The Vietnam War was the most controversial war in U.S. history. Also called the Indochina War, it has been said to have started in 1957 when communist rebels of North Vietnam launched an attack on The South. The country was divided because of the communistic views of the North. The North was trying to take over and make Vietnam a communist country. The war finally ended on April 30, 1973 with a defeated America going home, after the North Vietnamese had taken over the south.

The U.S. first got involved after president Dwight Eisenhower said, "If we let the communists take over, the other Asian countries would fall like dominos." At that time he pledged to assist the South Vietnamese government with war. By 1954 there were 342 American military personal there. The mounting communist assault against the South then prompted President John F. Kennedy to increase the troop strength to 16,000 by the time he was assassinated in 1963.

One of the biggest ways the U.S. acquired the troops, was by the draft. This was a method to get people to war. Anyone from the ages 18 to 26 had to sign up. After you signed up, they would give you a card that said that you

Many of the 2,000,000 veterans of the war suffered many illnesses once they returned back to the U.S. Some of them included insomnia, drug abuse, mental illness, and over exposure to Agent Orange, a chemical used in Vietnam to thin out all the brush from the trees. This caused cancer and other major illnesses in people who were around it. Most of them were basically ignored when they got home. Many people said that since they fought in the war they weren’t welcome back. The government has set up many homes for veterans and hospitals to treat any illnesses that were associated with the war.

In April 1975 the South Vietnamese surrendered at Saigon. The death toll for the South Vietnamese had topped 1,000,000 deaths. The civilians in both North and South Vietnam were countless. In the war the U.S spent over $150 billion, and the amount of bombing was the higher than any war the U.S. had ever been involved in.

This war has set up the fact that congress will now challenge the President on foreign moves. The war has also set up comparisons on wars for the future. Today many people argued that the U.S. shouldn’t have jumped into the Vietnam War. They feel that it was a war that would not have affected the US economy in any way. Others feel that it helped in stopping the spread of communism in South East Asia. The Vietnam War was a very controversial war, which lasted over a decade. It also caused many protests and Left many Veterans’ unwanted. I hope that this kind of a situation can be avoided in the future, as any war is devastating.

A total of 2.6 million Vietnamese were killed. The American deployment of troops jumped from 23,300 in 1963 to 184,000 in 1966 and reached 542,000 in January 1969 u

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