The Vietnam War: From the American Perspective – e-book

A short, factual history of the Vietnam War as it was seen from the United States: why Washington became involved, how the war escalated, what it was like for the soldiers, how it divided American society, and how it still shapes US politics and memory. One of two books in Planodium's Opposite views series; the companion book tells the same story from the Vietnamese side.

• 6 chapters, approx. 13 pages
• Chapters: Why Vietnam?; Escalation; The Soldier's War; Tet and the Home Front; Vietnamization and the Way Out; Legacy
• Companion book tells the same war from the Vietnamese side
• EPUB for e-readers and PDF for reading on screen or printing
• Written with the help of AI and reviewed before publishing

Why Vietnam?

For most Americans in 1945, Vietnam was a distant place on the map of French Indochina. Within twenty years it would become the setting of the longest war the United States had fought up to that time. To understand how that happened, we have to start not in the jungle but in Washington, at the beginning of the Cold War. After the Second World War, American leaders believed that the Soviet Union and, after 1949, Communist China were trying to spread their system across the world. The policy that grew out of this fear was called containment: communism should be stopped wherever it tried to expand. In Asia, the victory of Mao Zedong in China in 1949 and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 made this fear very concrete. In Vietnam, the Viet Minh, a movement led by the communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, was fighting to end French colonial rule. Many Vietnamese saw the struggle mainly as a war for national independence. In Washington, however, the communist leadership of the movement mattered more than its nationalist goals. From 1950, the United States helped pay for the French war effort, and by 1954 it was covering a large share of the cost. The French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. At the Geneva Conference that followed, Vietnam was temporarily divided at the 17th parallel. The North became the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. In the South, a separate state took shape: the Republic of Vietnam, led from 1955 by Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-communist Catholic nationalist. The Geneva agreements called for national elections in 1956, but they were never held. Diem refused, and the United States supported his decision, partly out of concern that Ho Chi Minh would win. President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained the stakes with an image that would shape American thinking for years: the domino theory. If one country in Southeast Asia fell to communism, he argued, its neighbours would follow, one after another, like a row of falling dominoes. South Vietnam therefore became more than a small country. In

… The excerpt continues in the book.

1. Why Vietnam?
2. Escalation
3. The Soldier's War
4. Tet and the Home Front
5. Vietnamization and the Way Out
6. Legacy

Format: E-book as EPUB (Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, Kindle via “Send to Kindle”) and PDF.. Made with the help of AI and tested by our quality control. Not tax, accounting or legal advice. Terms and right of withdrawal