The Vietnam War
Explore the Vietnam War — the prolonged conflict in Southeast Asia that became a defining trauma for the United States and a symbol of anti-colonial resistance.
The Vietnam War (1955–1975) was the longest and most divisive military conflict in modern American history, and a defining struggle of the Cold War era. What began as a French colonial war became an American crusade against communism, and ultimately a catastrophic defeat that reshaped American politics, culture, and foreign policy for generations.
Vietnam's struggle for independence stretched back decades. Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh defeated French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, leading to Vietnam's partition at the 17th parallel. The United States, applying the 'domino theory' — the belief that one country's fall to communism would trigger others — escalated its involvement from advisors to half a million combat troops by 1968. American firepower was overwhelming, but it could not defeat a determined guerrilla enemy fighting on its home ground for national liberation.
The war killed an estimated 2-3 million Vietnamese, 58,000 Americans, and devastated neighboring Laos and Cambodia. It shattered American confidence in military intervention, ended the postwar liberal consensus, and produced a generation of antiwar activism. The fall of Saigon in April 1975 marked the end of American military involvement, and Vietnam was reunified under communist rule. The war's lessons about the limits of military power, the importance of understanding local politics, and the human cost of ideological crusades remain bitterly relevant.