Vietnam War

Vietnam War, conflict in South Vietnam (1957–75) between South Vietnamese government forces, backed by the United States, and Communist guerrilla insurgents, the Vietcong, backed by North Vietnam. The conflict originated in 1941 when a Vietminh guerrilla force was formed under Hi Chi Minh to fight the Japanese. After 1946 it fought the French colonial government, defeating them at Dien Bien Phu. The Geneva Conference then temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel between the Communists (North) and the Nationalists (South). Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese premier, canceled national elections and declared the South independent in 1956. The Viet Nam Cong San (Vietnamese Communists), or Vietcong, was then formed to oppose his increasingly corrupt regime. The Vietcong fought a ferocious guerrilla campaign that led Diem to call in U.S. support forces under the U.S.-South Vietnamese military and economic aid treaty of 1961. In 1963 he was overthrown by his officers; after a period of turmoil, Nguyen Van Thieu became president in 1967. In 1965 the United States had begun bombing the North in retaliation for the use of northern troops in the South. Increasing numbers of U.S. combat troops, many of them drafted, began to arrive in 1965 and totaled nearly 550,000 by 1968, when fruitless peace talks began in Paris. The large-scale U.S. campaign proved unable to do more than hold back the highly motivated Vietcong. Vietnamese civilians suffered terribly at the hands of both sides. The American people were sharply divided by severe uncertainties about U.S. goals and participation in the war. In November 1969 President Richard M. Nixon announced the “Vietnamization” of the war by building up South Vietnamese forces and withdrawing U.S. combat troops, but ever mounting, sometimes violent U.S. anti-war demonstrations reached their peak later that month when 250,000 protesters marched on Washington. The war had spread to Cambodia and Laos before a cease-fire was signed in Jan. 1973, followed by the total withdrawal of U.S. troops a few months later. The South was then overrun by Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces; the war effectively ended with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon in May 1975. In the late 1980s the government began an economic restructuring plan with the purpose of stimulating private enterprise. In 1990 the Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, met with U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III in the first high-level meeting since the 1970s. They discussed Vietnam's involvement in Cambodia and U.S. MIAs, 2 issues that have kept the countries from establishing diplomatic relations.