the French colonial period? What problems and conditions did they face?

8. Referring to at least three movements or leaders, explain how some Vietnamese resisted the French colonial regime. How successful was this resistance?

9. Why did Vietnamese nationalists like Ho Chi Minh turn to communism after World War I?

10. Why did the Japanese invade Vietnam in 1940? What methods did they use to assert and expand their control?

The struggle for control: 1945 to 1954

1. Investigate the growth of the Viet Minh in the mid-1940s. How was this group formed? Who provided its leadership and its membership?

2. When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, what arrangements were made for the transition of power in Vietnam?

3. Explain why Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence in September 1945. In doing so, why did he refer to the United States Declaration of Independence?

4. During World War II the United States provided material support to Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh. Why did the American position change after 1945?

5. Discuss how the communist victory in China in October 1949 affected Western policies and attitudes to south-east Asia.

6. Explain the metaphor of “the elephant and the tiger” and how it shaped the outcomes of the First Indochina War.

7. How did Vo Nguyen Giap and the Viet Minh engineer a victory over French forces at Dien Bien Phu?

8. What were the terms of the Geneva Accords pertaining to Vietnam? What were they intended to achieve?

9. Many historians trace the origins of the Vietnam War to the failure of the Geneva Accords. Did the Accords have any chance or success or were they destined to fail?

10. Discussing similarities and differences, compare the development of Korea and Vietnam in the decade following World War II.

The two Vietnams: 1954 to 1963

1. Describe the political evolution of North Vietnam during the mid-1950s. Who ruled the North and what were their objectives?

2. Evaluate North Vietnam’s policy of land reform during the mid to late 1950s. Did these reforms make life better for the majority of people?

3. Investigate the background and political views of Ngo Dinh Diem. How did he become the leader of South Vietnam in 1954?

4. Western nations described Ngo Dinh Diem as the “Asian Churchill” and “our man in Saigon”. Was Diem a Western puppet, an Asian nationalist or a loose cannon?

5. Discuss the ‘Agroville’ and ‘Strategic Hamlets’ programs, initiated by Ngo Dinh Diem with Western backing. What were these programs intended to achieve and why did they fail?

6. Explain why the government of Ngo Dinh Diem failed to gain popular support in South Vietnam.

7. Investigate the role of Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife Tran Le Xuan in the Ngo Dinh Diem regime.

8. Evaluate the Kennedy administration’s policy with regard to Vietnam, between January 1961 and November 1963.

9. Why did Ngo Dinh Diem and his followers target South Vietnam’s Buddhists? What effects did this persecution have on Diem’s own regime?

10. Evaluate the origins, structure and ideology of the National Liberation Front (NLF). Why was this group formed and what methods did it employ?

The Vietnam War: 1964-75

1. Why did Lyndon Johnson decide to commit American forces to the conflict in Vietnam? What people, advice and factors influenced Johnson’s decision?

2. Explain why Thailand, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand contributed military forces to the war in Vietnam.

3. The Gulf of Tonkin incident provided a pretext for American military involvement in Vietnam. To what extent was this justified?

4. Evaluate the leadership of General William Westmoreland between 1964 and 1968. What was Westmoreland’s strategy for protecting South Vietnam? How successful was this?

5. Describe the challenges faced by American combat soldiers in Vietnam. What conditions and factors blunted the effectiveness of the American military?

6. Consider the causes and effects of the My Lai massacre of March 1968. What did this incident reveal about America’s military involvement in Vietnam?

7. Explain why the Tet Offensive was a victory and a defeat for both the Americans and the NVA-Viet Cong.

8. Discuss the objectives of Richard Nixon’s policy of Vietnamisation. How successful was this policy in achieving its goals?

9. Investigate American media coverage of the war in Vietnam. How was the war reported between 1964 and 1975 and how did this shape public attitudes and opinions?

10. Referring to data like opinion polls, evaluate American attitudes to the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1975. Which policies, developments or events caused significant shifts in public opinion?

11. What ideas, tactics and methods were used by individuals and groups opposed to Western involvement in Vietnam?

12. Evaluate the role of art, music and literature in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Effects and aftermath

1. Compare and contrast the policies of presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon with regard to Vietnam. Which of these leaders was most responsible for entangling the United States in the Vietnam War?

2. Evaluate the development of Vietnam in the two years after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. How did the communist victory affect the lives of ordinary Vietnamese?

3. Describe the difficulties faced by Vietnam veterans as they returned to civilian life in the United States or Australia.

4. Evaluate the claim made by some leaders, including General William Westmoreland, that the United States did not lose the Vietnam War.

5. Was the Domino Theory validated or refuted by the progress and outcomes of the Vietnam War?

6. Position the Vietnam conflict in the broader Cold War. How did the Vietnam War shape or affect the relationship between the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China?

7. What effects did the Vietnam War have on American government and society between 1965 and 1975? Consider changes to political, social and cultural attitudes.

8. What effect did American military intervention have on nearby Cambodia between 1969 and 1975?

9. Discuss how events in Vietnam shaped the development of neighbouring Laos from 1957 onwards.

10. Who were the Khmer Rouge and what was their vision for Cambodia? How did they go about implementing this vision?

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Vietnam War

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 16, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

US Infantry, VietnamThe US 173rd Airborne are supported by helicopters during the Iron Triangle assault. (Photo by © Tim Page/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians.

Opposition to the war in the United States bitterly divided Americans, even after President Richard Nixon signed the Paris Peace Accords and ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. Communist forces ended the war by seizing control of South Vietnam in 1975, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.

Roots of the Vietnam War

Vietnam, a nation in Southeast Asia on the eastern edge of the Indochinese peninsula, had been under French colonial rule since the 19th century.

During World War II , Japanese forces invaded Vietnam. To fight off both Japanese occupiers and the French colonial administration, political leader Ho Chi Minh —inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism —formed the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam.

Following its 1945 defeat in World War II , Japan withdrew its forces from Vietnam, leaving the French-educated Emperor Bao Dai in control. Seeing an opportunity to seize control, Ho’s Viet Minh forces immediately rose up, taking over the northern city of Hanoi and declaring a Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) with Ho as president.

Seeking to regain control of the region, France backed Emperor Bao and set up the state of Vietnam in July 1949, with the city of Saigon as its capital.

Both sides wanted the same thing: a unified Vietnam. But while Ho and his supporters wanted a nation modeled after other communist countries, Bao and many others wanted a Vietnam with close economic and cultural ties to the West.

Did you know? According to a survey by the Veterans Administration, some 500,000 of the 3 million troops who served in Vietnam suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and rates of divorce, suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction were markedly higher among veterans.

When Did the Vietnam War Start?

The Vietnam War and active U.S. involvement in the war began in 1954, though ongoing conflict in the region had stretched back several decades.

After Ho’s communist forces took power in the north, armed conflict between northern and southern armies continued until the northern Viet Minh’s decisive victory in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The French loss at the battle ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina.

The subsequent treaty signed in July 1954 at a Geneva conference split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th Parallel (17 degrees north latitude), with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South. The treaty also called for nationwide elections for reunification to be held in 1956.

In 1955, however, the strongly anti-communist politician Ngo Dinh Diem pushed Emperor Bao aside to become president of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN), often referred to during that era as South Vietnam.

This April 1968 file photo shows the first sergeant of A Company, 101st Airborne Division, guiding a medevac helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties suffered during a five-day patrol near Hue.

The Viet Cong

With the Cold War intensifying worldwide, the United States hardened its policies against any allies of the Soviet Union , and by 1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had pledged his firm support to Diem and South Vietnam.

With training and equipment from American military and the CIA , Diem’s security forces cracked down on Viet Minh sympathizers in the south, whom he derisively called Viet Cong (or Vietnamese Communist), arresting some 100,000 people, many of whom were brutally 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 the South Vietnamese army in firefights.

In December 1960, Diem’s many opponents within South Vietnam—both communist and non-communist—formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) to organize resistance to the regime. Though the NLF claimed to be autonomous and that most of its members were not communists, many in Washington assumed it was a puppet of Hanoi.

Vietnam War Timeline

Vietnam Background: Uneasy French Rule • 1887: France imposes a colonial system over Vietnam, calling it French Indochina. The system includes Tonkin, Annam, Cochin China and Cambodia. Laos is added in 1893. • 1923‑25: Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh is trained in the Soviet Union as an agent of the Communist International (Comitern). • February 1930: Ho Chi […]

Henry Kissinger’s Controversial Role in the Vietnam War

As Nixon's Secretary of State, Kissinger both escalated the war—and tried to end it.

6 Events That Laid the Groundwork for the Vietnam War

The conflict in Vietnam took root during an independence movement against French colonial rule and evolved into a Cold War confrontation.

Domino Theory

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 Diem confront the Viet Cong threat.

Working under the “ domino theory ,” which held that if one Southeast Asian country fell to communism, many other countries 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 some 9,000 troops, compared with fewer than 800 during the 1950s.

Gulf of Tonkin

A coup by some of his own generals succeeded in toppling and killing Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, in November 1963, three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

The ensuing political instability in South Vietnam persuaded Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson , and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to further increase U.S. military and economic support.

In August of 1964, after DRV torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson ordered the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution , which gave Johnson broad war-making powers, and U.S. planes began regular bombing raids, codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder , the following year.

The bombing was not limited to Vietnam; from 1964-1973, the United States covertly dropped two million tons of bombs on neighboring, neutral Laos during the CIA-led “Secret War” in Laos . The bombing campaign was meant to disrupt the flow of supplies across the Ho Chi Minh trail into Vietnam and to prevent the rise of the Pathet Lao, or Lao communist forces. The U.S. bombings made Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world.

In March 1965, Johnson made the decision—with solid support from the American public—to send U.S. combat forces into battle in Vietnam. By June, 82,000 combat troops were stationed in Vietnam, and military leaders were calling for 175,000 more by the end of 1965 to shore up the struggling South Vietnamese army.

Despite the concerns of some of his advisers about this escalation, and about the entire war effort amid a growing anti-war movement , Johnson authorized the immediate dispatch of 100,000 troops at the end of July 1965 and another 100,000 in 1966. In addition to the United States, South Korea , Thailand, Australia and New Zealand also committed troops to fight in South Vietnam (albeit on a much smaller scale).

William Westmoreland

In contrast to the air attacks on North Vietnam, the U.S.-South Vietnamese war effort in the south was fought primarily on the ground, largely under the command of General William Westmoreland , in coordination with the government of General Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon.

Westmoreland pursued a policy of attrition, aiming to kill as many enemy troops as possible rather than trying to secure territory. By 1966, large areas of South Vietnam had been designated as “free-fire zones,” from which all innocent civilians were supposed to have evacuated and only enemy remained. Heavy bombing by B-52 aircraft or shelling made these zones uninhabitable, as refugees poured into camps in designated safe areas near Saigon and other cities.

Even as the enemy body count (at times exaggerated by U.S. and South Vietnamese authorities) mounted steadily, DRV and Viet Cong troops refused to stop fighting, encouraged by the fact that they could easily reoccupy lost territory with manpower and supplies delivered via the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Cambodia and Laos. Additionally, supported by aid from China and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam strengthened its air defenses.

Vietnam War Protests

By November 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. As the war stretched on, some soldiers came to mistrust the government’s reasons for keeping them there, as well as Washington’s repeated claims that the war was being won.

The later years of the war saw increased physical and psychological deterioration among American soldiers—both volunteers and draftees—including drug use , post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ), mutinies and attacks by soldiers against officers and noncommissioned officers.

Between July 1966 and December 1973, more than 503,000 U.S. military personnel deserted, and a robust anti-war movement among American forces spawned violent protests, killings and mass incarcerations of personnel stationed in Vietnam as well as within the United States.

Bombarded by horrific images of the war on their televisions, Americans on the home front turned against the war as well: In October 1967, some 35,000 demonstrators staged a massive Vietnam War protest outside the Pentagon . Opponents of the war argued that civilians, not enemy combatants, were the primary victims and that the United States was supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon.

Tet Offensive

By the end of 1967, Hanoi’s communist leadership was growing impatient as well, and sought to strike a decisive blow aimed at forcing the better-supplied United States to give up hopes of success.

On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 DRV forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam.

Taken by surprise, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces nonetheless managed to strike back quickly, and the communists were unable to hold any of the targets for more than a day or two.

Reports of the Tet Offensive stunned the U.S. public, however, especially after news broke that Westmoreland had requested an additional 200,000 troops, despite repeated assurances that victory in the Vietnam War was imminent. With his approval ratings dropping in an election year, Johnson called a halt to bombing in much of North Vietnam (though bombings continued in the south) and promised to dedicate the rest of his term to seeking peace rather than reelection.

Johnson’s new tack, laid out in a March 1968 speech, met with a positive response from Hanoi, and peace talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam opened in Paris that May. Despite the later inclusion of the South Vietnamese and the NLF, the dialogue soon reached an impasse, and after a bitter 1968 election season marred by violence, Republican Richard M. Nixon won the presidency.

Vietnamization

Nixon sought to deflate the anti-war movement by appealing to a “silent majority” of Americans who he believed supported the war effort. In an attempt to limit the volume of American casualties, he announced a program called Vietnamization : withdrawing U.S. troops, increasing aerial and artillery bombardment and giving the South Vietnamese the training and weapons needed to effectively control the ground war.

In addition to this Vietnamization policy, Nixon continued public peace talks in Paris, adding higher-level secret talks conducted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beginning in the spring of 1968.

The North Vietnamese continued to insist on complete and unconditional U.S. withdrawal—plus the ouster of U.S.-backed General Nguyen Van Thieu—as conditions of peace, however, and as a result the peace talks stalled.

My Lai Massacre

The next few years would bring even more carnage, including the horrifying revelation that U.S. soldiers had mercilessly slaughtered more than 400 unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai in March 1968.

After the My Lai Massacre , anti-war protests continued to build as the conflict wore on. In 1968 and 1969, there were hundreds of protest marches and gatherings throughout the country.

On November 15, 1969, the largest anti-war demonstration in American history took place in Washington, D.C. , as over 250,000 Americans gathered peacefully, calling for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.

The anti-war movement, which was particularly strong on college campuses, divided Americans bitterly. For some young people, the war symbolized a form of unchecked authority they had come to resent. For other Americans, opposing the government was considered unpatriotic and treasonous.

As the first U.S. troops were withdrawn, those who remained became increasingly angry and frustrated, exacerbating problems with morale and leadership. Tens of thousands of soldiers received dishonorable discharges for desertion, and about 500,000 American men from 1965-73 became “draft dodgers,” with many fleeing to Canada to evade conscription . Nixon ended draft calls in 1972, and instituted an all-volunteer army the following year.

Kent State Shooting

In 1970, a joint U.S-South Vietnamese operation invaded Cambodia, hoping to wipe out DRV supply bases there. The South Vietnamese then led their own invasion of Laos, which was pushed back by North Vietnam.

The invasion of these countries, in violation of international law, sparked a new wave of protests on college campuses across America. During one, on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio , National Guardsmen shot and killed four students. At another protest 10 days later, two students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were killed by police.

By the end of June 1972, however, after a failed offensive into South Vietnam, Hanoi was finally willing to compromise. Kissinger and North Vietnamese representatives drafted a peace agreement by early fall, but leaders in Saigon rejected it, and in December Nixon authorized a number of bombing raids against targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Known as the Christmas Bombings, the raids drew international condemnation.

The Pentagon Papers

A top-secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 was published in the New York Times in 1971—shedding light on how the Nixon administration ramped up conflict in Vietnam. The report, leaked to the Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, further eroded support for keeping U.S. forces in Vietnam.

When Did the Vietnam War End?

In January 1973, the United States and North Vietnam concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations. War between North and South Vietnam continued, however, until April 30, 1975, when DRV forces captured Saigon, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City (Ho himself died in 1969).

More than two decades of violent conflict had inflicted a devastating toll on Vietnam’s population: After years of warfare, an estimated 2 million Vietnamese were killed, while 3 million were wounded and another 12 million became refugees. Warfare had demolished the country’s infrastructure and economy, and reconstruction proceeded slowly.

In 1976, Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia. Under a broad free market policy put in place in 1986, the economy began to improve, boosted by oil export revenues and an influx of foreign capital. Trade and diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. resumed in the 1990s.

In the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War would linger long after the last troops returned home in 1973. The nation spent more than $120 billion on the conflict in Vietnam from 1965-73; this massive spending led to widespread inflation, exacerbated by a worldwide oil crisis in 1973 and skyrocketing fuel prices.

Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper. The war had pierced the myth of American invincibility and had bitterly divided the nation. 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 toxic 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 men and women killed or missing in the war; later additions brought that total to 58,200.

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Introduction & Top Questions
French rule ended, Vietnam divided
The Diem regime and the Viet Cong
The U.S. role grows
The conflict deepens
The Gulf of Tonkin
The United States enters the war
Firepower comes to naught
Tet brings the war home
De-escalation, negotiation, and Vietnamization
The United States negotiates a withdrawal
The fall of South Vietnam

Why did the Vietnam War start?

Was the vietnam war technically a war, who won the vietnam war, how many people died in the vietnam war.

Why is William Westmoreland important?

Bar graph of the United States Death Toll during major events. Infogram chart.

Vietnam War

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Table Of Contents

The United States had provided funding, armaments, and training to South Vietnam’s government and military since Vietnam’s partition into the communist North and the democratic South in 1954. Tensions escalated into armed conflict between the two sides, and in 1961 U.S. President John F. Kennedy chose to expand the military aid program. The terms of this expansion included yet more funding and arms, but a key alteration was the commitment of U.S. soldiers to the region. Kennedy’s expansion stemmed in part from Cold War -era fears about the “ domino theory ”: if communism took hold in Vietnam, it would topple democracies throughout the whole of Southeast Asia , it was thought.

Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson , continued the work that Kennedy had started. Johnson raised the number of South Vietnam deployments to 23,000 U.S. soldiers by the end of his first year in office. Political turbulence there and two alleged North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. naval vessels spurred Johnson to demand the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. It granted him broad latitude in handling the struggle against communism in Southeast Asia.

By nearly every metric, the Vietnam War was, in the common sense of the word, a war . The United States committed some 550,000 troops to the Vietnam front at the height of the conflict, suffered more than 58,000 casualties, and engaged in battle after battle with communist forces in the region until its withdrawal in 1973. However, from a constitutional perspective, this conflict did not technically count as a war. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress sole authority to issue declarations of war. Since 1941 Congress has declared war only six times, all during World War II. Congress authorized troop deployment in Vietnam, but, because it did not issue a declaration of war on North Vietnam or the Viet Cong , the Vietnam War is, technically speaking, not considered a war in the United States.

The question of who won the Vietnam War has been a subject of debate, and the answer depends on the definition of victory. Those who argue that the United States won the war point to the fact that the U.S. defeated communist forces during most of Vietnam’s major battles. They also assert that the U.S. overall suffered fewer casualties than its opponents. The U.S. military reported 58,220 American casualties. Although North Vietnamese and Viet Cong casualty counts vary wildly, it is generally understood that they suffered several times the number of American casualties.

Those who argue that the United States’ opponents won the war cite the United States’ overall objectives and outcomes. The United States entered Vietnam with the principal purpose of preventing a communist takeover of the region. In that respect, it failed: the two Vietnams were united under a communist banner in July 1976. Neighbouring Laos and Cambodia similarly fell to communists. Furthermore, domestic unrest and the financial cost of war made peace—and troop withdrawals—a necessity, not a choice.

In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War : as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., lists more than 58,300 names of members of the U.S. armed forces who were killed or went missing in action. Among other countries that fought for South Vietnam, South Korea had more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 350, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.

Recent News

Vietnam War , (1954–75), a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong , against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States . Called the “American War” in Vietnam (or, in full, the “War Against the Americans to Save the Nation”), the war was also part of a larger regional conflict ( see Indochina wars ) and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China . The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. U.S. military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, and active combat units were introduced in 1965. By 1969 more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies, and advisers into the North, which in turn provided support, political direction, and regular combat troops for the campaign in the South. The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North.

The human costs of the long conflict were harsh for all involved. Not until 1995 did Vietnam release its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of U.S. armed forces who had died or were missing as a result of the war. Over the following years, additions to the list have brought the total past 58,200. (At least 100 names on the memorial are those of servicemen who were actually Canadian citizens.) Among other countries that fought for South Vietnam on a smaller scale, South Korea suffered more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 350, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.

Vietnam emerged from the war as a potent military power within Southeast Asia , but its agriculture, business, and industry were disrupted, large parts of its countryside were scarred by bombs and defoliation and laced with land mines , and its cities and towns were heavily damaged. A mass exodus in 1975 of people loyal to the South Vietnamese cause was followed by another wave in 1978 of “ boat people ,” refugees fleeing the economic restructuring imposed by the communist regime. Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in what had been its longest and most controversial war. The two countries finally resumed formal diplomatic relations in 1995.

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Vietnam War Essay Examples

Impact of the vietnam war on american culture.

The Vietnam War was a tumultuous and divisive period in American history, and its effects on American culture were profound. This essay will explore how the Vietnam War shaped and influenced various aspects of American culture, from music and film to politics and social attitudes....

The Vietnam War: the Experiences of Soldiers and Veterans

The Vietnam War was the United States attempting to help stop communism from spreading. The war left a negative effect on soldiers making them incapable of putting the ravages of the war out of their minds. This war was said to have lasted twenty years....

The Media in Australia During the Vietnam War

Vietnam War was a time of fear and panic for Australia as the ideology of communism had spread. Australia had been influenced by the fear of communism by the US and media. The media had become a big part of the perspectives during the War,...

Ceramics of the Khmer Empire: Temples for the Gods, Ceramics for the People

Remembered for being a significant part of the Vietnam War and even more so for the mass genocide perpetrated by Paul Pot and the Khmer Rouge after the defeat of the Communist regime in 1975 the Kingdom of Cambodia was a mystery to most people...

Why Tim O'brien Should Have Fought in the Vietnam War

What would you do if you were to get drafted into war? Tim O’Brien was meat factory worker, a student body president with a full ride scholarship to Harvard for graduate studies. He struggles to figure out if he should flee to Canada or go...

Vietnam War institutional Affiliation

In current conditions, the international situation remains quite complicated, and the relationship between the various regions of the world is so close that any armed conflict can turn into a large-scale war. This threat is because armed conflicts are, as a rule, a coalition in...

Vietnam War in "Living Through the Vietnam War" by Cath Senker

In the book “Living Through The Vietnam War” by Cath Senker talks about all the significance of The Vietnam War. It talks about how it was such a global significance and how it affected both sides of the conflict. It also talks about how it...

The Role of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War

Vietnam transformed into a subject of colossal scale news incorporation in the United States essentially after liberal amounts of U.S. fight troops had been centered around the war in the spring of 1965. Going before that time, the number of American newsmen in Indochina had...

Publishing of the Gulf of Tonkin and Its Impact on Johnson's Presidency Career

The Gulf of Tonkin incident took place on August 2 and 4, 1964, it is also known as the USS Maddox incident, an international confrontation of two unprovoked attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on Maddox and Turner Joy which lead to the involvement of...

The Power of Story Truth and Happening Truth in the Life of Tim O’brien

The author Tim O’Brien finds the way to tell his Vietnam War experience in his book by giving the story-truth and not happening-truth. The story-truth that never happened to him shows how he felt inside during the fighting for his life. The happening-truth seems to...

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1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Tet Offensive, My Lai Massacre, Gulf of Tonkin incident.

In general, historians have identified several different causes of the Vietnam War, including: the spread of communism during the Cold War, American containment, and European imperialism in Vietnam.

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Causes of the Vietnam War

World War II as a catalyst to the Vietnam War

United States belated involvement in Vietnam

America's military policy during the war

Americans' lack of support for the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War's military tactics

Viet Cong's deceitful disguises and innocent lives lost

Domestic response to the Vietnam War

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Works Cited

About The Author

Education About Asia: Online Archives

Vietnam’s French Colonial Background

US Objectives in Cold War Context, the Case for the War and Reasons Lost

The Face of War

The Antiwar Movement

Culture Clash: America and Vietnam

The War and America’s Cinematic Memory: Reality, Fantasy, and Remorse

Lessons learned (or not): “No more Vietnams”

Vietnam Today

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Vietnam War

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Gulf of Tonkin

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Tet Offensive

Vietnamization

My Lai Massacre

Kent State Shooting

The Pentagon Papers

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This 21‑Year‑Old College Student Designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

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Vietnam War Essay Examples

The Vietnam War: the Experiences of Soldiers and Veterans

The Media in Australia During the Vietnam War

Ceramics of the Khmer Empire: Temples for the Gods, Ceramics for the People

Why Tim O'brien Should Have Fought in the Vietnam War

Vietnam War institutional Affiliation

Vietnam War in "Living Through the Vietnam War" by Cath Senker

The Role of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War

Publishing of the Gulf of Tonkin and Its Impact on Johnson's Presidency Career

The Power of Story Truth and Happening Truth in the Life of Tim O’brien

About Vietnam War