By the time the war was over, America had committed 2.6 million troops to South Vietnam. Total casualties (including wounded) were horrendous: 365,000 for America; 5 million for Vietnam.
How did America get involved in Vietnam in the first place? Why didn’t the United States learn the same lessons the French had learned when the
area was called "French Indochina?" It was, to oversimplify, a fight to prevent communism from spreading south in this largely agrarian country. But as Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader, famously told the French in 1940:
You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.
Some writers soundly criticize the war and
argue it was a losing proposition from the very beginning. (Government documents, collectively referred to as "The Pentagon Papers," provide support for that conclusion.) Others argue it was a
necessary step in winning the Cold War.
However history ultimately judges the events of war, the story of America in Vietnam begins in the 1950s. Initially providing limited assistance to France, President Eisenhower met with the leader of South Vietnam in 1957. Now free of French control, President Ngo Dinh Diem was seeking more aid for his recently independent country.
America provided expanded aid when President Kennedy first sent Air Force and Army military advisors to South Vietnam in 1961. The U.S. plan was NOT to stay in Vietnam. The plan was simply to advise Diem and his military how to ward off their neighbors to the north.
But those plans changed during 1962-1964.