the ultimate lesson that should have been learned from Vietnam

After the Second World War Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to the United States government seeking their help in helping Vietnam gain its democracy, he was sure that America with its history would help him out since they had common goals, his main fear however was that Vietnam was so small and so far away that the United States might never both with it, how different history in the end turned out to be!

France a year later in 1946 begun the long French war in Indochina, for war torn France it sacrificed a mass amount of man power and resources, helped by the US the war went on until 1954 fighting communist forces until the French were defeated at the fortress of Dien Bien Phu, they surrendered and Vietnam was divided between a communist north and a free south, but there was to be no peace for Vietnam.

During the Eisenhower years Nixon became one of the first hawks and had even suggested three tactical nuclear warheads be dropped against the North Vietnamese to end this, Eisenhower responded by stating;

"The sun is still shining, Dien Bien Phu is not the end of the world."

During his time as president John F. Kennedy he tried to make it their war, he stated they could advise it but they would have to fight it, he sent some 16,000 advisers to Vietnam early in his presidency and shortly before he was killed he vowed to bring 1,000 men home before the end of 1963 and all of them by 1965.

Kennedy never wanted a war stating to put men and machine into the jungles of Southeast Asia with no clear sign of victory would be self destructive since they'd end up fighting an enemy that was everywhere and at the same time nowhere.



However when he was assassinated Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president, he changed Kennedy's policy four days later and after the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident in which case was incorrectly reported as a possible attack now proven to have been a lie saw Johnson signing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, more bombs were dropped on North Vietnam than on Western Europe in all of World War II.



This didn't work as Kennedy had said it wouldn't and Johnson begun to commit ground troops into this hopeless struggle, Kennedy was right, it was self destructive and by 1968 the Tet Offensive was launched by the North Vietnamese.



As a military offensive, it failed. As a psychological and political tactic to weaken U.S. support for the Vietnam War, it worked spectacularly well.

That same year was a very bad year for the United States!

* Johnson announced he would not run for re-election.
* Richard M. Nixon was elected president.
* Troop deployments in Vietnam peaked 550,000.

Nixon's contribution to the Vietnam War was the process of Vietnamization, or the replacement of U.S. combat troops by the troops of the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN).

By 1973 US forces were pulling out of the country and by 1975 as the last forces left Saigon with hundreds of South Vietnamese civilians as North Vietnamese troops rolled into Saigon, defeating the Republic of South Vietnam, unifying the country and thus ending the Vietnam War.

The US had lost the war that they had fought for over a decade, 58,000 American soldiers were lost and over 3,000,000 Vietnamese were killed.



After leaving Saigon the US embassy there and several other businesses were looted, more than 200,000 South Vietnamese government officials, military officers, and soldiers were sent to "reeducation camps", where torture, disease and malnutrition were widespread.

Not only had they lost the war but if they had neither listened to Kennedy or responded to Ho Chi Minh in 1945 things would have been different and better for millions of people across the world.

But the lesson that should have been learned, (primarily that it's almost impossible to win a war) is that first look back at history before repeating it and past mistakes, because after quite a bit of repetition it starts to get boring!