11.1: Vietnam and Counterculture

Military conuict in Vietnam began in the earliest days of the Cold War. Vietnam, which was then part of French Indochina, immediately began sghting its French colonizers when World War II ended, in an eoort to secure independence. As early as 1919, Vietnamese nationalists—including Ho Chi Minh—looked to the United States to support Vietnam’s independence claim. (Colonized people around the world hoped President Woodrow Wilson would support their claims of self-determination. These hopes were generally ignored.) Ho had embraced communism in the 1920s, but even as late as 1945, when he was authoring the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, he still modeled it on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The United States, though, was still unwilling to help Vietnam. By the end of World War II, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Cold War was taking hold. In this context, the United States would not support an avowed communist or anyone they believed was backed by the Soviet Union. War broke out between France and independence sghters in Vietnam in 1946. Fighting continued for years.