Vietnam War: Important Events 1962-1969 - Essay Example

And a second reason cited for the failure of America in Vietnam was the way the media in the US turned the people against the war and the US government (Weist and Barbier, 2010, 56). There are other reasons as well why the American war in Vietnam was a misadventure. The south versus north conflict in Vietnam had a very long history into which America was plunging as an ignorant participant who really did not understand its dynamics of it (Weist and Barbier,2010, 56). The Vietnamese soldiers were special in their ability in guerilla warfare, as they had learned it from fighting “Mongols to the Chinese” (Weist and Barbier, 2010, 56). By 1969, the defeat of America was so visible that Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird himself coined the word, “Vietnamization”, to describe “American troop withdrawals” (Kranow, 1997, 697).

What was the gain for America in getting involved in the conflict between South and North Vietnam is the question, which will answer the politics of the Vietnam War. For, America the war was just a game for global political domination, while the war was for the Vietnamese people, bloody civil strife, a matter of freedom and sovereignty. It was this difference that determined the course of war eventually. The Northern Vietnamese forces were motivated by an ideology and the hope that it imparted, while the American soldiers were youths just out of their schools, ignorant of the greater politics of the war. They were compelled to rage war in an unknown territory, to face unknown enemies, whose tactics of war surprised and defeated them.