vietnam war
The Vietnam War (1955-1975) is probably the most problematic of all American wars. First, it is morally ambiguous. It was both a war against communism and a war to suppress nationalist self-determination. Second, it can be (and was) very confusing. American objectives were not always well defined. As a result, US policy often meandered: the US would "Americanize" the war only to "Vietnamize" it five years later. Third, things in the Vietnam War were often not what they seemed. In the name of protecting democracy, the US propped up Diem's dictatorial regime. The American media sometimes represented tactical victories as terrible defeats. The US military often kept very accurate body counts of the number of vietkong killed without any clear method of determining which Vietnamese really were Vietcong and which were svn allies.To attempt to make sense of US involvement in Vietnam, the war must be considered in a larger context: the Cold War. The US and USSR were in the midst of a struggle over spheres of influence, each wanting to exert cultural, political, and ideological control over various regions of the globe; part of the effort to gain spheres of influence was a complementary effort to stop the other country from gaining any
In the Vietnam War (1955-1975), the US and South Vietnam ultimately failed to prevent North Vietnam from unifying both halves of Vietnam under communist leadership. In the midst of the Cold War, the US, operating under a belief known as the Domino Theory, feared that with the "fall" of North Vietnam to Communism, all of Southeast Asia might fall, setting off a sort of Communist chain reaction. American military advisors, technological superiority, massive bombing campaigns and combat troops were unable to crush the Vietnamese communists, whose guerilla tactics proved remarkably resilient. Within a year of the North Vietnam victory over the French, the US began to offer support to the anti-Communist ngo dinh diem helping him to take control of the South Vietnamese government, which he subsequently declared a republic. The American press therefore played a tremendous and hitherto unseen role in the outcome of the war. Public opinion, extremely important in any war, turned decisively against US involvement in Vietnam by the end of the 1960s. Unfortunately for the US, while the US backed South Vietnamese government was weak and corrupt, the North Vietnamese government was a fiercely proud and independent group of nationalists willing to fight endlessly against foreign control for Vietnamese unification. When the US did send troops into the territory in 1965, they were facing a far different situation than any other up to that point in the Cold War. Following the successful Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, antiwar protest fueled the growth of a vibrant youth counterculture. The war had roots in the First Indochina War (1945-1954), in which the vietminh (Vietnamese communist-nationalists) defeated their French colonial rulers and secured the independence of North Vietnam as a communist nation, with Emperor Bao Dai remaining as leader of South Vietnam. Because of this media portrayal, the Tet Offensive ended up being a decisive victory for the Vietnamese communists. Coupled with the US mismanagement of the situation and the simple fact that American boys were dying on foreign soil against an enemy that did not threaten America directly, the opinions, videos, and photographs of the American press helped to turn American public opinion against the war. Vietnam in specific, and Southeast Asia in general, functioned as a prospective sphere in the minds of both the US and USSR. in his effort to wrest control of South Vietnam from bao dai the US supported a series of weak and corrupt proxy governments in South Vietnam in order to prevent the extension of Communist influence in indochina.
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Acceptance Essays
