VIETNAMESE BOAT PEOPLE April 27th, 1975, North Vietnamese soldiers had finally reached the outskirt of the southern capital, Saigon. The war in Viet Nam that lasted 20 years is about to come to an end with communism taking over. It was all over, Saigon was surrounded by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. Presiden Nguyen Van Thieu resigned as president and gave his farewell speech and denounced the United States for failing in aiding the South before the North would later come into the city. 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" …show more content…
The boat would then be filled with water to the point it will sink. The biggest threat, the biggest fear for every Vietnamese boat would be the Thai Pirates. Out at sea lurkes pirates, Thai pirates. "These pirates are not of the swashbuckling variety rather they are common thugs and murderers on the high sea" [vietka.com - Some Horrible Statistic]. They hurt people with women experiencing the worst of the violence. "In October 1983, pirates repeatedly raped 23 of 25 Vietnamese girls and women aboard a boat during a two-day attack" [vietka.com - Some Horrible Statistics]. "By the 1980s, hundred of thousands of Vietnamese refugees, while escaping from Vietnam, were massacred in the sea by these Thai fishermen turned pirates. The way they killed these refugess, which has been documented, was abnoxiously barbarous, and was certainly far more brutal than that of the Nazis or Pol Pot's clans" [vietka.com - Some Horrible statistics]. In many cases, Thai pirates used hammer, machete, or even guns to kill the entire boat, including children and women. At the time, while Western governments sent navy ships to rescue refugees and combat these pirates, the Thai government took no action and was obstructive to the rescue mission. None of these murderers were ever brought to face the weight of jusitce. The Thai government made no attempt to even prosecute them. Many
By 1969, U.S. involvements in the war, more than 500,000 U.S. military recruits were involved in the Vietnam conflict. American techniques of warfare and the U.S. stopped in Vietnam in 1973, failing to achieve its goal because Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to Communist rule in 1975 ("Vietnam War").
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
Life after the vietnam war was and is still today terrible because of not only laos and vietnam but because of the americans who abandoned them. A lot of hmong people moved to minnesota, 10% of the population in saint paul is hmong. Hmong people who stayed in Laos are still being killed today for what happened almost 50 years ago. life in Thailand is no longer a safe refuge for the hmong
The novel, The Culture of the Cold War, is the all about the cold war and how that time period effected America in the 1960s. It talks about how the Cold War era haunted America with constant threats, and the talk of communism all across the nation. The author of the book, Stephen J. Whitfield, described that the Cold War gave the nation an identity crisis and that suspicion started to arise. The novel is very descriptive on that topic and elaborates on certain ideologies during that time.
Vietnam was a French colony dating back to mid 1800s. Vietnam was meant as a farming colony where they would grow things such as tobacco, tea, and coffee. The French treated their colony poorly by denying civil
American fears in the Cold War originated not only from Communism, but what it represented in American culture. After World War II, the popular culture demonizing the fascist regimes, the built-up aggression surrounding the system, began to move against Communism as tension between the USSR and America rose. Communism became viewed as a corruption; an infection that ruined the rugged individualism that Americans defined themselves by. Communism also, though its declaration of the evils of capitalism, decried Americans as living in an unequal society, that the United States lived in hypocrisy through its statements of liberty for all while it existed in a capitalist and segregated society. Americans saw the Soviet Union as the evil its heroic
Ship out of sight, family and surviving were the only things on his mind. “I’ll paddle till midnight, then rest. If I don’t hit land in a week's time I shall give up and die,” Jackson said to himself. As Jackson rowed he became more and more thirsty as time passed and life seemed to slip away. He had fresh water in the life boat in the first aid kit, but it must be used little at a time. If he was going to survive he had to use every drop to its fullest.
The Cold War propelled the United States of America into a seat of previously unattained power in the world . American citizens spearheaded the push toward advancement in their search for the epitome of happiness: the “American Dream”. Post-war paranoia was driven by the supposed threat of the spread of communism, which Americans feared could interfere with the freedoms and liberties the founding fathers fought to achieve. This paranoia eventually controlled the thoughts and actions of citizens everywhere. The Second Red Scare spread across America like a virus, leaving a trail of dread and despair in its wake. The fear of the growing communist regime, a lack of trust between citizens and the government, and a zealous streak of American pride drove the U.S. toward internal conflict and potential devastation.
After World War II came the development of another tension that involved the United States and the Soviet Union and their associated allies. The Cold War produced many dilemmas amongst the American people in terms of how they should comport themselves as a nation. Before World War II the United States had no interest in keeping a strong military system, nor did they send out troops outside of their borders. Also, they kept to themselves as a nation not minding the actions of other countries. Until after that war is when the country started to contradict their original goals and the tables completely turned. Eventually thousands of American soldiers were being shipped off worldwide and the country was prepared with nuclear weapons to protect themselves from their enemies. The Cold War intensified the internal issues for the United States no matter how successful the country was with distracting its people with new technologies, there were still underlying problems. The Americans wanted to show the rest of the world that they were indeed united and should be looked at as a model of democracy and individual rights. This is where the issues began, because the citizens of the United States knew that they themselves were not carrying out the equality they expected the rest of the world to follow. They had a newfound dilemma; prosperity of their country was intertwined with
Cold War: Cold War can be characterized as the political and the military pressure between the two super powers USA and USSR, Western and the Eastern coalition separately. They never went to coordinate war with one another yet they discovered options available to satisfy their cold war plans. It helped in the development of Asian American groups in United States of America. Proxy wars turned into the way to this advancement. Southeast Asian Americans were effected by these intermediary wars in a positive way.
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.
The Vietnam War was the longest war in the history of the United States it lasted from 1959-1975. Billions of dollars was spent trying to win and unwinnable war. Countless of lives were lost and America failed to achieve its objective. The origins of the war stem from the Indochina wars that occurred in the late 40s and early 50s. After many years of colonial war, the Viet Minh a communist group led by Ho Chi Minh sought independence for Vietnam. The French were not reluctant to let go of their crowning jewel without a fight. The French were aided militarily by the Unites States who sought the membership of France to the NATO and were willingly to provide as much aid to ensure that they won the war and Vietnam did not fall to communism. This led to an eight year war which culminated with the defeat of the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. A cease fire was issued and peace agreements known as the Geneva Accords where drawn during the 1954 Geneva Conference. The agreement issued a temporary division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel which created a Communist North Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh and a democratic South Vietnam led by prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem. Vietnam was supposed to unify after the nationwide election of 1956 which Diem refuse to acknowledge.
As we all know, the Vietnam War began on November 1, 1955. The war was fought between The Vietnamese and The United States. This war began because the South was opposed to the Communist rule. The war ended on April 30, 1975 and The United States had surrendered. When the supporters of the United States caught wind to this tragedy, the United States lost public support. Not only did they lose public support, they lost thousands of troops/soldiers, and billions of dollars that they had put into the war. Both the U.S. and the Vietnamese suffered tragedies but the U.S. lost more to the war than the Vietnamese. Join us in our essay to learn more about the lost of the U.S. to the Vietnam War.
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
---After WWII and until 1955, France fought hard to regain their former territories in the region, but with a poorly organized army and little determination among the troops, their efforts soon collapsed. The French were finally defeated at Dien Bien Phu on the 8th of May 1954 by the communist general Vo Nguyen Giap. The French troops withdrew, leaving a buffer zone separating the North and South and set up elections in order to form a government in the South. The communist regime set up its headquarters in Hanoi under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. Many North Vietnamese left the country and fled south where the self-proclaimed president, Ngo Dinh Diem had formed the Republic of Vietnam.