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On November 11, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) was completed, ten years after the end of the bitter and divisive Vietnam War that tore the United States apart. After ten years of shame, anger, and painful fights over US participation in the Vietnam War, the sacrifice and courage of the soldiers who fought was finally to be recognized and remembered. Speaking at the wall for a Veterans Day ceremony, President Reagan declared, “The night is over. We see these men and know them once again and know how much we owe them, how much they’ve given us, and how much we can never fully repay” ( Reagan 2). However, in light of the conflict surrounding the Vietnam War, the impact of the form of the memorial on the memorialization process and the overall memory of the Vietnam War remains in question.

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Bombarding the city on April 29, Dung attacked early the next day. Led by the 324th Division, PAVN forces pushed into Saigon and quickly moved to capture key facilities and strategic points around the city. Unable to resist, newly-appointed President Duong Van Minh ordered ARVN forces to surrender at 10:24 AM and sought to peacefully hand over the city.

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The War Powers Act attempted to correct what Congress and the American public saw as excessive war-making powers in the hands of the president.

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American journalists followed events only when breaking news happened in the region. Those who covered the beginning of the war in Vietnam were only reporting the rise of communism in the country. The official agencies that handled the press in Vietnam during the early years had little control over what those reporters wrote.

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When the United States first sent their troops to Vietnam on March 8, 1965, many Americans supported that military effort. 61 percent of Americans said no when asked if the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam was a mistake. However, as the war dragged on, the public support began to drop while the number of skepticism started to rise. During the time, the term “Credibility Gap” was widely used by skeptics to question the truthfulness of Johnson administration’s policies and statements about the war in Vietnam.

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The Pentagon Papers was the name given to a secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967

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The long debate over lowering the voting age in America from 21 to 18 began during World War II and intensified during the Vietnam War, when young men denied the right to vote were being conscripted to fight for their country. In the 1970 case Oregon v. Mitchell, a divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress had the right to regulate the minimum age in federal elections, but not at the state and local level. Amid increasing support for a Constitutional amendment, Congress passed the 26th Amendment in March 1971; the states promptly ratified it, and President Richard M. Nixon signed it into law that July.

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In May 1970, students protesting the bombing of Cambodia by United States military forces, clashed with Ohio National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus. When the Guardsmen shot and killed four students on May 4, the Kent State Shootings became the focal point of a nation deeply divided by the Vietnam War.

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Upon taking office in 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon (1913-94) introduced a new strategy called Vietnamization that was aimed at ending American involvement in the Vietnam War (1954-75) by transferring all military responsibilities to South Vietnam. The increasingly unpopular war had created deep divisions in American society. Nixon believed his Vietnamization strategy, which involved building up South Vietnam’s military strength in order to facilitate a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops, would prepare the South Vietnamese to take responsibility for their own defense against a Communist takeover and allow the U.S. to leave the conflict with its honor intact. In 1973, the U.S. negotiated a treaty with the North Vietnamese, withdrew American combat troops and declared the Vietnamization process complete. However, in 1975, South Vietnam fell to Communist forces.

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When Nixon took office, about 300 American soldiers were dying each week in Vietnam, and the war was broadly unpopular in the United States, with violent protests against the war ongoing. The Johnson administration had agreed to suspend bombing in exchange for negotiations without preconditions, but this agreement never fully took force. According to Walter Isaacson, soon after taking office, Nixon had concluded that the Vietnam War could not be won and he was determined to end the war quickly.Conversely, Black argues that Nixon sincerely believed he could intimidate North Vietnam through the "Madaman Theory" Nixon sought some arrangement which would permit American forces to withdraw, while leaving South Vietnam secure against attack. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1973, for their work in negotiating the ceasefires contained in the Paris Peace Accords on "Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam", signed the January previous.

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Along with the
Civil Rights campaigns of the 1960s, one of the most divisive forces in
twentieth-century U.S. history. The antiwar movement actually consisted of a
number of independent interests, often only vaguely allied and contesting each
other on many issues, united only in opposition to the Vietnam War. Attracting
members from college campuses, middle-class suburbs, labor unions, and
government institutions, the movement gained national prominence in 1965, peaked
in 1968, and remained powerful throughout the duration of the conflict.
Encompassing political, racial, and cultural spheres, the antiwar movement
exposed a deep schism within 1960s American society.

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On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year holiday called Tet), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), planned the offensive in an attempt both to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its support of the Saigon regime. Though U.S. and South Vietnamese forces managed to hold off the Communist attacks, news coverage of the offensive (including the lengthy Battle of Hue) shocked and dismayed the American public and further eroded support for the war effort. Despite heavy casualties, North Vietnam achieved a strategic victory with the Tet Offensive, as the attacks marked a turning point in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the slow, painful American withdrawal from the region.

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During the Vietnam War, about two-third of American troops were volunteered, the rest were selected for military service through the drafts. In the beginning of the war, the names of all American men in draft-age were collected by the Selective Service. When someone’s name was called, he had to report to his local draft broad, which was made up of various community members, so that they could begin to evaluate. By this manner, local draft broads had an enormous power to decide who had to go and who would stay. - See more at: http://thevietnamwar.info/vietnam-war-draft/#sthash.wkaYH1Zv.dpuf

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The confluence of events in 1954 led to Ngo Dinh Diem becoming the leader of South Vietnam.

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The movement against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War began small–among peace activists and leftist intellectuals on college campuses–but gained national prominence in 1965, after the United States began bombing North Vietnam in earnest. Anti-war marches and other protests, such as the ones organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), attracted a widening base of support over the next three years, peaking in early 1968 after the successful Tet Offensive by North Vietnamese troops proved that war’s end was nowhere in sight.

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The Ho Chi Minh  Trail was not just one trail but a series of trails. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was used by the North Vietnamese as a route for its troops to get into the South. They also used the trail as a supply route – for weapons, food and equipment. The Ho Chin Minh Trail ran along the Laos/Cambodia and Vietnam borders and was dominated by jungles. In total the ‘trail’ was about 1,000 kilometers in length and consisted of many parts.

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During the Vietnam War (1954-75), as part of the strategic bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder, U.S. military aircraft attacked targets throughout North Vietnam from March 1965 to October 1968. This massive bombardment was intended to put military pressure on North Vietnam’s Communist leaders and reduce their capacity to wage war against the U.S.-supported government of South Vietnam. Operation Rolling Thunder marked the first sustained American assault on North Vietnamese territory and thus represented a major expansion of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Historians differ in their assessments of the strategic value of Operation Rolling Thunder. Some claim that the bombing campaign came close to crippling North Vietnam’s capacity to wage war, while others contend the campaign’s effectiveness was limited.

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In February 1966, under Fulbright’s leadership, the committee held televised hearings on the war. The misgivings expressed there began the national debate on the wisdom of U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia. From then until the end of Lyndon Johnson’s term as president, Fulbright worked to dismantle support for the war. In 1967, he published The Arrogance of Power, a sweeping critique of American foreign policy that sold 400,000 copies

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Tonkin Gulf Resolution/The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

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Tonkin Gulf Resolution/The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

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The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964) gave broad congressional approval for expansion of the Vietnam War. During the spring of 1964, military planners had developed a detailed design for major attacks on the North, but at that time President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers feared that the public would not support an expansion of the war. By summer, however, rebel forces had established control over nearly half of South Vietnam, and Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president, was criticizing the Johnson administration for not pursuing the war more aggressively.

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Robert S. McNamara was one of the most recognized and controversal figures of the Vietnam War which served as the Secretary of Defense under both John F. Kennedy  and Lyndon B. Johnson. His policies changed the way that the military operated and shaped the srategy of the Vietnam War.

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robert s. mcnamara vietnam war - Google Search

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The three most basic operations or missions were search and destroy, clearing, and security. These terms and the concepts they described were new, and like most new names and ideas, they were understood by some and misunderstood by others. Best known and most misunderstood was search and destroy. Search and destroy operations began in 1964, before U.S. ground forces were committed. These operations were conducted to locate the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong main force units in and around their base areas and to attack them by fire and maneuver. Since enemy infiltration of the populated areas depended heavily on the availability of base areas near the population centers, destruction of close-in base areas received priority attention.

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The hawks believed that due to the aggression of North Vietnamese it forced us into the war. They thought that the United States should do what ever is necessary to win. Doves think that the problem in Vietnam is a civil war. They thought that the United States had no right to be in their conflicts.

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US escalation in Vietnam came in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s victory in the presidential election of November 1964. With a full four-year term ahead of him, the president now turned his full attention to Vietnam – and he was not pleased by what he saw. The Viet Cong insurgency had grown rapidly in the final months of 1964, estimates of its numbers ranging from 80,000 to 100,000.

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Agent Orange was a powerful mixture of chemical defoliants used by U.S. military forces during the Vietnam War to eliminate forest cover for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, as well as crops that might be used to feed them. The U.S. program of defoliation, codenamed Operation Ranch Hand, sprayed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides over 4.5 million acres of land in Vietnam from 1961 to 1972. Agent Orange, which contained the chemical dioxin, was the most commonly used of the herbicide mixtures, and the most effective. It was later revealed to cause serious health issues–including tumors, birth defects, rashes, psychological symptoms and cancer–among returning U.S. servicemen and their families as well as among the Vietnamese population.

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The Việt Cộng was a political organization and army in South Vietnam and Cambodia that fought the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War, and emerged on the winning side.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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May 7th, 1954"The War of Indochina enters its final phase. It was t he longest, most
furious battle of the French Expeditionary Corps in the Far East. 170 days of confrontation, 57 days of hell.

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full Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, English League for the Independence of Vietnam,     organization that led the struggle for Vietnamese independence from French rule. The Viet Minh was formed in China in May 1941 by Ho Chi Minh. Although led primarily by Communists, the Viet Minh operated as a national front organization open to persons of various political persuasions

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Ho Chi Minh first emerged as an outspoken voice for Vietnamese independence while living as a young man in France during World War I. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, he joined the Communist Party and traveled to the Soviet Union. He helped found the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 and the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh, in 1941. At World War II’s end, Viet Minh forces seized the northern Vietnamese city of Hanoi and declared a Democratic State of Vietnam (or North Vietnam) with Ho as president. Known as “Uncle Ho,” he would serve in that position for the next 25 years, becoming a symbol of Vietnam’s struggle for unification during a long and costly conflict with the strongly anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam and its powerful ally, the United States.

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A foreign policy during the 1950s to 1980s that states if one one land in a region came under the influence of communism, then surrounding countreis would follow.