History Memes

Explanation: The Vietnam War, as it's known here in the USA, was an utterly pointless clusterfuck of a war wherein the US backed several successive military juntas against the Communist North Vietnam because [checks notes] gommunism bad

It led to a decade-long 'intervention' in the ongoing Vietnamese civil war, causing tens-of-thousands of American deaths and over a million Vietnamese deaths when casualties from both sides of the civil war are counted.

It was an unpopular war at the time, though opposition to the war didn't solidify in US domestic politics until the late 60s. Many American troops in Vietnam were conscripts, and even many volunteers ended up deeply disillusioned by what was very apparently the defense of a brutal and corrupt military junta against a relatively popular government, with no plan for success and utter breakdown at all levels of the American military hierarchy. In addition, the American administration approved a terror bombing campaign that was both deeply immoral and utterly ineffective at doing anything other than killing Vietnamese civilians.

Many of the Viet Cong, the guerilla forces in favor of North Vietnam, were not well equipped and subject to official or unofficial reprisal attacks by American, South Vietnamese, or ethnic paramilitaries on their home villages, regardless of whether they were actually there at the time or not. They spent long years in rural areas, surviving on the margins to avoid being detected by enemy forces, fed only the faintest drip of resupply that was able to be smuggled in from North Vietnam, and suffering high casualty rates.

While the Viet Cong were important, their contribution lessened after the Tet Offensive, and much of the 'heavy lifting' was done by North Vietnam's formal military. Regardless, they suffered greatly for the cause of defeating the South Vietnam junta, regardless of what one thinks of how North Vietnam developed. North Vietnam would unite the country after American forces withdrew.

Vietnam is doing okay nowadays, though it's regrettably still a single-party state. Relations with the US were normalized after the Cold War, and the Vietnam War remains a trope in the American consciousness both for pointless and immoral foreign wars, and for long struggles of attrition that cannot be won.