Introduction

The Vietnam War started in 1954 and lasted until 1975. During those 21 years, the United States saw the longest war in its history. It cost the this nation not only a large sum of money (I consider $580 billion to be very large) but it also stole the lives of over 60,000 of our bravest and noblest men. It harmed the nation of Vietnam as well, causing the major alteration of the landscape in Vietnam. No longer did Vietnamese civilians behold a panoramic view of gorgeous grassy plains where they could let their children run around and play but they stared at terrain scattered with holes and craters. France left Vietnam in 1954 after almost a hundred years of colonial rule. They then signed the Geneva Peace Accords, which said that there would be a temporary partition of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. This created Northern Vietnam and Southern Vietnam. In addition, Vietnam agreed to hold national elections in 1956 in order to reunify the country. Once the elections took place, the separation at the seventeenth parallel would no longer be needed. Vietnam felt that they only signed the agreement because of pressure from Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Instead of the Geneva Accords, United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower supported the idea of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organzation (SEATO), which was enacted in 1955 and said that the United States would assist Vietnam in rebuilding its country. In Vietnam, it created the Government of the Republic of Vietnam with President Ngo Dinh Diem who, as an anti-Communist, thought that the Republic of the south was in danger of attack by the Communist north. He thought that northern Vietnam wanted to take the South by force and proceeded to pass a series of acts that made it legal to hold any person suspected of Communism in jail without a formal charge. In January of 1959, the Northern Communists held a conference (called the Fifteenth Party Plenum) where they agreed to use revolutionary violence in order to overthrow Diem’s government in the south. The United States became involved in December of 1961 when President Kennedy sent a group of people over to Vietnam to report about the conditions. As a response to their findings, he increased the level of military involvement in Vietnam. Over the next few years, many Americans soldiers would go to Vietnam in order to weed out the VietCong, which was the nickname given for the Vietnamese Communists.

I do not pretend to understand the hardships that American soldiers experienced in the Vietnam War, but from my research I will do my absolute best to provide insight on an issue that still plagues the brave men who fought for the United States during that time. I also want to make clear that I am writing from the perspective of a soldier who fought during the war. Although the soldier himself is not real, the stories are adapted from many soldiers who did fight in the war and received psychological damage from the experience. This project is dedicated to those brave men who gave everything they had, even a portion of their sanity, to improve and protect the nation of the United States.

Information from http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/index.html