The Vietnam War
Just Kids: The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War, also known as The Second Indochina War, lasted from November 1st 1955 to the fall of Saigon on April 30th 1975. The Communist regime, the Vietnam People’s Army of North Vietnam used traditional war tactics when battling the French and American backed South Vietnamese forces. The Viet Cong, a lightly armed South Vietnamese communist common front directed by the North, fought a vicious guerilla war against the anti-communist forces of the South.
The United States felt it quite necessary to support the French effort against North Vietnam, seeing this war as part of the larger containment effort directed against the spread of communism. The U.S. presidents of the Cold War era felt that if they failed to take action in Vietnam, it would inevitably lead to “critical psychological, political and economic consequences” for U.S. interests in the region. Moreover, “in the absence of effective and timely counteraction”, the “loss” of any single country in Southeast Asia would have “probably lead to relatively swift submission to or an alignment with communism by the remaining countries of this group.” This idea became known as the domino theory. The government of North Vietnam on the other hand, along with the Viet Cong, saw South Vietnam as a “puppet state” and sought to reunify Vietnam under a single government.
Throughout the early 1960’s, the U.S. heavily bombed Laos and Cambodia in an effort to eradicate the Viet Cong. U.S. involvement further increased in 1968, after the Tet Offensive. Eventually, due to the extreme and ubiquitous unpopularity of U.S. involvement, the process known as Vietnamization began and U.S. troops were gradually withdrawn. U.S. involvement finally ceased in 1975. A year later, Vietnam was reunited. The staggering death tolls of this war clearly explain why it was so unpopular to the American public, as 58,220 U.S. service members were killed in the conflict. This war left an indelible blemish on the presidency of Lyndon Johnson who refused to run for a second term in office. It is also regarded by many as the only war ever lost by the U.S.
