The defeat solidifies the end of French rule in Indochina. President Dwight D. This so-called domino theory guides U.
The agreement also stipulates that elections are to be held within two years to unify Vietnam under a single democratic government.
These elections never happen. Kennedy sends helicopters and Green Berets to South Vietnam and authorizes secret operations against the Viet Cong. The South Vietnamese are overcome despite their four-to-one advantage and the technical and planning assistance of U. Eight people, including children, are killed.
Between and , 12 different governments take the lead in South Vietnam as military coups replace one government after another. Lyndon B. Johnson becomes president. Two U. Meanwhile, China sends several engineering troops to North Vietnam to assist in building critical defense infrastructure. The same month, U. The six-day operation diffuses the Viet Cong regiment, although it would quickly rebuild. Onlookers encourage him to release his month-old baby daughter, whom he is holding, before he is engulfed in flames.
Both sides declare victory. The United States forces suffer some 1, casualties. For 77 days, the marines and South Vietnamese forces fend off the siege. Attacks are carried out in more than cities and outposts across South Vietnam, including Hue and Saigon, and the U. Was our western sway over the world, in its final American embodiment, coming to an end? The drawing of such parallels was commonplace — a kind of self-romanticisation that seems distasteful in retrospect. Vietnamese people, North and South, were at an extraordinary moment in their history, and we were sitting around misquoting Edward Gibbon.
We also tried, of course, to report what was happening in the new Vietnam. Some of it was under our noses, in the very hotels in which we were staying, as staff were summoned to various kinds of re-education meetings.
Hoc tap , as it was called, would eventually touch almost everyone. Former officers were called in, grade by grade. Was there to be, at least for a while, a separate southern state?
What role would be played by the provisional revolutionary government, which had been such a feature of wartime propaganda? Not for long, and very little, were the answers, but our time was so short and the new authorities so opaque in their workings that we had only slender notions of what was going on. We had a sense that we — or rather the countries we represented — had been demoted, even if, with one part of our minds, we saw that as a long-deserved comeuppance.
That feeling was reinforced by the fact that, while we journalists were not prisoners, we were not free agents either. We could not decide for ourselves whether we would stay in Vietnam or leave.
We admired them and their discipline — what we thought was their revolutionary purity — but something about their unbending attitude was disconcerting. It seemed to rule out the possibility of a national reconciliation based on even limited compromise.
It was sometimes galling to be as excluded as we felt we were. Most of the small group of British correspondents holed up during the day in a spacious villa belonging to a British bank. It came with a big, good-natured dog, who was very pleased to see people, as dogs often are. One evening a North Vietnamese patrol arrived, posing some polite questions about why we were there, but often looking pointedly at the dog. A little while later, we British, together with most of the or so journalists who had stayed, were politely thrown out of the country and put on a Russian Antonov passenger aircraft to Vientiane in Laos.
The Americans sent in marines to rescue the crew, who, it turned out, were probably not in any danger. The operation then somehow got ludicrously pumped up as a counterweight to the humiliation of 30 April in Vietnam and the earlier fall of Pnomh Penh.
In reality it was a botched and stupid affair in which the Americans lost a lot of people while attacking Khmer Rouge forces who — in a foretaste of the future — were in fact preparing to defend what they saw as their territory against the new masters of South Vietnam. In its poor intelligence, wasteful firepower and bloody confusion, it encapsulated much that had been wrong about the war that had just ended.
The Mayaguez affair was the first indication that you could take the United States out of Vietnam, but you could not take Vietnam out of the United States. In the decades since, the US has never ceased to fight the war. It continued to fight it, in the most immediate sense, by vindictively isolating the new Vietnam economically and politically.
This it later took to a monstrous extreme by effectively favouring the Khmer Rouge regime remnants who were resisting the new Vietnamese-imposed government in Pnomh Penh. The two countries are now almost as friendly as Ho Chi Minh had hoped they would be in , when his appeals to the US for help in achieving independence from France went unheard. But if the US has finally stopped chastising Vietnam itself, the war still goes on in other ways. Everything the US has done in the world since then has been conditioned by its fear of the consequences of trying to reassert itself militarily — and by its compulsion to do so.
The fear is of another Vietnam, another quagmire, another debacle. The compulsion, though, constantly seeks out other places where something like Vietnam can be taken on again, but this time won, cleanly and conclusively. The US has sought this compensatory victory again and again, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The war never went away in America, at the most fundamental level, because it became a test of how Americans saw their country. The young regular army officers who served in Vietnam returned home determined to create a new army. It would be a professional, all-volunteer force, and thus less subject to public pressure over casualties. It would have technology that could replace boots on the ground. But if there had to be boots on the ground, the new army would have skills in counter-insurgency of a kind it had lacked in Vietnam.
Finally, it would not go to war without a guarantee that there would be no constraints on the full use of its resources — constraints that, in the view of many soldiers, had cheated the US army of victory in Vietnam.
It was all in vain. The US public proved almost as sensitive to the deaths of volunteers as it had been to those of draftees. New technology created as many problems as it solved. Counter-insurgency strategies were still ineffective.
And the guarantees that the use of force would not be constrained simply did not happen, because that is not how governments function.
At least three different Vietnam wars have competed for American attention, and for space on the heavily loaded shelves of books about the conflict.
In a second, it did win, because its aims of containing China and Russia and preventing a domino-fall of other south-east Asian countries into the communist sphere were actually achieved. The Davis Station in Saigon was named for him. Vietnam Veterans are less likely to be in prison — only one-half of one percent of Vietnam Veterans have been jailed for crimes.
As of April 14, , there are 1, Americans still unaccounted for from the Vietnam War across Vietnam 1, , Laos , Cambodia 49 , and China 7. The average age of the 58, killed in Vietnam was Event date is used instead of declared dead date for some of those who were listed as missing in action. Fact : Mortality studies show that 9, is a better estimate.
After that initial post-service period, Vietnam veterans were no more likely to die from suicide than non-Vietnam veterans. Sociologists Charles C. Black fatalities amounted to 12 percent of all Americans killed in Southeast Asia, a figure proportional to the number of blacks in the U. Fact : Servicemen who went to Vietnam from well-to-do areas had a slightly elevated risk of dying because they were more likely to be pilots or infantry officers.
Vietnam Veterans were the best educated forces our nation had ever sent into combat. None of the enlisted grades have an average age of less than The average man who fought in World War II was 26 years of age. Fact : The American military was not defeated in Vietnam. The American military did not lose a battle of any consequence.
From a military standpoint, it was almost an unprecedented performance. Fact : The domino theory was accurate. Without that commitment, Communism would have swept all the way to the Malacca Straits that is south of Singapore and of great strategic importance to the free world.
If you ask people who live in these countries that won the war in Vietnam, they have a different opinion from the American news media. The Vietnam War was the turning point for Communism. The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about days of combat in one year thanks to the mobility of the helicopter.
One out of every 10 Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh, control the North. Kennedy beats Richard Nixon in the U.
Johnson is vice president. June 11, Self immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in Saigon sparks outrage around the world and brings attention to the developing conflict.
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