vietnam war

Vietnam war

The Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle between nationalist forces attempting to unify the country of Vietnam under a communist government and the United States (with the aid of the South Vietnamese) attempting to prevent the spread of communism. Engaged in a war that many viewed as having no way to win, U.S. leaders lost the American public's support for the war. Since the end of the war, the Vietnam War has become a benchmark for what not to do in all future U.S. foreign conflicts. The war began in 1954 (though conflict in the region stretched back to the mid-1940s), after the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, and continued against the backdrop of an intense Cold War between two global superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War; more than half were Vietnamese civilians. By 1969, at the peak of U.S. involvement in the war, more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were involved in the Vietnam conflict. Growing opposition to the war in the United States led to bitter divisions among Americans, both before and after President Richard Nixon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. In 1975, communist forces seized control of Saigon, ending the Vietnam War, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.

Vietnam War: U.S. Intervention Begins

With the Cold War intensifying, the United States hardened its policies against any allies of the Soviet Union, and by 1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had pledged his firm support to Diem and South Vietnam. With training and equipment from American military and police, Diem's security forces cracked down on Viet Minh sympathizers in the south, whom he derisively called Viet Cong (or Vietnamese Communist), arresting some 100,000 people, many of whom were tortured and executed. By 1957, the Viet Cong and other opponents of Diem's repressive regime began fighting back with attacks on government officials and other targets, and by 1959 they had begun engaging South Vietnamese Army forces in firefights.

In December 1960, Diem's opponents within South Vietnam--both communist and non-communist--formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) to organize resistance to the regime. Though the NLF claimed to be autonomous and that most of its members were non-Communist, many in Washington assumed it was a puppet of Hanoi. A team sent by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to report on conditions in South Vietnam advised a build-up of American military, economic and technical aid in order to help confront the Viet Cong threat. Working under the "domino theory," which held that if one Southeast Asian country fell to communism, many would follow, Kennedy increased U.S. aid, though he stopped short of committing to a large-scale military intervention. By 1962, the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam had reached some 9,000 troops, compared with fewer than 800 during the 1950s.

Strategy of Attrition in Vietnam

In contrast to the air attacks on North Vietnam, the U.S.-South Vietnamese war effort in the south was fought on the ground, largely under the command of General Westmoreland, in coordination with the government of General Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon. In general, U.S. military forces in the region pursued a policy of attrition, aiming to kill as many enemy troops as possible rather than trying to secure territory. By 1966, large areas of South Vietnam had been designated as "free-fire zones," from which all innocent civilians were supposed to have evacuated and only enemy remained. Heavy bombing by B-52 aircraft or shelling made these zones uninhabitable, as refugees poured into camps in designated safe areas near Saigon and other cities. Even as the body count (at times exaggerated by U.S. and South Vietnamese authorities) mounted steadily, DRV and Viet Cong troops refused to stop fighting, encouraged by the fact that they could easily reoccupy lost territory. Meanwhile, supported by aid from China and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam strengthened its air defenses.

By November 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. As the war stretched on, some soldiers came to mistrust their government's reasons for keeping them there, as well as Washington's claims that the war was being won. The later years of the war saw increased physical and psychological deterioration among American soldiers, including drug use, mutinies and attacks by soldiers against officers and noncommissioned officers.

Bombarded by horrific images of the war on their televisions, Americans on the home front turned against the war as well: In October 1967, some 35,000 demonstrators staged a mass antiwar protest outside the Pentagon. Opponents of the war argued that civilians, not enemy combatants, were the primary victims and that the United States was supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon.

Legacy of the Vietnam War

In January 1973, the United States and North Korea concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations. War between North and South Vietnam continued, however, until April 30, 1975, when DRV forces captured Saigon, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City (Ho himself died in 1969). The long conflict had affected an immense majority of the country’s population; in eight years of warfare, an estimated 2 million Vietnamese died, while 3 million were wounded and another 12 million became refugees. War had decimated the country's infrastructure and economy, and reconstruction proceeded slowly. In 1976, Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia. Under a broad free market policy put in place in 1986, the economy began to improve, boosted by oil export revenues and an influx of foreign capital. Trade and diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. were resumed in the 1990s.

In the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War would linger long after the last troops returned home in 1973. The nation spent more than $120 billion on the conflict in Vietnam from 1965-73; this massive spending led to widespread inflation, exacerbated by a worldwide oil crisis in 1973 and skyrocketing fuel prices. Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper. The war had pierced the myth of American invincibility, and had bitterly divided the nation. Many returning veterans faced negative reactions from both opponents of the war (who viewed them as having killed innocent civilians) and its supporters (who saw them as having lost the war), along with physical damage including the effects of exposure to the harmful chemical herbicide Agent Orange, millions of gallons of which had been dumped by U.S. planes on the dense forests of Vietnam. In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, D.C. On it were inscribed the names of 57,939 American armed forces killed or missing during the war; later additions brought that total to 58,200.

the influence of the vietnam war in the cinematographic industry

Although initially the Vietnam War called not overly attention of the film industry in the eighties film production flourished about outstanding games like Apocalypse Now or Platoon. This attention of Hollywood contrasts with the low interest shown by French cinema to its defeat a generation antes.22Unlike the historical analysis and even the United States itself, the film itself was able to assimilate the American defeat, according to Marc Leppson.19 Thus passed the patriotic and not credible The Green Berets, which shows some delivered members of the U.S. Special Forces in their fight against the evil communists, ignoring the terrible tortures recounted the original book, a most critical 48 Apocalypse Now, who preferred to reach astronomical budgets rather than surrender to Pentagon censorship in exchange for their helicópteros.48 Meanwhile, Oliver Stone made between 1986 and 1993 three works on these events: Platoon, Born on the 4th of July and Heaven and Earth. Platoon won four Oscars and left some U.S. veterans misplaced because it portrayed them as heroes or (appears fragging, rape girls, the murders, the burning of villages), but also shows very tough situations that look obligated to accept for their poverty, and they are not all the same and there are heroes like Sergeant Elias Grodin, played by Willem Dafoe. Born July 4 only won two Oscars, one for best director, but swept the Golden Globes In Heaven and Earth, based on the books of Le Ly Hayslip, tried to approach Vietnamese vision emphasizing conflict hardships endured by a young Vietnamese which, in turn, became narrator of the film in a version that seeks neutral standpoint, recounting the horrors and atrocities committed by both bandos.53Another classic on the subject is Full Metal Jacket (known in Spain as Full Metal Jacket and Latin America face war as Born to Kill) by Stanley Kubrick. There was also The Hamburger Hill of John Irvin.54Certainly the different studios have created ribbons of all kinds. In this way perhaps more fictional cinematic vision of this conflict is that given by Rambo, a hero who, in the words of Marc Leppson, resembles both a Vietnam veteran as a policeman Superman for his great unreality. But other titles provide analysis closer to reality as shown by Francis Ford Coppola in Gardens of Stone, where mature impulsive veterans tell the boy that this war can not win and he will responds to forget their firepower and its high-tech bows and arrows against the Vietnamese, a clear metaphor for one of the causes of the defeat, think you can beat an underdeveloped people based only bombas.22In the 2007 movie directed by Julie Taymor, Across the Universe are located in New York and anti-war movements primarily include youth to see friends and family to go against their will to Vietnam.An absence in many of these films is the Vietnamese position, with few exceptions like showing Vietnam and Australia's involvement in the villages Vietnamese actions. It was in 2002 when it opened We were soldiers (We Were Soldiers in Spain, we were heroes in Latin America) and delve a little deeper into life in the tunnels with northern soldiers.