A Pyrrhic Victory Is Defined, Per Merriam-Webster, As “A

“In August of 1964, in response to the American and GVN espionage along its coast, the DRV launched a local and controlled attack against C. Turner Joy and the U.S.S. Maddox , two American ships on call in the Gulf of Tonkin” (Brigham 2). This resulted in the United States government giving Lyndon Johnson the ability to make war under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. President Johnson then gave orders to perform air raids on Northern Vietnam pushing the United States further into the war. Compared to 1962 when only 9,000 soldiers supported the South Vietnamese, by June 1965 82,000 soldiers occupied the country. The number only continued to rise exponentially, and by 1966 370,000 soldiers had been sent in to prop their South Vietnam allies. President Richard Nixon withdrew American soldiers from Vietnam and as part of the “vietnamization” of the war. Over and 60,000 American soldiers had been lost in a war to preserve the status quo, not to win.

In 1961 the worst war ever fought by America had just started. The Vietnamese of the north also known as the Viet Cong had invaded the south to take control of the entire country. America and other democratic countries felt the spread of communism to this country would be a stepping-stone for other communistic countries around the world, also known as the Domino Effect. America, as cocky as they were, invaded Vietnam to help the southern Vietnamese. Although America is one of the most powerful countries in the world, it extremely underestimated the dedication of their enemy. Backed by China and the USSR, the Viet Cong were a determined and very tough enemy. The Vietnam War as a whole was a terrible act by the US government. Vietnam was

The Vietnam war, also called the Indochina War , may be said to have started in 1957 when Communist-led rebels began mounting terrorists attacks against the government of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The rebel forces, commonly called the Vietcong, were later aided by troops of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). American combat personnel were formally committed to the defense of the South in 1965. An agreement calling for a ceasefire was signed in January 1973, and by March the few remaining U.S. millitary personnel in Vietnam were withdrawn. However, the war between the two Vietnamese sides persisted inconclusively for two additional years before South Vietnamese resistance

The civilians retaliated by aiding the Viet Cong eventually joining them. This continued over the span of the war thereby creating an ever-increasing number of People fighting against the Americans.

The Battle of Khe Sanh was located in northwest South Vietnam near the Laotian border. Marines built a garrison next to the Army camp in 1966. In the fall of 1967, the

The Vietnam War and active United States involvement in the war began in 1954, although the ongoing conflict in the region had stretched back several decades. It wasn’t until 1965 that President Johnson, with the support of the general public, decided to deploy US combat forces to battle in Vietnam. Eventually, 82,000 combat troops were stationed in Vietnam, and soon military leaders were calling for 175,000 more men by the end of 1965 to help aid the struggling South Vietnamese army. Disregarding

These attacks were not has accuracy as they hope it could be by dropping napalm on the entire area hoping to hit your targets. Many innocent civilians died during these attacks, which only helped to increase the resentment towards the military officers. Military strategies like Operation Rolling Thunder were implemented to try to limit the impact of guerilla warfare, where they bomb the region but at same time seriously limiting the United States chancing of win the war because it look like the United States was aggression and conquest nation. Its look like United States was more concerned with fighting the rebels than protecting the South Vietnamese people. Who they claimed to protect but at the same time three million people were killed and

Preceding Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive against the United States which “signified the beginning of the end of U.S involvement in the Vietnam War” (CNN). Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, “was a holiday during which the North and South had previously observed an informal truce” (CNN). However, on January 31st, 1968, a “coordinated attack by Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese targeted 36 major cities and towns in South Vietnam” (CNN). Despite the heavy casualties, “North Vietnam achieved a strategic victory with the Tet Offensive, as the attacks marked a turning point in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the slow, painful American withdrawal from the region” (“Tet Offensive”). This attack was a crucial turning point in the war because the ambush resulted in Americans withdrawing their support of the war. Before the offensive, the U.S.

On March 29 in 1973, the last American troops left Vietnam, leaving thousands of missing behind. The same day, a few hundreds of war prisoners were released in Hanoi. Within a couple of months, the war between the North and the South was restored and it was soon apparent that the communists are more unified and have a military dominance. In Cambodia and Laos, where the fights were not so strong, the communist victory also seemed unavoidable. In March 1975 the northern Vietnam commenced a complete military invasion in the South. Southern president Thieu asked Washington for help, but the democratic majority in the Congress refused and on March 30, the Americans could watch on TV how North-Vietnamese tanks enter Saigon, which was soon renamed to Ho-Chi-Min’s town. Scenes in American embassy in Saigon, where thousands of scared Vietnamese fought for places on board of last American helicopters were a sad ending of the biggest American foreign policy catastrophe.

North Vietnamese forces under the command of Senior General Van Tien Dung began their final attack on Saigon, which was commanded by Gerneral Nguyen Van Toan on April 29th, with a heavy artillery bombardment"

“No other battle of the entire war produced a better count or kill ratio then that claimed by the Americans at the battle Khe Sanh”, (Pisor, 1982). On the Morning of January 21 1968, the Marines of Khe Sanh Combat Base woke to fighting and bombardment in one of the longest and most intense battle of the Vietnam War. It was the first of a seventy-seven day battle that later is titled as the Tet Offensive. The People’s Army of North Vietnam began a massive artillery strike on their combat outpost. Six thousand United States Marines, together with their Vietnamese allies struggled to hold off four Battalions of Northern Vietnamese soldiers. This battle would later prove what our artillerymen already knew: there is no-obstacle, or force that

In earlier years, the occasion had been the event for a casual agreement in South Vietnam's long-running clash with North Vietnam and their comrade southern partners, mockingly known as Viet Cong. In mid-1968, on the other hand, the North Vietnamese military commandant General Vo Nguyen Giap picked January 31 as the event for a composed hostile of shock assaults went for softening the stalemate. Giap accepted that the assaults would result in Armed force of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) strengths to fall and incite discontent and defiance among the South Vietnamese populace, driving them to ascend against the administration in Saigon. Furthermore, Giap accepted the union between South Vietnam and the United States was temperamental; he trusted the offensive would drive the last wedge in the middle of them and persuade American soldiers to surrender their resistance of South Vietnam. After midnight on Wednesday January 31, the North Vietnamese propelled the Tet hostile at Nha Trang. About 80,000 North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong made part in this wide move, taking the fight from the wildernesses to the urban areas. The offensive would bear on for quite a long time and is seen as a noteworthy defining moment for the American state of mind toward the

The North Vietnamese Communist leadership's ability to reassess and adapt during the Vietnam War was reflected in how well they combined guerilla and conventional operations to achieve their strategic goal of unifying Vietnam under communist rule. Throughout the conflict, the Viet Cong (VC) were employed to conduct guerilla operations while North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and VC "main force" units were used to transition to conventional operations. Guerilla operations enabled Hanoi to inflict a steady flow of casualties on US forces which increased anti-war sentiment in America. NVA and VC main force conventional operations reinforced the US Army's conventional approach to the fight which caused the Americans to alienate the people of South

In 1958, Communist-led guerrillas, eventually known as the Viet Cong, began to battle the government of the South Vietnamese. The United States then sent 2,000 military advisors t support South Vietnam’s government. This number grew to 16,3000 by 1963. The military force slowly deteriorated. By 1963 the fertile Mekong Delta was lost to the overpowering Viet Cong. The war rose in 1965, when President Johnson issued commencing air strikes on North Vietnam and ground forces, which had risen to 536,000 by 1968. The Tet Offensive by North Vietnam turned many Americans against the waging war. President Nixon, following Johnson, promoted Vietnamization, the withdrawing of American troops and handing over the great responsibility of the war to South Vietnam. Protesting of the war dramatically increased, especially after Nixon’s attempt to slow North Vietnam forces and supplies into the South by sending American forces to destroy supply bases in Cambodia in 1970, which violated Cambodian neutrality. This provoked antiwar protests on many of the United Stats’ college campuses. In 1968 through 1973 attempts were made to end the ongoing conflict through diplomacy. Then in January 1973, an agreement was reached. U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam and the U.S. POWs were released. In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the North and Vietnam was once again united. The Vietnam War ended, but it took the lives of 58,000

United States Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy had spent millions of dollars to aid the non-communist South Vietnamese. Before 1964 thousands of American military advisers were training and assisting the South Vietnamese army. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to bomb North Vietnam put the United States in the center of the longest war in the nations history. The Vietcong (North Vietnamese) grew more aggressive after the incident at the Gulf of Tonkin. On November 1964, they attacked the American base at Bien Hoa and destroyed five B-57 jets while damaging twenty more. Since the increase of tension with the Vietcong continued, draft calls had increased substantially in the United States and American casualties were being felt across the country.