Examining the Vietnam War: Causes and Impact

VIETNAM WAR

US History

4th Quarter

Paul Morris

May 5, 2017

The Vietnam War started on November 1,1955 and ended when Saigon was defeated on April 30,1975. It occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and was fought between North Vietnam and the government of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam. The Vietnam War was also known as the Second Indochina War and in Vietnam it was called the American War. The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies and the South Vietnamese army was supported by the United States, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and other anti-communist allies. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy

The communist side launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar New Year) that same year in the late night hours on January 30th. It was the largest military operation conducted by either side up to that point in the war. 70,000 Vietnamese troops under General Vo Nguyen Giap’s command coordinated a series of brutal attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. The initial attacks stunned both the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies, causing them to temporarily lose control of several cities however, they quickly regrouped, beat back the attacks, and inflicted heavy casualties on North Vietnamese forces. The Tet Offensive failed in its goal of overthrowing the South Vietnamese government however, it did become the turning point of the war because it persuaded many U.S. citizens that its government's claims of progress toward winning the war were false. In the U.S. a large anti-Vietnam War movement developed. Horrific images of the war on television caused Americans on the home front to turn against the war. In October 1967 35,000 demonstrators staged an antiwar protest outside the Pentagon. Adversaries of the war argued that civilians, not enemy combatants, were the primary victims of the war and that the U.S. was supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon. This caused President Johnson’s approval rates to drop in the U.S. and because it was an election year he called a stop to bombing in North Vietnam in

Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 to 3.8 million and 3 million others were wounded and another 12 million became refugees. Approximately 240,000 to 300,000 Cambodians, 20,000 to 62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the battle, and an additional 1,626 remain missing in action. In the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War lingered long after the last troops returned home in 1973. The nation spent more than $120 billion on the Vietnam War from 1965-73. Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper due to Americans finding out that the U.S. was not invincible and by becoming a bitter divided nation. Many returning veterans faced negative reactions from antagonists of the war who viewed them as having killed innocent civilians as well as the supporters of the war who saw them as having lost the war. Veterans also experienced physical damage from the effects of exposure to the harmful chemical herbicide “Agent Orange.” In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, D.C. The names of 57,939 American armed forces killed or missing during the war were inscribed on it and it was later updated to bring the total to