In January , the United States and North Vietnam concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations. In , Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia. Under a broad free market policy put in place in , the economy began to improve, boosted by oil export revenues and an influx of foreign capital. Trade and diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.
In the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War would linger long after the last troops returned home in Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper. The war had pierced the myth of American invincibility and had bitterly divided the nation.
Many returning veterans faced negative reactions from both opponents of the war who viewed them as having killed innocent civilians and its supporters who saw them as having lost the war , along with physical damage including the effects of exposure to the toxic herbicide Agent Orange , millions of gallons of which had been dumped by U. On it were inscribed the names of 57, American men and women killed or missing in the war; later additions brought that total to 58, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Vietnam War started in the s, according to most historians, though the conflict in Southeast Asia had its roots in the French colonial period of the s. Vietnam War protests began small among peace activists and leftist intellectuals on college campuses but gained national prominence in , after the United States began bombing North Vietnam in earnest.
Anti-war marches and other protests, such as the ones organized by Of the nearly 1 million Americans who served on active duty in the U. Armed Forces during the Vietnam War era , many were or went on to become famous in diverse fields such as politics, entertainment, sports and journalism. The young Navy pilot John McCain, son of a Vietnamization was a strategy that aimed to reduce American involvement in the Vietnam War by transferring all military responsibilities to South Vietnam.
The increasingly unpopular war had created deep rifts in American society. President Nixon believed his Vietnamization The United States and many other countries intervened, propping up both sides—but especially South Vietnam—with troops, weapons and From air power to infantry to chemicals, the weapons used in the Vietnam War were more devastating than those of any previous conflict.
United States and South Vietnamese forces relied heavily on their superior air power, including B bombers and other aircraft that dropped Women in the Vietnam War served as soldiers, health workers, and in news-gathering capacities. The bloody conflict had its roots in French colonial rule and an independence movement driven by communist leader Ho Live TV. This Day In History.
History Vault. Recommended for you. Vietnam War: The Fall of Saigon. Vietnam: Anti-War Protests. Vietnam War: Tet Offensive. Vietnam War: Presidents and Policy Makers. Vietnam War. Removing rivals: The North quickly made clear that previous agreements for sharing power with allied groups in the south were no longer valid.
But in the weeks after liberation, there were already signs that the North would not tolerate an alternative base of power, especially one that included non-communists like the NLF. One top NLF official named Truong Nhu Tang reflected on this while watching the victory parade organized by the communists shortly after they took Saigon.
He says:. Seeing this, I experienced almost a physical shock. A feeling of distaste for this whole affair began to come over me—not to mention premonitions I did not want to entertain. At a meeting of northern and southern delegates in the summer of , the decision was made official: the two Vietnams would be merged into a single state, called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The decision was made without any meaningful discussion or debate. Some southern delegates objected, saying that people in the south would not easily accept life in a socialist system, but their protests were not heeded. Most of these officials had done work that was not particularly political in nature, like running a school or hospital. He then repeated the importance of following the correct path before letting everyone go. Some people spent several years in camps.
They were subjected to torture and brainwashing and forced to do hard labour in inhospitable areas of the country. Some who were taken away to the camps were never seen again. Image 3: Vietnamese man in a re-education camp other camps were more like prisons.
Some southerners described their time in these camps as the first time they interacted with northerners in many years. Tran Tri Vu, who spent four and a half years in six re-education camps, describes this in his memoir, Lost Years:. Our generation in the South was suddenly charged with wrongdoing because we had not lived in the North, had not been used to the way of reasoning of the Northern people, had not accepted their ideology. Our skin was the same color, we spoke the same language, our ethnic origin and geographic location were the same, and yet we were completely different from them.
When Northern soldiers poured into the South, they had appeared to our eyes as country folks who had strayed into a big town…Living in their company, observing their way of life and thinking, and especially experiencing our treatment in the camp, we had come to realize that between us and them was a barrier that could never be overcome.
Monitoring and silencing alternative forms of thinking and belief: The media, schools, and religious institutions were brought under government control. All of these represented potential challenges or alternatives to socialism and were therefore seen as threats. Newspapers were shut down and the government started keeping records of who attended religious services.
The government was especially suspicious of Christianity, which it saw as a holdover from the colonial years. But even non-European religions like Buddhism were viewed with suspicion. Some religious buildings were closed down or required to place a portrait of Ho Chi Minh on their altars. In addition to consolidating political control, the Vietnamese government introduced a socialist, centrally planned economy in the south.
This system was already in place in the north. In such economies, people are often discouraged or forbidden from owning private property. Introducing this system in the south led the government to take several actions:. One of the groups most affected was the ethnic Chinese minority, known as the Hoa. However, they generally avoided politics and refrained from aligning themselves too closely with the South Vietnamese government. De-urbanizing the population: The population of cities like Saigon swelled in size during the war as people fled the fighting and bombing in rural areas.
After reunification, the government worried these cities would become sites of social unrest, and it encouraged people to return to their hometowns. Some did so voluntarily, but others were relocated against their will to New Economic Zones NEZs set up by the government. These zones were usually located in remote highland areas, where living conditions were harsh.
According to one account:. The people received no food and were reduced to eating the leaves off the trees and bushes. There were well known cases of people [in] the NEZs dying from eating manioc leaves that they had cooked. Collectivizing peasants: About half of all rural families in the south were organized into agricultural collectives. These collectives put several families together into a single unit that was expected to combine what they produced and turn over any surplus anything above what they needed for their basic and immediate consumption to the government.
The government distributed this surplus to people elsewhere in the country. In collectivized farming, people were rarely rewarded individually for their hard work.
Thus, while collectives were supposed to make the rural economy more productive, they often had the opposite effect. Rather than producing more, Vietnamese peasants … simply cultivated enough land upon which to live rather than have to turn over any surplus to the state at fixed prices i. Image 4: Vietnamese peasants. With decreasing productivity, the economy contracted. By the late s, Vietnam, once a major rice producer, was experiencing cases of famine or near famine.
It was becoming clear that the socialist economic experiment in the south was failing. Southerners were not entirely passive in responding to these changes. Others chose to leave, even when doing so was fraught with danger and uncertainty. Everyday resistance: Some peasants who were forced to join rural collectives resisted in ways that were quiet and indirect. Another example was delaying delivery of grain or livestock to government authorities.
Fleeing Vietnam: Some who were targeted by the government, or who generally faced worsening conditions, made the decision to leave.
The first wave of departures was the , southerners who fled during the fall of Saigon in These were people who had worked with the Americans, and most were permanently re-settled in the United States. But the departures continued, even without American or other international assistance. Smaller numbers continued to leave Vietnam, many in small and rickety boats that landed in neighbouring countries or territories where they requested asylum.
By the end of the following year, the numbers reached alarming levels, quadrupling to 62, By , members of the international community were recognizing that the situation had become a humanitarian crisis. There were two main reasons for their concern. Many more barely survived. Image 5: Boat people from Vietnam. We found a dozen employees cleaning the front of a five-star hotel.
The people are friendly. Da Nang was the site of a major U. Marble Mountain is just a short distance away. Inside the mountain, there's a cave where the Viet Cong built a secret hospital. They claim to have shot down 18 U. Beneath Marble Mountain is Marble Beach. We know it as China Beach, made famous in movies and TV shows. The U. But the Vietnamese have removed many references to China since the war. Retired U. Air Force Lt. John Stiles told his story and his desire for reconciliation. He described how he has become close friends with the Vietnamese pilot who shot him down.
On April 16, , in a dogfight in the skies near Hanoi, U. Air Force Brigadier Gen. Dan Cherry fired a missile from his F4 fighter jet that exploded under the wing of a Russian-made MiG. Vietnamese pilot Hong My ejected, breaking both arms. He barely escaped with his life. Thirty-six years later, a Vietnamese TV host arranged for the pilots to meet.
Hong My was wearing a medal on his coat and revealed that it signified that he had shot down an American airman. Hong My asked Cherry to find him when he returned to the United States.
Research and luck led to Stiles. But Stiles was at first wary. He had believed for years that his plane had been shot down by ground artillery. But he agreed to meet Hong My.
When he did, Hong My revealed details of the shooting that immediately convinced Stiles that Hong My was right. I got to know him and got to know his family very, very well. He treated me like a king.
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