| commander1 = [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] <br/> [[John F. Kennedy]]<br/>[[Lyndon Johnson]]<br/>[[Robert McNamara]]<br/>[[William Westmoreland]] <br/> [[Richard Nixon]]<br/>Nguyen Van Thieu
| commander2 = [[Ho Chi Minh]]<br/>Le Duan<br/>Hoang Van Thai
| strength1 = around 1,420,000 (1968)| strength2 = around 860,000 (1968)
| casualties1 =
| casualties2 =
[[Image:SaigonFall.jpg|thumb|South Vietnamese residents flee [[Saigon]], as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.]]
The '''Vietnam War,''' also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between [[North Vietnamese]] [[Communist]] troops and [[South Vietnamese]] forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a an [[Atheism|atheistic]], Communist government, part of a "hot war" in the ongoing [[Cold War]] between the US and the Soviets. Officially, Vietnam is an atheist state.<ref>Jan Dodd, Mark Lewis, Ron Emmons. The Rough Guide to Vietnam, Vol. 4, 2003. p. 509: "After 1975, the Marxist-Leninist government of reunified Vietnam declared the state atheist while theoretically allowing people the right to practice their religion under the constitution."</ref>
The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of [[Japan]], which occupied Vietnam during [[World War II]], in 1945. [[Ho Chi Minh]], an operative of the [[Comintern]] (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist–Leninist revolution around the world),<ref>[http://www.triumphforsaken.com/index.php?pr=Excerpt Triumph Forsaken], book by [[Mike Moyar]]</ref> led the movement for a unified, [[Communist]] Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and murdering hundreds of thousands of people.
During the twenties and thirties, Communist forces waged an insurrection of mass murder and terrorism in an effort to seize power in Vietnam. The communist Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements in the forties. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. (America refused to back the French against the communists until 1950.)<ref>Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74 and “Myths of the Vietnam War,” Southeast Asian Perspectives, September 1972, pp14-8</ref> The Japanese invasion of French Indochina proved to be a catalyst for Vietnamese independence, as it united the Vietnamese people behind the Communist resistance to imperial domination. In 1953, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref>
From mid 1953 to early 1956, the North Vietnamese Communists embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which landowners, dissidents, and French collaborators were slaughtered en masse in a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."<ref name="rfa.org">http://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam_landreform-20060608.html</ref> Declassified Politburo documents confirm that 1 in 1,000 North Vietnamese (i.e., about 14,000 people) were the minimum quota targeted for execution during the earlier "rent reduction" campaign; the number killed during the multiple stages of the considerably more radical "land reform" was probably many times greater.<ref>Alec Holcombe, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.243?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3Ffilter%3Djid%253A10.2307%252Fj50000660%26Query%3Drent%2Breduction%26wc%3Don%26Search.x%3D0%26Search.y%3D0&Search=yes&uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672198221 Politburo's Directive Issued on May 4, 1953, on Some Special Issues regarding Mass Mobilization] ''Journal of Vietnamese Studies'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 243-247, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.225?uid=3739656&uid=367529381&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101672298091 Complete Collection of Party Documents] (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.</ref> In 1957, during its "Rectification of Errors" campaign, North Vietnam admitted that it had wrongly executed about 15,000 communist cadre during the "land reform", and that 30% of the "landlords" executed were party members; i.e., that about 50,000 people were executed in total.<ref>''Nhan Dan,'' August 13, 1957.</ref><ref>''Time,'' July 1, 1957, p. 13, says they were given a proper burial.</ref><ref>Gittinger, J. Price, [http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3024603?uid=3739656&uid=2134&uid=367529391&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=367529381&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101618662091 "Communist Land Policy in Viet Nam"], ''Far Eastern Survey'', Vol. 29, No. 8, 1957, p. 118.</ref><ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214. "Vo Nhan Tri found and read a top-secret report on the number of communist cadres falsely accused and executed: 15,000."</ref> Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently confirmed that 20-30% of those executed were actually fellow communists, but gave higher estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".<ref>Lam Thanh Liem (1990), [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/landreform.html "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?"] in Jean-Francois Revel et al., ''Ho Chi Minh'', Nam A, pp. 179-214.</ref><ref>Dommen, Arthur J. (2001), [httphttps://books.google.com/books?id=MauWlUjuWNsC&pg=PA340#v=onepage&q&f=false ''The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans''], Indiana University Press, p. 340, quotes comparable figures for communist cadre executed.</ref> Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the "land reform", of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.<ref>''The History of the Vietnamese Economy'' (2005), Vol. 2, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences. Landlords were classified as 5.68% of the population, but only a fraction of them were killed. These figures are proportionally comparable to those for China's land reform, in which millions of "landlords" were slaughtered.</ref> The full death toll was even greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation."<ref>''Nhan Vhan,'' November 5, 1956: "In the agrarian reform, illegal arrests, imprisonments, investigations (with barbarous torture), executions, requisitions of property, and '''the quarantining of landowners’ houses''' (or houses of peasants wrongly classified as landowners), which left innocent children to die of starvation, are not exclusively due to the shortcomings of the leadership, but also due to the lack of a complete legal code. If the cadres had felt that they were closely observed by the god of justice... calamities might have been avoided for the masses." Nhan Vhan was one of the best-known opposition periodicals that was allowed during the three-month period of relative intellectual freedom in the fall of 1956, modeled on Mao's "Hundred Flowers" campaign.</ref> As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead."<ref name="Turner">Turner, Robert F. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/deniers/vietnam/turner.pdf "Expert Punctures 'No Bloodbath' Myth"]. ''[[Human Events]],'' November 11, 1972.</ref>
In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," [[William Colby]] writes in his book, ''Lost Victory'', "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."<ref name="vietnam.ttu.edu">http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/1996_Symposium/96papers/story.htm</ref>
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.<ref>The Economist, February 26, 1983; Washington Post, April 23, 1985.</ref>
The [[Kennedy]] administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in November 1963 to the overthrow of the weak South Vietnam leader Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The ''casus belli'' for full combat intervention by the United States was an exaggerated confrontation between North Vietnamese P4 torpedo boats and the USS ''Maddox '' on August 2, 1964 and a second alleged attack by North Vietnam on August 4, 1964 which involved both the USS ''Maddox '' and USS ''Turner Joy''; the events became known as the "[[Gulf of Tonkin incident]]". Shortly thereafter, President Johnson got Congress to pass the "[[Gulf of Tonkin Resolution]]". President Johnson then deployed US military forces for warfare against North Vietnam. He had the US respond with a massive bombing campaign called "Operation Rolling Thunder". Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".
President Johnson, a tormented but ultimately sincere man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his incompetent administration, exemplified by [[Robert McNamara]], began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.
By 1968, the KK had 14-15,000 fighters, while the KVM had 12,000. North Vietnam had invaded and occupied large chunks of Cambodia. Nearly half of the country was faced with North Vietnamese or other Communist occupation. The Viet Cong was active in the country with about 30,000 troops, and worked with the KVM to launch invasions of Cambodia from North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had 60,000 troops on Cambodian soil. This would be the equivalent in the United States of nearly 4 million armed and organized troops from Mexico and Canada overrunning most of the country. These figures are from 10 months prior to the start of any US bombing, which began in late 1968 under President Johnson.
By 1969, the North had accelerated its long-term plan, dubbed "Campaign X," to conquer Cambodia. By 1970, it had the supply lines, troops, and logistical support necessary to force the collapse of Cambodia. Sihanouk had long done little to disguise his support for the North Vietnamese Communists, but now he grew afraid. "Hanoi," he said, "could easily force the collapse of both Cambodia and what is left of Laos if it was not faced with American opposition." Therefore, he encouraged the Americans to bomb KK, KVM, VC, and North Vietnamese "sanctuaries" in Cambodia so as to send Hanoi a message that it had better back down immediately. Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians.<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp41-8.</ref> Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing.<ref>http://www.yale.edu/cgp/Walrus_CambodiaBombing_OCT06.pdf</ref> Many leftists opposed to the war considered the bombing to be a war crime. The Khmer Rouge claimed that 600-800,000 died in the war,<ref name="paulbogdanor.com">http://www.paulbogdanor.com/200chomskylies.pdf</ref> which is about three times the real figure,<ref>Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique</ref> and [[far-left ]] activists such as [[Noam Chomsky]] have not only embraced these numbers but also attributed all of the deaths to American bombing and thus implied that the Khmer Rouge ''underestimated'' the full toll from the war<ref name="paulbogdanor.com"/>—despite the demographic impossibility of their assertions.
In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the indigenous Communist forces, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:
Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the [[Khmer Rouge]], on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fourth of all Cambodians, or more than 2 million people. UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed.<ref>William Shawcross, ''The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience'' (Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.</ref> Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed,<ref name="Heuveline, Patrick 2001">Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia." In Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.</ref> while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.<ref name="Marek Sliwinski 1995">Marek Sliwinski, ''Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique'' (L'Harmattan, 1995).</ref> Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".<ref name="Mekong.net_deaths">{{cite web|last=Sharp|first=Bruce|title=Counting Hell: The Death Toll of the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia|date = April 1, 2005|url = http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm|accessdate =January 9, 2013}}</ref> Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion.<ref>Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980</ref> By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to "the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,"<ref>New York Times, August 8, 1979.</ref><ref name="time.com">http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,947511,00.html</ref><ref>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,912511,00.html</ref> who were saved by American and international aid.
The Vietnamese Communists, led by Le Duan, perpetrated a huge bloodbath in South Vietnam, murdering hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese men, women, and children in cold blood. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final NVA [[1975 Spring Offensive|Spring Offensive]] were killed or abducted on the road to [[Tuy Hoa]] in 1975.<ref>Wiesner, Louis, ''Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954-1975'' (Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 318-9.</ref> Sources have estimated that 165,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps out of 2.5 million sent,<ref name="Desbarats">Desbarats, Jacqueline. [http://jim.com/repression.htm "Repression in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: Executions and Population Relocation"], from ''The Vietnam Debate'' (1990) by John Morton Moore. "We know now from a 1985 statement by Nguyen Co Tach that two and a half million, rather than one million, people went through reeducation....in fact, possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people were victims of extrajudicial executions in the last ten years....it is likely that, overall, at least one million Vietnamese were the victims of forced population transfers."</ref><ref>Anh Do and Hieu Tran Phan, [http://dartcenter.org/content/camp-z30-d-survivors Camp Z30-D: The Survivors], ''Orange County Register'', April 29, 2001.</ref> while the number executed could have been as high as 200,000<ref>Al Santoli, ed., ''To Bear Any Burden'' (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3.</ref> (Jacqueline Desbarats estimates an absolute minimum of 100,000 executions<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref>Morris, Stephen J. [http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/vietnam/morris.pdf Glastnost and the Gulag: The Numbers Game], ''Vietnam Commentary'', May–June 1988.</ref>). Victims were beheaded, eviscerated or buried alive.<ref>Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, "Research Among Vietnamese Refugees Reveals a Bloodbath," Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1985.</ref> Rummel estimates that slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 deaths (out of a total 1 million deported).<ref name="Desbarats"/><ref name="Statistics of Vietnamese Democide">Rummel, Rudolph, [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP6.HTM Statistics of Vietnamese Democide], in his ''Statistics of Democide''.</ref> The number of [[boat people]] who died is estimated between 200,000 and 400,000, out of the 2.5 million that fled (according to the UN).<ref>Associated Press, June 23, 1979; San Diego Union, July 20, 1986. See generally Nghia M. Vo (2006), ''The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992'', McFarland.</ref> There were also tens of thousands of suicides after the North Vietnamese take-over.<ref>Le Thi Anh, "The New Vietnam", ''[[National Review]]'', April 29, 1977, estimated some 20,000 post-war mass suicides.</ref> In 1988, Vietnam suffered a famine that afflicted millions.<ref>Crossette, Barbara, [httphttps://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/15/world/hanoi-citing-famine-fears-seeks-emergency-aid.html?src=pm Hanoi, Citing Famine Fears, Seeks Emergency Aid], ''[[The New York Times]],'' May 15, 1988.</ref>
The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s People's Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape.<ref>Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989); and Jane Hamilton-Merrit, ''Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos'' (Indiana University Press, 1999)</ref> The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.<ref>http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat5.htm#Lao75</ref>
More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.
Far from bringing peace, American defeat vastly increased the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina, as 3-4 million people were slaughtered in a bloodbath far surpassing the expectations of even the most fervent supporters of the war. Although North Vietnam agreed to "peace" in 1973; no one protested its subsequent invasion of South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam's wars with China, Laos, and Cambodia. The campuses were silent on the Holocaust in Cambodia, despite their hysterical response to the limited US incursion in 1970. The bloodbath received little media coverage at the time.
Evidence exists that the United States left behind POWs in Vietnam when it withdrew, even though the government denied such claims.<ref>Kirkwood, R. Cort (September 1, 2018). [https://www.thenewamerican.com/print-magazine/item/29825-evidence-of-pows-from-vietnam Evidence of POWs From Vietnam]. ''The New American''. Retrieved September 1, 2018.<br>See also:
*Kirkwood, R. Cort (August 26, 2018). [https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/29882-mccain-was-no-maverick-on-pows McCain Was No Maverick on POWs]. ''The New American''. Retrieved August 26, 2018.</ref>
===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
Max Boot wrote:
<blockquote>
Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that [[Ho Chi Minh]] was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true [[communist]], and that his victory was inevitable. That [[Ngo Dinh Diem]] was an unpopular and repressive [[reactionary]]. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘[[domino theory]]’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. [[Mark Moyar]], a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His book] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [https://web.archive.org/web/20061125071028/http://www.triumphforsaken.com/]
</blockquote>
Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records Record states was the ''most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century.'' He charge charges President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.<ref>The wrong war. Why We Lost in Vietnam, by Jeffrey Record.</ref>
Many politically correct "history books" make the My Lai Massacre into an important event of the war. In March 1968 in the hamlet of [[My Lai]], approximately 400 civilians were killed by American troops under the command of 2nd Lt. William Calley. Many troops present that day protested and did not take part in the event. After the event, the U.S. Army conducted an investigation and concluded there had been poor training in the Laws and Rules of Engagement, poor discipline and poor leadership up to the brigade commander. Atrocities on some level occur in every war. Since the 19th century, the U.S. is one of the few nations who prosecute its soldiers for such acts when they happen. The enemy in Viet Nam "conveniently" overlooked their far more numerous acts of atrocities and used this event for propaganda.<ref>Dunnigan & Nofi, ''Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War'' (1999)</ref> This does not justify the massacre, but 3 to 5,000 civilians were killed and found in mass graves after the retaking of Hue following the [[Tet Offensive]], a point not often noted. Other atrocities are listed in other sections of this article.
Largely because of misreporting during the war (see Media Bias below) as well as the [[anti-war]] movement, various returning veterans in Vietnam were treated horribly by the anti-war crowd, where they often were spat upon and denounced as "baby killers" (ironically, many of the anti-war protestors tended to support abortion).<ref>https://americanhistory2013vietnamwar.weebly.com/treatment-of-returning-troops.html</ref>Ironically, as [[Leftists]], many of the anti-war protestors tended to support [[abortion]].
==Media Bias==
Charges of western [[media bias]] in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics,<ref>Leonard Magruder, “I was there and that’s not the way it was”</ref> who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry Summers, Jr. told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."<ref>On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, Harry G. Summers</ref>
The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)
The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)
In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by [[Yahoo]] news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator [[Edmund Muskie ]] to and from the site of an anti-war rally.<ref>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts2067/print</ref>
An ongoing example of such liberal bias is the work on Vietnam by the extreme left-wing propagandist, historical revisionist and genocide-denier Marilyn Young, which is required reading in many universities, even though she denies the North Vietnamese "land reform" bloodbath by relying entirely on official Communist press releases (as well as Moise and Porter, who in turn rely entirely on official North Vietnamese press releases). According to her, Communist Vietnam killed only 15,000(!) people at most during the "reform" and all other accounts of its atrocities were fabrications made up by the Western media (hence North Vietnamese media is a more reliable source than any in the West—a point she quite explicitly argues); ''even though official North Vietnamese government records document over 172,000 executions of individuals named as landowners during the 1954-6 period alone''.<ref name="rfa.org"/>
* [[M-16]] and [[M-14]] rifles used by America and the [[South Vietnamese]]
* [[Kalashnikov]] ([[AK-47]]) and [[SKS]] rifles used by [[Viet Cong]]
* [[List of wars involving the United States]]
* [[Battle of Hamburger Hill]]
==References==
*[http://www.onpower.org/foreign_regional_Asia.html#10 Vietnam War].
*[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2391209/posts?page=3 Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)]
*[http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html Vietnam and the Media, part 1]([https://web.archive.org/web/20071005220621/http://www.i-served.com/v-v-a-r.org/VietnamAndTheMedia_part01.html archived])
*[http://www.viet-myths.net/Turner.htm Myths and Realities in the Vietnam Debate]
*[http://www.rjsmith.com/war_myth.html Vietnam War Myths]*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F67C8yzww_Y How the Vietnam War Was Won and Lost by Prager University]*[http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/article-summary/goldwater-on-vietnam#.YH9ZLyWSmUk Goldwater on Vietnam]
[[Category:Wars]]
[[Category:United States History]]