The Vietnam War (1955-1975) is probably the most problematic of all American wars. First, it is morally ambiguous. It was both a war against communism and a war to suppress nationalist self-determination. Second, it can be (and was) very confusing. American objectives were not always well defined. As a result, US policy often meandered: the US would "Americanize" the war only to "Vietnamize" it five years later. Third, things in the Vietnam War were often not what they seemed. In the name of protecting democracy, the US propped up Diem's dictatorial regime. The American media sometimes represented tactical victories as terrible defeats. The US military often kept very accurate body counts of the number of vietkong killed without any clear method of determining which Vietnamese really were Vietcong and which were svn allies.
             To attempt to make sense of US involvement in Vietnam, the war must be considered in a larger context: the Cold War. The US and USSR were in the midst of a struggle over spheres of influence, each wanting to exert cultural, political, and ideological control over various regions of the globe; part of the effort to gain spheres of influence was a complementary effort to stop the other country from gaining any such spheres. Vietnam in specific, and Southeast Asia in general, functioned as a prospective sphere in the minds of both the US and USSR. With the "fall" of North Vietnam to Communism in 1954, the US became committed to stopping the further spread of communism in the region.
             The escalation period of the Vietnam War, which lasted between 1955-1965, also foncromed to the Cold War model, in which the US and USSR avoided direct conflict and thereby avoided the possibility of nuclear war. Instead, the two superpowers operated though proxy governments or forces. Unfortunately for the US, while the US backed South Vietnamese government was weak and corrupt, the North Vietnamese government was a fiercely proud a...