Powering Veitnam

11 Pages 2741 Words

h had been a major ally to the United States in the defeat of Adolph Hitler and the Axis Powers. France occupied and claimed the small coastline country of Vietnam in Indochina. In this region there had been recent Communist uprisings funded by the USSR The Vietnamese were willing to accept Communism in return for what they had been fighting for over 2000 years: self rule. In 1950 the United States, owing a debt of gratitude towards France, sent several advisors to aid French control in Vietnam. Over the next decade and a half, the United States would send an entire Army and Navy to aid the French in maintaining control in South Vietnam, which had separated from the Communist North Vietnam by treaty in 1954. In early August of 1964 a small Vietcong (term used to identify South Vietnamese in favor of communism and unification) patrol boat had an encounter with a United States war ship in the Gulf of Tonkin. Gunfire was exchanged, and, in the end, President Johnson agreed to allow aggressive retaliation. On February 6, 1965, the United States began the bombing of North Vietnamese cities, marking the unofficial start of the Vietnam War (Winthrop, 853-861). In the years of the war to follow, the media began to play a role. Photo-journalists would accompany platoons on missions and, through the aid of cameras and video equipment, relate the stories to the American at home. Every night for the length of the war news programs were saturated with reports of the happenings in Vietnam and death tolls for the day. Grossly eggzrated enemy casualty numbers were reported, giving the public a false view of happenings of the war. Suddenly on January 30, 1968 a Vietcong uprising, now commonly known as the Tet Offensive, took place. Tet is the Vietnamese new year and is commonly accepted as a cease-fire. With a cease-fire in effect, most major cities’ defensives were less tight. As if all at once, more than one hundred South Vietnamese cities were bein...