American Invovment in Vietnam
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In American History, the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies were extremely turbulent and controversial times. Protest rights were being tested and occasionally suppressed, new moral and political values began to develop, and the Vietnam War dominated the twenty-year period. Vietnam invited many young activist people to begin a huge movement of anti-war protesting denouncing the war, the government, and even the soldiers who were picked against their will to fight. Reasons for American entry into the Vietnam War are controversial, and everyone has a different opinion on why we got into the conflict. Multiple reasons contributed to the entry in Vietnam from support of allies who were fighting their battles, to the fact that the American Government felt that they were responsible to stop the spread of communism led America to fight a war that would define an era.
In order to rally support for a war, often something has to happen to get the American people behind the government. In World War Two it was Pearl Harbor, and in Vietnam it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident. On August 2nd, The U.S.S Ticonderoga sank a North Vietnamese ship while on a patrol. Two days later, a U.S ship called the Maddox,
had assumed it was under attack, and began to display its firepower into the night for hours hitting nothing. An interview with a pilot of the Maddox said, “There was nothing but dark sea, and American firepower.” Years later the incident was revealed essentially as a way to rouse the American support for the war cause, and it is known now that the incident was a form of propaganda, but it served its purpose as the publics reason for supporting the war, and the public reason for entry into the Vietnam War.
Another reason for American entry into the Vietnam War was the commitment that had formerly been made by the French and the Americans into the fight or the support of the fight in Vietnam for the French colony. The French had been fighting for an Indochina colony after World War Two to benefit them, but at the same time had been struggling with domestic costs and issues. American support to the French in the form of millions of dollars to support the war failed, but officially committed to Americans to a cause in Vietnam in the American governments eyes. In 1954, at Dienbienphu the French military forces came into conflict with the North Vietnamese forces, called the Vietminh after their leader Ho Chi Minh, being defeated and leaving the Communist Vietnamese the victors. The French negotiations left a border at the 17th parallel making North Vietnam the communist half of the country while the Southern half was the democratic portion. An election was set up to decide whether the government was to become communist or democratic. American officials would not stand for this agreement realizing that it would fall to the communist, so they replaced the French in South
Vietnam and began to train the South Vietnamese Army. This would soon lead us into the actual cause of the American Entry into the Vietnam War.
This War took place during some on the more intense times of the Cold War. Paranoia had already set in for the American Democratic Government and the domino theory was in effect heavily for the leaders of America. Communism quickly became the number one enemy of the American Government and it was made known that the United States would do anything in its power to try