Causes Of The Vietnam War

After thousands of years of being repeatedly oppressed the people of Vietnam were finally free in the year 1945. Southern Vietnam had the United States support, and the north had the newly created Peoples Republic of China helping them. About twenty years later the Vietnam War began. Not even a generation had gone by when the United States started sending soldiers into Vietnam. The soldiers had no previous training on the customs, culture, history or language of the people there. We began moving the citizens around and disrupting normal Vietnamese life. The people in the south wanted to become a united communist nation with the north, but the United States would allow that. Instead of facing these facts we failed to understand them. We definitively lost the Vietnam War because the majority of Americans did not understand the political and social wants and needs of the Vietnamese people.

About four thousand years ago, Vietnam was divided into north and south two cultures, with two different rulers. Farmers and nomads lived in the north, and merchants and traders lived in the south. Despite these differences, these people shared one thing, a common suffering. For thousands of years across the land everyone was poor as a result of a series of feudal systems that left only a very few people with most of the money and land. Leader after leader revolted promising a better life for the peasants. But every time, once they rose to power the leaders forced the citizens into another vicious cycle of the feudal system. Then along came the French, and like every leader before them they promised a better future. The peasants revolted and overthrew their leaders. Only to realize that France would impose strict laws and taxes upon them making th...

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...lready extremely unstable and wary of who to trust. The country went into anarchy as we trued to continue a war, manage a country and hold together a stable military. Soon different militias within South Vietnam were rising and fighting the U.S. for power people were scared of re-colonization and feared the U.S.. Soon we had trouble realizing who was our friend and who was our foe. There was no set “enemy” and so we began accidentally killing many civilians this created more hate for the U.S. and therefor larger militias to worry about. We dug ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole because we refused to believe the simple truth that we were not fighting a war for South Vietnam. We were fighting a war for ourselves. Before all this happened had we realized that the people of South Vietnam didn’t want to fight, we could have escaped many more bloody years of the war.