How long was the vietnam war

The woman looked at the young man standing before her in his dress blues with such scorn and hate in her eyes. I had just gotten out of basic training. I had not killed anyone. It was the first time I was the object of hate by anyone.

It stayed with me. I went to the bathroom and took off my uniform, and put on the civilian clothes I had worn to San Antonio when I came to Lackland Air Force Base to start basic training. I did not want to be spit on again. I was one of many servicemen, proclaimed war criminals by a spiteful left. Jane Fonda, Abby Hoffman, and a host of antiwar activists cheered those who evaded the draft as courageous heroes. They viewed those who were trying to kill us as sympathetic victims.

The victims of the Vietnam War are the soldiers who served, like my friend Bruce. Bruce was a Green Beret and a tunnel rat. He would go into booby-trapped underground tunnels and fight hand-to-hand. One evening, Bruce went into his bedroom and shot himself. We spoke often; he never got past the war. Eleven years after the end of the war, Vietnam Veterans staged our own welcome home parade in Chicago.

Organizers expected , marchers; , participated cheered on by half a million people along the three-mile parade route. The resistance and the NVA fought to unify the country while the South sought to establish independence.

Since the 19th century, Vietnam had been under the colonial rule. During the second world war, Japan invaded the country. Vietnamese political leader Ho Chi Minh was inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism and formed the League for the Independence of Vietnam Viet Minh with the aim of driving out both the Japanese invaders and the French colonialists.

Ho Chi Minh saw an opportunity to seize control and immediately rose up in arms. Although both parties wanted a united country, Ho and his supporters favored communism while Bao and many others wanted to establish a country based on western culture. In July , a treaty to split the county along the 17th parallel was reached. In an attempt to limit the volume of American casualties, he announced a program called Vietnamization : withdrawing U.

In addition to this Vietnamization policy, Nixon continued public peace talks in Paris, adding higher-level secret talks conducted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beginning in the spring of The North Vietnamese continued to insist on complete and unconditional U.

The next few years would bring even more carnage, including the horrifying revelation that U. After the My Lai Massacre , anti-war protests continued to build as the conflict wore on.

In and , there were hundreds of protest marches and gatherings throughout the country. On November 15, , the largest anti-war demonstration in American history took place in Washington, D. The anti-war movement, which was particularly strong on college campuses, divided Americans bitterly.

For some young people, the war symbolized a form of unchecked authority they had come to resent. For other Americans, opposing the government was considered unpatriotic and treasonous. As the first U. Nixon ended draft calls in , and instituted an all-volunteer army the following year.

In , a joint U. The invasion of these countries, in violation of international law, sparked a new wave of protests on college campuses across America. At another protest 10 days later, two students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were killed by police. By the end of June , however, after a failed offensive into South Vietnam, Hanoi was finally willing to compromise. Kissinger and North Vietnamese representatives drafted a peace agreement by early fall, but leaders in Saigon rejected it, and in December Nixon authorized a number of bombing raids against targets in Hanoi and Haiphong.

Known as the Christmas Bombings, the raids drew international condemnation. Some of the papers from the archive of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in A top-secret Department of Defense study of U. The report, leaked to the Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, further eroded support for keeping U.

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.