Week 14 - Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is known as one of the more memorable conflicts in the history of the United States in which our country's involvement played a huge role in how the war played out. Albeit the Vietnam War happening more than fifty years ago, the effects live on up until present day and brought attention to the consequences of a country's intervention in the political affairs of another country. All the years of guerrilla warfare in the thickets, jungles, and villages of Vietnam ended with a North Vietnamese victory and a Vietnam unification. People of all sorts, American and Vietnamese, died by the hundred-thousands in the war and the country still has issues trying to regroup after the damages to the land and the government after the war. The American government became involved in the war effort to prevent the spread of communism within Vietnam. The US was involved in the push for Vietnamese independence, but the idea was not to get its military involved in the war. Historians believe that the Geneva Settlement is the reason for continued American involvement in the  international affair. Some believe that America should have had signed the conference which would have split Vietnam into two; the North which was communist and the South which was not. However, historians also believe that America enforced its right not to sign because they did not want communism falling to the Vietnamese. While the actions carried out by US troops were justified by the situation at the time, the war is looked at as being insignificant due to the fact that the war was so costly in terms of both the lives of humans and money. The overall consensus pertaining to the effort is that there is no true winner in this war because of the drastic repercussions that each side had obtained through ten long years of battle. America called for the removal of its troops in Vietnam and ended the war on its own accord. The Paris Peace Accord followed soon after and 're-birthed' the political life in Vietnam, but the accord could not wipe away from the destruction and hardships that plagued the Vietnamese people and the land after the war had ended. The Vietnamese war was a decade-long battle that could have been avoided or at least shortened if both sides were able to handle matters in a peaceful manner and move forward with their negotiations instead of orchestrating military attacks against one other to solve their problems.

Image information: Picture by LINEAGOTICA1944.

Source: Kissinger, Henry. Ending the Vietnam War: A history of America's involvement in and extrication from the Vietnam War. Simon and Schuster, 2003.