How did the Vietnam war begin and how did it last so long?
After WWII, President Truman (and the other western allies) viewed Communism (in the form of the Soviet Union) as the greatest post-war threat. The turning point for Asia came in Dec. 1949 when Chinese communist forces won the civil war in China. Now the U.S. feared all of Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand) might fall to communism. France had attempted to regain control of its Southeast Asian colonies (including Vietnam) after WWII in 1945. They were fighting Ho Chi Minh and his communist rebels. Starting in 1950, the U.S. started to send military aid to France to help in its effort against the Viet Minh (the communist rebels). This was part of the U.S. goal of “containment” of the spread of communism. When France pulled-out of Vietnam in 1955-56, the U.S. basically felt it had to fill the void in order to prevent Ho Chi Minh from unifying Vietnam under communist rule (the 1956 peace accords with France had divided Vietnam in half). So starting in 1955, the U.S. startin
