Laos

Vietnam got their independence in 1954. Vietnam divided the nation until they could hold an election to have a united Vietnam. A problem then arose, the north wanted a communist government and the south wanted a democratic government. China’s communist government influenced the north. South Vietnam was influenced by the United States to the East. The elections were canceled and North Vietnam attacks the south. The United States was funding and training south Vietnam until 1957. In 1957, an American ship was attacked. That was the point when the United States sent in soldiers and started bombing runs on the North(Cole).

The Vietnam War began soon after World War II. At first , in 1946, the war was between the Vietnamese and the French. The government was French, but many Vietnamese people did not want a French government. They wanted the French to leave so they could have their own government. The Vietnamese fought hard, and slowly they won more and more land. By 1953. The French army was in trouble. They were not winning the war. French soldiers were dying and the war was costing a lot of money. So, in 1954, the French army stopped fighting and left Vietnam.

On the 19th of December 1946, The Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh leadership launched a rebellion against the French authority governing the colonies of French Indochina. The first few years of the war were a low-level rural insurgency against French authority. However, after the Chinese communists reached the Northern border of Vietnam in 1949 the conflict became a conventional war between two armies equipped with modern weapons. These were supplied by the Chinese communist and Russian communist.

In 1961 as the Communist North Vietnamese advanced into South Vietnam. The communist Laos party allied

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for a ceasefire was signed in January 1973, and by March the few remaining U.S. millitary personnel in Vietnam were withdrawn.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

In the early 1960 with the war happening in Vietnam, American troops were landing in the outskirts of Laos, where at that time between 300,000 – 400,000 hill side villagers were living; these people were known as Hmong. Without much knowledge of the location, and with the guerilla warfare used by the Vietcong, the CIA recruited the Hmongs to help counter the Vietcong and to block off the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this war was known as the Secret War. This caused the war to eventually be pushed into Laos which was a neutral nation at the time. In return, the U.S promised to provide supply and support; however the Hmong were simply fighting for their freedom to live peacefully. When the U.S pulled out of the war, the communist were able to take over the

Vietnamese army. In 1965 the United States sent in troops in Vietnam to prevent the

The United States played a very crucial role in the conflict that occurred in Southeast Asia between the U.S.-backed democratic South Vietnam, and Soviet-backed communist North Vietnam. Following the defeat of its French administration in 1954, North Vietnam, led by Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, wanted to reunify the country with the help of its rebel allies in the south, known as the Viet Cong. Out of this chaos emerged a difficult situation for the United States, as Cold War sentiments were present within this proxy war between the two powerful nations and the third party of Vietnam. The United States wanted to support Ngo Dinh Diem, leader of South Vietnam, in order to ensure his government would not fall into ruins and be taken control by the communists, but President Eisenhower was also hesitant to get his troops involved in this large scale conflict in Southeast Asia.

In 1959, North Vietnam announced that they would liberate the South, so in 1961 the Vietcong was formed and ordered to overthrow the the government of Diem

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era conflict that started in 1946 and ended in 1974, taking nearly 30 years to resolve. The war was fundamentally a conflict between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, where the North was communist and South was not. The United States, France, the United Kingdom and other non-communist allies supported the non-communist South Vietnam. China, Russia (USSR), Cuba, Cambodia and other Communist allies supported the regime in the north. North Vietnam saw the United States involvement in the North as foreign aggression, so they fought guerilla wars against the anti-communist forces in the region. Guerilla forces (the Viet Cong) and the regular North Vietnamese Army were responsible for fighting the anticommunist forces. The conflict mainly consisted of small battles until the onset of air attacks -- part of an overall strategy of massive bombing and search-and-destroy operations, which South Vietnam and the Americans hoped would win the war.

Vietnam is a southeastern Asian country that has been occupied by the French since the early 19th Century. During War War II Japanese forces invaded Vietnam. In order for the native Vietnamese to fight off both the French Colonial Administration and the invading Japanese, political leader Ho Chi Minh inspired by Soviet Communism, established the League of Independence of Vietnam. After Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945, the Japanese withdrew their forces from Vietnam. The French educated Emperor Bao Dai was now back in control of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh saw this as an opportunity to finally gain control and almost immediately took control of the northern city of Hanoi. Ho Chin Minh declared himself as president. In hopes to regain control of Hanoi, France backed Emperor Bao and created the state of Vietnam in 1949. Although both sides wanted the same goal of uniting Vietnam, their government views were drastically different. Ho and his followers wanted the nation to be modeled after other communist countries. While Bao and his followers wanted their country to be in close ties with democratic countries in the west. These causes led to a civil war for the sole control of Vietnam.

South Vietnam became detached from the Communist North in 1954. Seeing their opportunities, the Americans decided to make a move against the North Vietnamese “to stop the spread of communism all over south-east Asia” (Trueman). They mainly targeted the third-world nations around their mighty Communist enemy, the Russians. The competition started between the two parties

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

---Between 1955 and 1960, the North Vietnamese with the assistance of the southern communist Vietcong, tried to take over the government in South Vietnam, and in November 1963 President Diem was overthrown and executed. The following year, the North Vietnamese began a massive drive to conquer the whole country aided by China and Russia.

The conflict in Vietnam for the United States started when President Dwight D. Eisenhower went along with the domino theory and sent in military advisors in South Vietnam to stop the communist movement from taking place in South Vietnam. The Vietnam conflict was between the communist’s and the United States. North Vietnam was led by Ho Chi Minh, and Ho Chi Minh led the Viet Cong, a guerilla group to help spread communism. The United States were supporters of the South Vietnam because they wanted them to maintain their government rather than falling to the domino theory of communism. After Eisenhower’s term ended John F. Kennedy became president and took control of the situation of Vietnam but on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was