An Analysis of the Vietnam War, focusing mainly on the American Perception of the war.

Essay by bandit1969University, Bachelor'sA, December 2005

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Vietnam

The Vietnam war started long before the 1960's and 70's involvement of the United States and Communist China. The story of Vietnam dates back to the early 20th Century and this is how most Vietnamese view Vietnam in the 20th Century. For Americans however, Vietnam is a cold period in the 1960's and 70's in which the nation was more occupied with threat of the Communist giant than with the well being of it's own people. The American version of the war is not only in the body bags of the thousands of soldiers coming back, and the crying faces of their mothers, but also in a nation divided at home. One million Vietnamese citizens were slaughtered and the nation began to grow as soul as many questioned the governments actions.

In the 1920's and 30's Vietnam was a colony of the French Empire at the very end of colonialism.

This was the European colonialism which had started with Christopher Columbus in 1492 but by the 20th Century, it had seen what was to be the last of the freed colonies. Although most Europeans nations (with the exception of England) had abandoned their dreams of being a colonial empire, France could not resist holding to what was its richest colony-Vietnam. In the 1930's and 40's Vietnamese nationalist desired what many other French colonies had achieved. Freedom and self rule. Many nationalist such as Ho-Chi Minh and others began to protest the French Rule and began to fight back against what they saw as French Tyranny. The French saw what was to be their last chance at colonialism in Vietnam and refused to release their grip. Many Vietnamese nationalists and demonstrators were massacred and their families were either killed or tortured. Such was the fate of Vietnamese revolutionary Vo Nguyen...