Very Rough Beginning of Vietnam War History (comments greatly appreciated)

“I want to put Vietnam in context.

We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who partic-ipated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made out decisions in light of those values.

Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

-Robert McNamara, United States secretary of defense (1960-1967)

The Vietnam War was the greatest tragedy in America’s history since the Civil War of 1861-65. From 1965 to 1975, American ground troops fought and died in the jungles of southeast Asia against Vietnamese communists intent on unifying North and South Vietnam into one independent nation. 58,000 American military personnel died in the struggle to prevent the communists from doing so, along with almost two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians; the North Vietnamese alone lost more than 700,000 people in the conflict. To put that number in perspective, it would be the equivalent of the United States losing ten million lives in a war. Young men, most no older than 19 or 20, were chosen by a lottery to go kill and be killed in the alien environment of Southeast Asia. Those that made it back home were often scarred, emotionally and physically, by their experiences in “the bush,” and found it difficult to transition back into the lives they were so suddenly pulled away from. To make matters worse, the America they returned to was tearing itself apart, as the youth of the country revolted against both the war and the older generation of Americans, their parents’ generation, which they held responsible for the war. National Guardsmen were sent onto American college campuses, including UC Berkeley and Colombia in New York, to put down anti-war demonstrations. Protesters camped outside of the White House and chanted, within earshot of President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”

In the end, America’s war effort failed, and South Vietnam fell to the communists. On the 29^th of April, 1975, as North Vietnamese forces prepared to take the city of Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, the American military performed its final mission of the war. What unfolded was a scene of utter chaos and tragedy, and the American people witnessed it all on television. Thousands of South Vietnamese frantically stormed the gates of the American embassy in Saigon in a desperate attempt to escape the communists. The scene was unnerving, like something out of a disaster movie. Over packed helicopters took off from makeshift landing zones, often the roofs of buildings within the embassy compound, full to the brim with human cargo. US Marines and South Vietnamese soldiers guarded the landing zones to make sure that only authorized personnel boarded the escape helicopters. In two days more than 6,000 American citizens and South Vietnamese families were airlifted out of Saigon to nearby aircraft carriers by a fleet of American helicopters. After 10 years of fighting, America’s long war in Vietnam was over, and it was clear to all that the United States, the superpower that stood victorious in two World Wars, was leaving the battlefield defeated. What were we doing there in the first place? The answer begins with America’s victory against Japan to end World War Two.