The Vietnam War was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and a major conflict of the Cold War. While the war was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, the north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other countries in the Eastern Bloc, while the south was supported by the US and anti-communist allies. This made it a proxy war between the US and Soviet Union. It lasted almost 20 years, with direct US military involvement ending in 1973. The conflict spilled into the Laotian and Cambodian civil wars, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975.
South Vietnam, officially the Republic of Vietnam, was a country in Southeast Asia that existed from 1955 to 1975, the period when the southern portion of Vietnam was a member of the Western Bloc during part of the Cold War after the 1954 division of Vietnam. It first received international recognition in 1949 as the State of Vietnam within the French Union, with its capital at Saigon, before becoming a republic in 1955. South Vietnam was bordered by North Vietnam to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and Thailand across the Gulf of Thailand to the southwest. Its sovereignty was recognized by the United States and 87 other nations, though it failed to gain admission into the United Nations as a result of a Soviet veto in 1957. It was succeeded by the Republic of South Vietnam in 1975. In 1976, the Republic of South Vietnam and North Vietnam merged to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
The Viet Cong was an epithet and umbrella term to call the communist-driven armed movement and united front organization in South Vietnam. Formally organized as and led by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and nominally conducted military operations under the name of the Liberation Army of South Vietnam (LASV), the movement fought under the direction of North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and United States governments during the Vietnam War. The organization had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized and mobilized peasants in the territory the Viet Cong controlled. During the war, communist fighters and some anti-war activists claimed that the Viet Cong was an insurgency indigenous to the South that represented the legitimate rights of people in South Vietnam, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of North Vietnam. It was later conceded by the modern Vietnamese communist leadership that the movement was actually under the North Vietnamese political and military leadership, aiming to unify Vietnam under a single banner.
Montagnard is an umbrella term for the various indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The French term Montagnard ( ) signifies a mountain dweller, and is a carryover from the French colonial period in Vietnam. In Vietnamese, they are known by the term người Thượng, although this term can also be applied to other minority ethnic groups in Vietnam. In modern Vietnam, both terms are archaic, and indigenous ethnic groups are referred to as đồng bào or người dân tộc thiểu số. Earlier they were referred to pejoratively as the mọi. Sometimes the term Degar is used for the group as well. Most of those living in the United States refer to themselves as Montagnards, while those living in Vietnam refer to themselves by their individual ethnic group.
David Halberstam was an American writer, journalist, and historian, known for his work on the Vietnam War, politics, history, the Civil Rights Movement, business, media, American culture, Korean War, and later, sports journalism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1964. Halberstam was killed in a car crash in 2007 while doing research for a book.
Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục was the Archbishop of Huế, Republic of Vietnam, and later a sedevacantist bishop who was excommunicated twice by the Holy See but is believed to have reconciled with the Holy See before his death in 1984.
Hearts and Minds or winning hearts and minds refers to the strategy and programs used by the governments of South Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War to win the popular support of the Vietnamese people and to help defeat the Viet Cong insurgency. Pacification is the more formal term for winning hearts and minds. In this case, however, it was also defined as the process of countering the insurgency. Military, political, economic, and social means were used to attempt to establish or reestablish South Vietnamese government control over rural areas and people under the influence of the Viet Cong. Some progress was made in the 1967–1971 period by the joint military-civilian organization called CORDS, but the character of the war changed from a guerrilla war to a conventional war between the armies of South and North Vietnam. North Vietnam won in 1975.
The Đắk Sơn Massacre was a massacre committed by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, in the village of Đắk Sơn, Phước Long Province, South Vietnam.
The Huế Phật Đản shootings were the deaths of nine unarmed Buddhist civilians on 8 May 1963 in the city of Huế, South Vietnam, at the hands of the army and security forces of the government of Ngô Đình Diệm, a Roman Catholic. The army and police fired guns and launched grenades into a crowd of Buddhists who had been protesting against a government ban on flying the Buddhist flag on the day of Phật Đản, which commemorates the birth of Gautama Buddha.
The Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces were the elite military units of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Following the establishment of the Republic of Vietnam in October 1955, the Special Forces were formed at Nha Trang in February 1956. During the rule of Ngô Đình Diệm, the Special Forces were run by his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, until both were assassinated in November 1963 in a coup. The Special Forces were disbanded in 1975 when South Vietnam ceased to exist after the Fall of Saigon.
The Krulak–Mendenhall mission was a fact-finding expedition dispatched by the Kennedy administration to South Vietnam in early September 1963. The stated purpose of the expedition was to investigate the progress of the war by the South Vietnamese regime and its US military advisers against the Viet Cong insurgency. The mission was led by Victor Krulak and Joseph Mendenhall. Krulak was a major general in the United States Marine Corps, while Mendenhall was a senior Foreign Service Officer experienced in dealing with Vietnamese affairs.
CIA activities in Vietnam were operations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in Vietnam from the 1950s to the late 1960s, before and during the Vietnam War. After the 1954 Geneva Conference, North Vietnam was controlled by communist forces under Ho Chi Minh's leadership. South Vietnam, with the assistance of the U.S., was anti-communist under Ngo Dinh Diem's leadership. The economic and military aid supplied by the U.S. to South Vietnam continued until the 1974. The CIA participated in both the political and military aspect of the wars in Indochina. The CIA provided suggestions for political platforms, supported candidates, used agency resources to refute electoral fraud charges, manipulated the certification of election results by the South Vietnamese National Assembly, and instituted the Phoenix Program. It worked particularly closely with the ethnic minority Montagnards, Hmong, and Khmer. There are 174 National Intelligence Estimates dealing with Vietnam, issued by the CIA after coordination with the U.S. intelligence community.
The United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races was an organization whose objective was autonomy for various indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in South Vietnam, including the Montagnards in the Central Highlands, the Chams in Central Vietnam, and the Khmer Krom in Southern Vietnam. Initially a political movement, after 1969 it evolved into a fragmented guerrilla group that carried on simultaneous insurgencies against the governments of South Vietnam under President Nguyen Van Thieu and North Vietnam of Ho Chi Minh. Opposed to all forms of Vietnamese rule, FULRO fought against both sides in the Vietnam War against the Soviet-aligned North and the American-aligned South at the same time. FULRO's primary supporter during the 1960s and early 1970s conflict in Southeast Asia was Cambodia, with some aid sent by the People's Republic of China during the period of the Third Indochina War.
The 1959 to 1963 phase of the Vietnam War started after the North Vietnamese had made a firm decision to commit to a military intervention in the guerrilla war in the South Vietnam, a buildup phase began, between the 1959 North Vietnamese decision and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which led to a major US escalation of its involvement. Vietnamese communists saw this as a second phase of their revolution, the US now substituting for the French.
The Viet Cong (VC) insurgency expanded in South Vietnam in 1962. U.S. military personnel flew combat missions and accompanied South Vietnamese soldiers in ground operations to find and defeat the insurgents. Secrecy was the official U.S. policy concerning the extent of U.S. military involvement in South Vietnam. The commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), General Paul D. Harkins, projected optimism that progress was being made in the war, but that optimism was refuted by the concerns expressed by a large number of more junior officers and civilians. Several prominent magazines, newspapers and politicians in the U.S. questioned the military strategy the U.S. was pursuing in support of the South Vietnamese government of President Ngô Đình Diệm. Diệm created the Strategic Hamlet Program as his top priority to defeat the VC. The program intended to cluster South Vietnam's rural dwellers into defended villages where they would be provided with government social services.
1959 saw Vietnam still divided into South and North. North Vietnam authorized the Viet Cong (VC) to undertake limited military action as well as political action to subvert the Diệm government. North Vietnam also authorized the construction of what would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail to supply the VC in South Vietnam. Armed encounters between the VC and the government of South Vietnam became more frequent and with larger numbers involved. In September, 360 soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) were ambushed by a force of about 100 VC guerrillas.
In 1958, the upswing in violence against the government of South Vietnam continued, much of which was committed by the communist-dominated insurgents now called the Viet Cong (VC). In South Vietnam, President Ngo Dinh Diem appeared to be firmly in power, although many American officials expressed concern about the repressive nature of his regime. The United States continued to finance most of the budget of the government of South Vietnam. North Vietnam continued to campaign for reunification with the South while focusing on its internal economic development, but pressure from hard-pressed communists in the South was forcing the North to contemplate a more active military role in overthrowing the Diem government.
Racism in Vietnam has been mainly directed by the majority and dominant ethnic Vietnamese Kinh against ethnic minorities such as Degars (Montagnards), Chams and the Khmer Krom. It has also been directed against black people from other countries around the world as well.
The United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races waged a nearly three decade long insurgency against the governments of North and South Vietnam, and later the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The FULRO insurgents represented the interests of indigenous Muslim and Hindu Cham, Montagnards, and Buddhist Khmer Krom against the ethnic Kinh Vietnamese. They were supported and equipped by China and Cambodia according to those countries' interests in the Indochina Wars.
The native inhabitants of the Central Highlands of Vietnam are known as the Montagnard. The Vietnamese conquered the Central Highlands during their "march to the south". Ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh) people now outnumber the indigenous Degars after state-sponsored colonization directed by both the government of South Vietnam and the current Communist government of unified Vietnam. The Montagnards have engaged in conflicts with the Vietnamese, from the anti-Communist South Vietnamese government, the Viet Cong, to the Communist government of unified Vietnam. There are contrasting views on this issue, as the constitution of the government of Vietnam states "Article 36 of the Constitution, the state invests heavily in education and supports various preferential programmes for ethnic minorities, like ethnic minority boarding schools, lower entry requirements and quota for minorities." Both the initial 1945 constitution and the revised 1992 constitution of North Vietnam and the successor state the Socialist Republic of Vietnam stated that all minority groups in Vietnam have the right to maintain their mother tongues in their schooling as well as to use their languages to preserve their ethnic cultures and values, although the degree of enforcement remains ongoingly debated due to complicated nature.
