its sad that people dont seem to know what South Vietnam was? About 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war fighting against the North Vietnamese and for the direction they wanted their country to go. By the end of the war there were over a million South Vietnamese fighting against the North.. I'm not sure if they teach that in schools or not. The South Vietnamese were fighting along with the US, South Korea, New Zealand, Thailand, Australia, Philippines as their allies. They were fighting North Vietnam which was allied with Russia, China and Czechoslovak.
They don't teach that in Vietnam, are you kidding? That's like asking if you would find Tianmen Square in a chinese history book. Communist countries completely invent their own history like bad fanfiction.
@@cjr-en4wr I don't think VolkXue was saying one side was more right, simply that the girls didn't seem to know that the US was fighting *with* the Vietnamese just as much as they were fighting against them. Right or wrong, the fact is that it seems the girls haven't learned about the south's part in this. Perhaps they have and their reactions in a foreign language don't bring out the nuance.
@@michaelm.1947 jingoistic, patronizing nonsense. How could a Vietnamese person possibly know their own history? Lets have a white American man come and tell them right?
The book he was reading with the red cover at the beginning is in French (I am an native French speaker) the title of the book is "The wars of Indochina" which was the name the French gave to Vietnam when it was one of it's' "colonies". That book was required reading for officers as it gave a fairly good understanding of the background of the situation there, the strategic aspect of the rice crop and so on. The thinking at the time was that "whoever controls Vietnam's rice harvest gets to decide who eats" so it became of strategic importance to not allow it to fall into communist hands as it was believed it would lead to it being used as a weapon to cause famines and foster communist expansion throughout Asia. Something that was called the "domino theory". It was one of the main causes for American involvement.
The guy who played the NVA comander was from Vietnam. His involvement in this film and another called Green Dragon got him banned from the entertainment industry in Vietnam and he later immigrated to the United States and settled in San Francisco, California until his death in 2011.
As far as I can recollect Full Metal Jacket was based in I Corp in Da Nang and Hue. Forest Gum was in IV Corp in the Mekong Delta. Apacolypse Now and We Were Soldiers were based in II Corp in the Central Higlands.
You mean a communist govt took trigger issue with his hot take outside of state sanctioned narrative and forced him to flee to a freedom of expression based democracy? Gee, ya don’t say??
You nailed. Vietnam actually took his passport and denied him the right to be involved in pictures. His letter to his son was published in the L.A. Times and there was world wide outrage and that's when the Government allowed him to leave the country with his family.
It's so surreal watching Vietnam war movies with you guys. Edit: And I'm curious, do they not teach you about the over one million men of The Army of the Republic of Vietnam who fought alongside the Americans? Not saying we should have been there, but when you call them traitors I am a bit perplexed.
ARVN were pretty much treated as traitors once Saigon fell in 1975 and the shooting stopped, pretty sure their side of the story is not told within Vietnam today, you pretty much have to go outside to find out much about it.
They are reflecting what they are taught and I'm sure the government of Vietnam minimizes the south vietnamese cause in their teachings of the war. Remember they renamed Saigon to Ho Chi Minh city.
They only learned what their government taught them. The 1 million who fought for South Vietnam to them were traitors. Those so-called traitors thought the North Vietnamese and Vietcong themselves to be traitors to their people.
Yeah I don't believe the Communist Party of Vietnam would EVER allow education about the South. Just like the CCP, anything even remotely questioning of Communism is taken to be seen as treason because the Communist Party has crafted propaganda that synonymizes the Nation with the Party. Typical one-party-state behavior and so I cannot fault anyone who lives there/was born there for not knowing. But they can't stop people from using the internet and finding out more :)
The Vietnamese soldier with the Americans is not a traitor but is actually in the Vietnamese Rangers which was a light Infantry in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
In Vietnam they're generally not taught that. They're just taught that America came and started attacking and bombing. The propaganda surrounding the war is pretty wild, borderlining on just rewriting history.
@@Waterford1992 don't bother. I've seen that guy comment many similar replies all over this video. He's either: A) dumb. B) ignorant. C) a propagandaist. D) a mega simp.
I really enjoyed seeing this from your perspective. My wife is also Vietnamese, she is from a farm outside of Saigon and she talks about how her family had to use a steel American soldiers helmet to cook in because they had no stove or anything like that. As Americans, we sometimes forget that both sides had people who fought for what they believed in. I was fortunate enough to work with a great group of Vietnamese men who served and helped the Americans. Several of them told me of how after the U.S. left they were imprisoned for fighting against the North. Thank you for your honest comments and genuine thoughts and feelings.
In my country (I’m not American), the conflict in Vietnam isn’t discussed in much depth. When it does come up, it’s usually in a simplistic way, such as, “Oh, the US intervened in Vietnam to take control of the country,” and that’s the end of it. Movies often reinforce this narrative to some extent. Personally, I always felt there was more to the story. During the "cold war" the Soviet Union supported various movements to expand its communist ideology, while the US sought to counteract these efforts. In Vietnam, this translated into a division between the North and South, with the North attempting to overthrow the South’s government, which was aligned with Western powers. The situation led to widespread violence and significant suffering for the civilian population. The US became involved after repeated requests for assistance from the South Vietnamese government, aiming to stabilize the region. However, external support for the opposing side made the situation increasingly complex. Despite tactical successes, the conflict ultimately ended due to political decisions, with agreements that were not consistently upheld. Following the withdrawal of US forces, the North consolidated control over the country, leading to a significant shift in the nation’s trajectory. It’s similar to what happened in Korea, but with a different outcome. I believe that the official narrative in Vietnam is quite different. We can observe this in the way the girls refer to Vietnamese individuals who fought alongside the Americans as traitors.
that ignores the facts of French Colonialism and how the North Vietnamese clans and South Vietnamese clans had had civil wars in the past. The US was caught up in historical forces it didn't understand and drew the wrong conclusions.
After the end of WWII, there was the Truman Doctrine, which had two missions: 1) containment of the USSR sphere of influence, and 2) support those, originally indirectly, those who are defending their countries against communist parties and doctrines. First case after WWII, before the Korean War, was the Civil War in Greece. This was the first proxy conflict of support US and its allies, against support of the USSR. In the case of Vietnam, its original purpose of the US involved was containment, as President Eisenhower feared a "domino" effect would occur, which he though that the conflict would spill over into nearby nations. In post-war Europe, allies were stationed in Germany and created a containment against the "Iron Curtain" which was the satellite states in Eastern Europe that fell under USSR sphere of influence. As well as military presence in Europe, the Marshall Plan was implement, giving aid in rebuilding Western Europe.
The Vietnamese man at 17:10 was from South Vietnam. The war was essentially North Vietnam vs South Vietnam with the US siding with the South against the North, and ultimately the North won.
@@UMADtouchgrass They did beat the US, in one of the most humiliating defeats your country has faced (other than maybe Afghanistan), and subsequently Vietnam is an amazing place with amazing people. If the fascists had of won, we wouldn't have amazing reactors like these two. Try reading a book dummy.
@@SovermanandVioboy did you took history class? the American people didt want that war there, riots, protest ect thats why we pull out, not because they beat us.
@@SovermanandVioboy Americans left the Vietnam due to politics reasons. The high number of victims and the anti-war propaganda made US settle an agreement with the vietnamese communist and withdraw
At that time, Vietnam was divided into two countries. North Vietnam's capital was Hanoi, and South Vietnam's capital was Saigon. The South was allied with the US, while the North was allied with the communists (China and the USSR, currently Russia). That's why there was inevitably a war.
Correct. The girls don't know this, unfortunately. The SOUTH Vietnamese government asked the USA for help against the oppression of NORTH Vietnam....that's why the USA went to Vietnam. The South Vietnamese soldiers TOGETHER WITH THE USA soldiers, fought against NORTH Vietnam ( who was supported by China and Russia with money and weapons. ) The girls just think some Vietnamese men were traitors which is totally wrong. The ENTIRE SOUTH VIETNAM joined together with the American soldiers to fight the NORTH.
And the south came to existence by being created by ex french colonial authorities and survived trough repeatly refusing to make fair elections wich president ensenhower admted that if it happened the communists would won by 80%. The war was fully evitable, literary just needed ok fair election already agreed by bolth states at UN so it didnt happened
it was really a civil war and all sides allied with Vietnam to represent their ideologies.. North Wanted Communism hence Communist nations backing them and the South wanted Democracy hence the Democratic nations supporting them. By the end of the war there were over a million South Vietnamese troops. I think the US was only able to evacuate around 150,000 South Vietnamese at the end of the war. After the war the North Vietnamese sent the South to forced labor camps. Where they were reindoctrinated with communist ideology and often faced harsh treatment, including torture, while their property was confiscated and businesses nationalized.. No doubt something they dont teach everyday today.. Also a lot of people fled the country by boat to escape what the North Vietnamese were doing.. They became known as "boat people" at the time.
@@Chamomileable oh, i'm more mentioning the facts because it feels like people dont know them.. I'm not saying one side right or wrong, or if the US should have been involved to start with. We know the Gulf of Tonkin incident was highly questionable today.. One thing i will say though, after it started and all.. I'm not really into leaving that many allies to suffer at the end.. I wasnt into doing it in Vietnam, Afghanistan and i dont want to see it happen in Ukraine either.
One main reason I am subscribed, seeing your reactions to movies made in USA that involves Vietnam especially when it involves history between the two countries. It gives different perspective from the other side, and I feel it's beautiful to witness and see. Thank you for the reaction and thank you for being you!
I agree wholeheartedly. I am amazed at their perspective on the war since it's been only 50 years since it ended and the Vietnamese people are still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. I don't know if I would be as forgiving as these two marvelous young ladies are of Americans if some nation had done to my people what we did to them. That unnecessary war cost the lives of over 2 million Vietnamese 😮😢 and it was all based on a lie. I recall watching a documentary on the war and listening to an American soldier talk about how confused he was that the Vietnamese hated him while he was there to help them. American soldiers for the most part fought bravely and with good intentions. It was our government that was evil. I remember the scandal surrounding McNamara's Morons. If you don't know about this issue, look it up. Our government was 100% at fault in that war. Today Vietnam is about as close to being our strongest ally as you can get. They are also the fastest growing economy in the region with the highest standard of living for its people. They basically have a free market economy though they still call themselves Communist🤔 go figure. Ho Chi Minh was never going to be a puppet of China or Russia. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Let's face it, we fucked up.
Do Vietnamese schools actually characterize the Vietnam War as being between the US and Vietnam? Because that's totally NOT what the Vietnam War was. It was a Vietnamese civil war first and foremost. The US was merely fighting on behalf of the South, with the North & Viet Cong supported by the Soviet Union & China. They know they were split into two countries at the time... right?
South Vietnam only existed because of foreign support. Had foreign powers stayed out of it, Vietnam would have been reunified within months of independence.
Communist North Vietnam will tell lies when they won the war so when the later generations grow up the government will have teachers tell a different story probably not related to the civil war unless they come to America they would learn the actual truth of what really happened in their country from the U.S. history books these ladies were shown propaganda in their school so when you hear them calling South vietnamese soldiers traitors you know they were learning a different history instead of being told the real truth that's what living under communism is like the government who won get to tell a different story to their liking for centuries....
@@JohnShepherd117 It wouldn't have been a civil war if America hadn't intervened, it was a completely unnecessary war, if America hadn't supported a puppet regime millions Less would have died
the vietnamese who fights as you said for the US ARMY is not a traitor, he is from the south vietnam army and at that time south vietnam was an ally of the USA
USA was betrayed them as now they trying to do same to Ukraine. But on Ukraine was based American World Order. It's scary how people would have 2 months of piece and then go to BIG WAR, then just help Allie to win war and protect and to not have a big war...
The story is told by the winners. For them they were traitors because they supported a foreign army in their conflict, although in the north army also had a lot of foreigners, like chinese and soviets. The losers in a conflict will always be the "bad guys"
@@danilokenobi I'm guessing the girls here were taught just the "winners side". China and Russia definitely manipulated this was just as the US did. If the roles were reversed, these girls might be calling the north Vietnamese traitors
Also, US Army NEVER invaded North Vietnam. A lot of bombing from the air, yes but no US soldiers in North. Just as in Full Metal Jacket, all fighting on the ground was done in the country of South Vietnam to repel the invading North Viet troops.
"South Vietnam" was the American invasion. It was a puppet state with no popularity or legitimacy whatsoever, created by force to keep part of Vietnam under foreign control.
There were US forces in the North.... unofficially. They were there for intelligence gathering and sabotage. I believe that they were part of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam - Studies Observation Group) people. There were huge numbers of CIA staff in Laos. We ran a 'secret war' in Laos.
At 8:12 Moore is talking about the Sioux, a Native American people who are known for their semi-nomadic lifestyle and horse riding skills. The US Army fought them from 1875 to almost 1900 in The Great Plains Indian Wars.
@@DomLab-g2n I was in Vietnam just under a month ago, for 5 weeks. Judging from what I saw at museums, that's not something they are taught. They are shown a version where Vietnam pretty much won every major battle, and the US mostly terrorised the civilian population. It's also shown as a war between Vietnam and the US (where the US just suddenly decided to come in and kill everyone for largely no reason), not the North vs South.
Do they not explain that now? The south Vietnam government was very corrupt, basically just the old local elites who converted to Catholic to curry favor with the French colonizers.
@@thedragondemands5186 Yes, South Vietnam was a "corrupt" regime according to the modern history they are taught there. Only to legitimize Communism. But we'll just ignore that Communism didn't find it's way into North Vietnam from free choices people made...they were also influenced. If you believe otherwise, you sir are a moron. This is how history gets passed on, not unlike that of genes, carefully selected then passed on.
Because Communism took control and thus they get to control what information the later generations are taught in schools. The old saying that "History is written by the victors." isn't just a random thought. They call the Southern Vietnamese traitors...but don't consider themselves as corrupted by Communism.
The Vietnamese education system is incredibly demeaning toward the South Vietnamese because the party that won and took control of the country considered them traitors. They aren't seen as Vietnamese, but as traitors who helped the Americans. I don't like the glee over the idea of "hehehe we won" because it wasn't a victory for anyone. Countless Vietnamese died in what can best be described as a combination of a proxy war on behalf of Russia and an attempt to free themselves from French rule that the US had the unfortunately idea to wander into. I don't do business with the countless ethnic grievances in Southeast Asia because once you start digging it just goes on forever and follows you across the earth. The Vietnamese are mostly a bit arrogant about the US pulling out but their real foe the entire time has been China. China battled them for hundreds of years in various conflicts and had enslaved many Vietnamese. Even so, whether they realized it or not, their cult of personality behind Ho Chi Minh led them into joining the same loosely connected eastern coalition that China was also part of. Even the war with China after we left didn't seem to convince them. Now they're a minor southeast Asian tourist destination known for cheap textiles and their current cordial relationship with the US isn't enough to erase the fact that their old enemy China is breathing down their neck and we're the most likely force to defend them if things go hot in Southeast Asia.
Thank you ladies for watching this one.. it was a tough story to experience but it's important so we can honor and value their sacrifice by not making the same mistakes again.
I don't think the story of the Vietnam war can be told without the perspective of the Vietnamese boat people who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.
Every civil war has its refugees. After the American Revolution the Americans loyal to England had to flee to Canada. The Vietnam War is similar in so many ways to our War of Independence.
The black and white pictures shown after the 'broken arrow' scene are actual battlefield photographs taken by Joe Galloway on that fateful day. The dropping of napalm on U.S. troops was an accident, the soldier directing the airplanes miscalculated the distance. It is uncommon thanks to good training, but it does happen.
The men attacking the Americans are north Vietnamese and your enemy. As south Vietnamese your grandparents fought with us Americans and that is how your grandparents were able to come to United States as refugees .
in America - the government is the people......people elected that senator who voted to send in troops.. so while we can point to the government... in the end it's us. So it's weird to hear when a foreigner says something like 'we love America and the American people... it's their government we hate' - - um... well....
bro the government can't do the fighting who the hell is gonna run the country once they're killed? If the government did the actual fighing the country would collapse after the first wave of fighting lol
The US didn't invade Vietnam to depose Ho Chi Minh's Communist government. The US was part of a multinational coalition of anti-communist forces supporting the Republic of Vietnam (Saigon government) in its efforts against a Communist insurgency (the National Liberation Front or VietCong) backed by the People's Republic of Vietnam (Hanoi government), who had assistance from the People's Republic of China and the USSR. The US and its allies fought the PAVN on the ground and through a bombing campaign to make North Vietnam withdraw its support of the VietCong. Once a ceasefire was reached in 1973, the US and the other nations withdrew. The PAVN invaded the South again in 1975 and the US refused to reinvolve itself in the conflict, leading to the unification of Vietnam, plus the creation of Communist regimes in Laos and Cambodia, and the following Cambodian Genocide.
The nuances of the Vietnam war are lost on most of the current generation (hell it was lost on the Vietnam generation). They just see a US invasion when it was the US defending South Vietnam from the North. In wars of national unification, the morality is always difficult. Two generations after Bismark's reunification of Germany the Saxons and Bavarians generally were proud Germans and didn't think of the Prussians as enemies, just overbearing. The Soldiers of South Vietnam were certainly not traitors, just defending their country from the invading communists from the North. These ladies growing up in a unified Vietnam with its capitol in Hanoi undoubtedly grew up with a skewed history of this war as the communist party still rules the country though thankfully has opened up a lot since the early 90s. I applaud these ladies for watching these difficult movies though. The war was certainly brutal on both sides and this movie was as realistic as could be reasonably done. Also, from what I understand about the Vietnamese 'charging' tactics, as we see briefly in the film they liked to close in on US troops as quickly as possible as at longer range US firepower and marksmanship would cause more casualties than a charge from the nearest covered and concealed fighting position.
Everything you say is correct. But change the perspective, you change the answer. The Vietnamese won independence from France through military means. We'd probably have cheered for them if they had not been a communist independence force. Who were all these outside powers, on both sides of the cold war, to come in and divide the country after? What promises did Ho Chi Minh owe foreign empire builders? In fact, they already betrayed him. The peace deal included a elections to unify the country which never happened for fear the communists would win easily. And for the criticism I could level at the communist system, the southern government was corrupt as hell. Not worth fighting for.
It's honestly amazing how effective the pro-communist propaganda has been in reframing the Vietnam War. There is nobody that laments the existence of South Korea when compared to North Korea, yet the situations were virtually identical. Vietnam only exists as it does today because they effectively abandoned communist principles in favor of market principles. (they still claim to be a "socialist oriented market economy", but in reality that just means it's 95% capitalist.) They should consider themselves VERY lucky that their leadership abandoned the sinking ship of communism after the cold war, otherwise they would be far closer to North Korea than South Korea today. They are communist in name only, which is kind of funny.
I wonder what is it you ladies where taught about the war. Who started it, and how other countries got involved. Especially since you ladies yelled 'traitor' to a South Vietnamese soldier.
Ho Chi Minh was a central figure in Vietnam's history, striving throughout his life for the country's unification and independence. His efforts can be divided into two phases: initial cooperation with the United States during World War II and the subsequent confrontation during the Cold War. Efforts to Unite Vietnam 1. Cooperation with the United States: During World War II, Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the United States to resist Japanese occupation. His organization, the Viet Minh, received support from the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), including weapons, equipment, and training. Ho hoped that this cooperation would lead to U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence after the war. 2. Diplomatic Outreach: After Vietnam’s declaration of independence on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent multiple letters to U.S. President Harry Truman, appealing for support and referencing the American Declaration of Independence. However, these appeals were ignored as the U.S. prioritized supporting France, its European ally. 3. First Indochina War (1946-1954): Ho led North Vietnam in its fight against France, which sought to retain Vietnam as a colony. The conflict culminated in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Accords, which temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Ho anticipated national elections in 1956 to unify Vietnam, but the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold them. --- Why Did Conflict Arise Between North Vietnam and the U.S.? 1. Ideological Clashes: During the Cold War, the U.S. viewed Ho Chi Minh's government as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. This led to significant U.S. military and financial support for South Vietnam to prevent communist expansion (the Domino Theory). 2. Support for South Vietnam: The U.S. bolstered Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime despite its repressive policies against opposition forces, including the Viet Cong, who were supported by North Vietnam. The escalating conflict ultimately drew the U.S. into direct military involvement by 1965. 3. Resistance from North Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese leaders saw U.S. actions as neocolonialism and considered the conflict a struggle for national liberation. They received significant backing from the Soviet Union and China. --- Conclusion Ho Chi Minh initially sought peaceful unification and diplomatic ties with the U.S. However, America’s disregard for his appeals and Cold War geopolitics led to escalating tensions. The division of Vietnam and U.S. support for the South made confrontation inevitable, resulting in the Vietnam War.
Joe Galloway is the only civilian to be awarded the Bronze Star for Valor for what he did during the battle. During the Gulf War in 1990, he was our embedded reporter in the 24th Infantry. Our division commander, Gen McCaffrey, said Joe was the only reporter he trusted to report what we were doing honestly. He died in 2021. RIP, Joe.
The problem is that usually someone does actually win, land and resources are won through war, which the descendants of the people fighting the war will inherit forever. In ideology wars the winner imposes his ideology on the losers and all must follow the winners way of life, for instance religious wars and like this one communist wars. But there's certainly winners and losers in war there's no doubt about that.
3:28 His name is Nguyễn Hữu An, and he served as a Vietnamese military officer in the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during the Vietnam War. He was called the "General of Battles" by the famed General Võ Nguyên Giáp. The State of Vietnam and the Communist Party of Vietnam presented him with six honors. He died in Hanoi, Vietnam on April 9, 1995, he was 68. The actor who played him, the late Đơn Dương emigrated to the United States in 2003. Also here is another interesting fact! Some Vietnamese actors in the movie had been in the North Vietnamese Army.
Do young Vietnamese people even know about South Vietnam? Are they taught about it at school? The Vietnam war started as a civil war, before the US intervened on the side of South Vietnam after they asked for help when the North violated the peace settlement and attacked the south.
Are you dumb enouth to not consider that they might just consider the people who colaborated with the invasor an traitor just like it is in the whole rest of the world???? Do you ask french people if they know what vichy france was when they acused nazi colaborators of beijg traitors??? "Before the us interved" The usa was funding the french war since before south vietnam was even a thing. "The north violtated tye peace settlement and attacked". The south a creation of ex french colonial authorities refused to hold reunifying elections wich it had agree to do during the paris accords and wich president eisenhower said that if happened it would result in 80% of the vietnamese voting for the communists. The south broke the deal and north military reaction only happened after the south started slaughtering pro reunification groups who guess what, asked the north to help. Dumb american thinks hes invasion is special and thus colaborating does not exist😂
That's like asking if young chinese people ever heard of tianmen square. They obviously don't. Sure, it's not as bad as north korea, but each one of these communist and ex-xommunist governments write their own history like teenage girls write fanfaction. except they try to kill you if you disagree.
Hold on there. Who violated the peace agreement? After Dien Bien Phu fell and the French decided they had had enough, they signed the Geneva Accords at the Geneva Convention of July 21, 1954. The Accords stipulated that the country would be divided into North and South with a general election to be held in 1956 to reunite the country. The US didn't like that part of the Cease Fire agreement so we didn't sign. When 1956 came around the CORRUPT DICTATOR of South Vietnam, backed by the US, refused to participate in any election. The notion that South Vietnam was some sort of democracy is pure bullshit. It was governed by dictatorships that were hated by most Vietnamese.😮
as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides -north and south- and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. That is a lot of death.
@@storagebox1793 what I find interesting about that number is that the girls on this channel clearly think they "killed all the Americans and pushed them out" so to speak, when Vietnamese people had far greater casualties and the US withdrew not because they couldn't fight but because the American population shifted to be against the war.
America lost 58,300 soldiers during the Vietnam conflict. South Vietnam lost between 200k and 250k soldiers. North Vietnam lost in excess of 1.1 MILLION and over 2 million civilians. America never lost a major military engagement. This is a perfect example of a military success and a political failure. We had the technology to completly annihilate the North Vietnamese, but we were never allowed to take our gloves off and engage the enemy for maximum effect. And we still killed more than 3.1 million with only 58k casualties with one hand behind our back.
41:12. The actress Madeleine Stow here is a lead actress in one of my favorite films called “Last of the Mohicans. Brilliant novel as well. Has one of the greatest actors of all time Daniel-Day Lewis you have yet to see his work. It is about the struggle prior to the US Revolutionary War with the most powerful military nation at that time England. Where English and English soon to be Americans were sorting out their relationship, while at the same time fighting others. These were very turbulent times as European Nations were expanding into what would eventually become over much time the USA. It is romantic, patriotic, violent, beautiful, very troublesome, and speaks to war from two sides if not more in a way. It is a beloved film. I think the MMLs will love it too.
My Father and both my uncles joined the army and were sent to Vietnam. One of my Uncles in particular was there for several tours of duty and was involved in a "Broken Arrow" situation similar to what we saw here in the film and he still gets emotional describing it 60+ years later. As they explain in the film, Broken Arrow means a U.S. Army unit is being overrun and is in danger of being annihilated by the enemy, what it does is create a highest priority call for help to any and all US Military or Allied units within range to send any aid or support they possibly can regardless of their branch and what other orders they may have (with very few exceptions). As you could see in the film, with the US Army, Navy and Air Force having so much Air Power a Broken Arrow call could bring in hundreds of aircraft deploying thousands of bombs and rockets within a very short time.
All told, the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) suffered around two hundred thousand casualties while Communist North Vietnam suffered around one million casualties.
There are some excellent movie from the Vietnamese point of view: THE ABANDONED FIELD: FREE FIRE ZONE THE GIRL FROM HANOI THE SCENT OF BURNING GRASS DIEN BIEN PHI (1972)
My understanding of that time was that the US military won the vast majority of the battles. The Americans lost primarily due to the south Vietnamese government being inept and corrupt and American public opinion at home wanting the war to end. The US had many protests about their involvement as it was a non defensive war. The public also grew inpatient with the south Vietnamese government. They essentially could not maintain the advances that the Americans made and were never prepared to lead.
The US didn't lose the war. South Vietnam won the war, for the most part in 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended US involvement in Vietnam, maintained the status quo of the two independent countries, and included assurances from North Vietnam that they would not engage in further hostilities. When North Vietnam broke the treaty, the US simply did not get involved a second time.
Thank you for making it through this movie - I am sure it was difficult for you. I feel sympathy for you as you react to the heartbreak of Americans dying, then feel the sadness of Vietnamese dying as well. This is the tragedy of war, and the beauty of this movie - it avoids “good versus bad” and tries instead to tell a story of courage and honor regardless of ideology. As for Vietnam, it has slowly flourished as a unified country and “Vietnamized” Communism to become a strong, independent nation you can be proud to call your Mother country. As an American Vietnam-era veteran, I was lucky to marry a Vietnamese woman, and be accepted into a Vietnamese family. We return to VN every year to enjoy the wonderful culture and traditions with our Vietnamese family, friends, and neighbors there. Chúc bạn và gia đình sức khỏe và hạnh phúc ! (…and thank goodness for Google Translate !)
33:05 No, the North Vietnamese didn't win a single battle in the entire war. In fact, it was not even close. In the largest assault the North Vietnamese conducted, the Tet Offensive, the North led a surprise attack having sneaked people into the south for weeks pretending to be civilians and waited, then led a massive attack on many different locations at the same time. I'm sure you know about it, but what I doubt you know is how badly the North lost the battle. There were about 2300 South Vietnamese soldiers killed, and about 300 US soldiers killed while 60,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed. It was such a lopsided victory that then president Lyndon Baines Johnson said that the North Vietnamese were amateur soldiers, and he was right. They were poorly trained and equipped. Just like in the Korean war where the North Koreans and Chinese would try to overwhelm the Americans by with greater numbers of men, sending huge amounts of soldiers into a battle expecting the majority of them to die. The North Vietnamese lost more soldiers in that single battle than the Americans did in the entire war. The only advantage the North had was that the communist government was willing to sacrifice millions of people to win, which is evident in the death toll from the Tet Offensive which I mentioned earlier. The fact is that the American soldiers were not defeated at all. They never lost ground to the North, and they never lost a battle to the North. The Americans were never pushed back and they were never forced to surrender. Believe it or not, the Americans never launched an offensive campaign into the north with the intention of taking any ground, instead their goal was to defend the Southern Government from the invading Northern Government, they were purely fighting a defensive war, hoping that the North would realize that they couldn't defeat the US and sue for peace. Had the US military been ordered to invade the North and take over the country then they would have easily done so. They did not invade however because they feared it would cause China to become involved and escalate the war even further. It wasn't China that the US ultimately feared becoming involved, it was the Soviet Union that they were actually concerned with. If China became involved it was feared it might lead to the Soviets becoming involved as well. The offensive campaigns the US led into the North were bombing campaigns, some of which were not successful due to President Johnson's rigid rules of engagement such as operation rolling thunder, and some like operation linebacker II were incredibly successful. In fact, operation linebacker II caused the North Vietnamese government to attend the Paris Peace Accords and sign a ceasefire, and the US agreed to withdraw but vowed that they replace any equipment the south lost on a 1 to 1 basis. That meant that every bullet, every fighter jet, every tank, every helicopter, and every rifle they lost the US would replace. The war was effectively won. Then the Watergate scandal happened in America where then President Richard Nixon was caught spying on his political opponents and was forced to resign. This led to an awkward situation because President Nixon's vice president had also resigned before that and was replaced by an unelected man Nixon chose. So when Nixon resigned, America had the first and only President that was not elected, President Gerald Ford. He was quite unpopular and because of all the scandals the opposing political party had taken the majority in Congress. Seemingly to spite their political opponents the new congressional majority chose NOT to honor the replacement deal made with the South to replace military equipment. So then as the US was withdrawing from the South, the North resumed hostilities and started attacking the South at places where the US had already left. They made sure NOT to attack the Americans so the US wouldn't recommit to the war. The US was not forced out of the country, they freely withdrew. You have to realize that what you learned in school was honestly just communist propaganda. I mean, you mentioned that the Vietnamese guy was a traitor, but he was a South Vietnamese soldier. They were never communist... You do realize that the Communist North Vietnamese government was the aggressor? Right? The South wasn't trying to invade the North, the North was invading the South. The North actually specifically targeted South Vietnamese civilians, and when the Communist government finally took control of the South there was a purge. Mass executions of South Vietnamese. I think this just highlights the dangers of single party political systems. All the information you were taught about the war was through a very carefully constructed lens in order to control the narrative about the Communist Party. The reason why this isn't as prominent in the west is because there are multiple political parties that compete with each other, and are more than willing to expose the opposing party. It's not perfect and doesn't always work like that, but free speech being a pillar of western society tends to mean that we have greater access to unfiltered information than in a society where a single party has a monopoly on government. You actually said multiple times in the video that the US forces had superior technology, which was the case. It was asymmetrical warfare and the North stood no chance against the most technologically advanced military in the world, the US Military. The death tolls highlight that fact perfectly.
Ken Burns: Vietnam is a 10 episode documentary on the Vietnam War. It pretty much sums up the American understanding of the war for most. It would be very interesting to see these girls reaction to it.
Her punching a pillow one second and urging to shoot down helicopters and 10 minutes later sympathizing with the same pilot while he 'purges' out is stomach is the exact reason for this film.
You have watched a lot movies about Vietnam from the American perspective. Please watch Oliver Stone's film Heaven and Earth, a Vietnamese woman's perspective staring Hiep Thi Le. You will love it ✌️❤️
Crazy Horse was a war leader of the Lakota Tribe. They are one of the Native American Clans who are members of the Sioux Tribes in the states of North Dakota and South Dakota. Crazy Horse fought in the Black Hills War. He was protecting his people's land against the White Americans who were invading and living on their land. There is a statue of Crazy Horse. It is carved near Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
@AhmedKoroma-um1rf General Custer was the worst soldier ever. For attacking the Native Americans because they discovered gold on the tribes land and forced them to live on reservations. Crazy Horse was risking his life and led the Crow and Lakota tribes to push Custer back
@@zacharyballif3212 you’re right on the money and they say the US was destroyed. This was a war that had interference from politicians. The North Vietnamese/Vietcong lost alot more people.
@@AlexisLopez-pb8ms in the end those politicians made us look stupid. The anti war backlash was the consequence of that. In 1995 an NVA officer was asked by a newspaper what the United States could have done to win the war and he said cut the Ho Chi Minh trail. That was the main supply corridor used by NVA and VC.
The Vietnamese fighting with the Americans are not "traitors". They were not fighting "for" the Americans, if anything it's the other way around. They are fighting for South Vietnam against North Vietnam.
You girls have to realize that half of Vietnam supported the Americans because they didn't want communism in their country. Vietnam wasn't so much China vs US, it was more like a civil war between the Vietnamese who wanted communism versus those who wanted freedom.
Pro tip...the little girl is Cindy Lou Who, in the Grinch, and lead singer of Pretty Reckless! His wife didn't go with a friend, but went with the cab drivers, to each widow, and her and the driver would console them. Because usually, the cab driver was a vet, just like here. Its simple really, the Vietnam people realize the north and communist soldiers were all brainwashed or forced, and that American troops were just there, to try and help them and stop communism. So they dont hate americans or american soldiers! I'm a vet myself, never went to an official combat zone, but i went to a few places, u wouldn't wanna go! A quick thought...we could have won this war easy and fast, if we would have fought it the way Animal Mother said, in Full Metal Jacket. Mine the harbor, bomb the hell out of the North, roll in with tanks, burn up the jungle. But the Media, and LBJ, wanted us to fight a "nice" war, and not be all big and bad! We should never have been here, but we went because of treaties and guilt, we had to the French, for them aiding us in the Revolutionary War. But good did come out of it. It's a beautiful country, friendly people, friendly to americans, fairly prosperous, and they have a certain amount of freedoms and religion and capitalism , today. I can't remember who said it, a general maybe during ww2, said, the American soldier by his feet, brings freedom and the gospel, better than any other way! When u go down the list of war movies... Platoon, hamburger Hill, saving Private Ryan, Blackhawk down, 13 hours, zero dark thirty, lone survivor, hacksaw Ridge, warhorse, 1917, Big Red one, thin Red line, boys in company C, Dunkirk, full metal jacket, apocalypse now, fury, and any others u can think of, this one has both the longest and most brutal combat scene or scenes, it takes up at least half the movie, and is about 1 continuous battle OVER 3 DAYS!! He and the reporter wrote this book together. I believe he's the only civilian ever, to win military Medals as a civilian! The guy with the burned legs, died 2 days later, but learned his baby was born! hal Moore was, a super religious man and an absolute legend! Lets not forget Hal's wife. She became a absolute beast because of this. She demanded and start benefits protocols and veterans services, still in place by the military today. and demanded soldiers families get official visits by two men and or a clergymen, when they die. There's many ww2 and Korea vets, who told Vietnam vets, they were glad they didn't have to fight in that hellhole of death torture heat jungles sickness disease, etc. plus the Media, colleges, etc., totally poisoned Americans minds, and they were treated like hell, when they got home. The white exploding grenade is phosphorus. It blows white hot burning pieces, and stays burning, as long as it's in oxygen! Yes, Hal got that red diary, with a handwritten letter, to that Vietnamese soldier's wife, personally! Telling her he was brave, that he died fast and without pain. Actually footage of Hal, after this battle. ua-cam.com/video/70zHanLhce0/v-deo.htmlsi=NZpWkzdRUHDm2X63 ua-cam.com/video/ESeRFIGN--c/v-deo.htmlsi=M_becCPjG0UHb3iv Hal also spent many years during the rest of his time in the military, making sure Snakeshit and TooTall, got medal of honor award.
USA is not the invader here but are there to assist the South Vietnam in fighting the North Vietnamese Communist forces who are invading the South by going through Laos and Cambodia.
@@TimoDyer There were so many different countries involved in the Vietnam war it was like a mini world war. I think even with out the Americans the death toll would still be pretty high.
What many people forget is the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) were hardened veterans, not only had they fought and won against the French Colonial soldiers, they had fought the Japanese in ww2. And we assume NVA soldiers were at home in the jungle, but just like anywhere else most people are from cities, so the jungles and wilderness were just as scary to the average NVA soldier as they were to the average American GI
Yeah I think people confuse the VC and NVA quite a lot. It was ultimately the VC that presented the bigger problem for US troops because they were totally OK with putting bombs in villages and setting up traps that could or would kill their own people whereas the NVA followed more or less "moral" war tactics compared to the VC.
Soldiers never win in war regardless of which side they are on, all are left as guilt ridden broken people, even those from the victorious nation. All warriors worth a damn come to either regret but accept the things they did to survive or the very fact they survived when their brothers and sisters didn't.
South Vietnamese soldiers were not “traitors”. They were fighting for many reasons but two of which were against Communist rule and those from the North telling people in the South what to be. There is a reason why over 2 million Vietnamese people left the country after 1975. The retributions by North Vietnamese Army and government, the forced arrests into “re-education camps”. The “boat people” was a problem for the entire region from 1975 to 1990 as these millions left trying to escape the hardship they were under. You are lucky the current Vietnamese government lets you live in some measure of peace to do your own thing. But try to voice a contradictory opinion involving politics and you could be subject to the Communist Party there and arrested to be “re-educated”.
Vichy french soldiers were not "traitors". They were fighinting for many reasons but two of wich were fighingt communins and the french who wanted to telll other french people how to live( that is thr original french gorvment isntead of the proped by an ocupying power one who sure did not told french how to live) Lol
You could have also written "I never opened a western history book inmy entire life", it would have been shorter. Western history studies are full of critical analyses of western history, its motivations and outcomes. Western society is literally the only society on the planet that is critical with its own history to this degree. The jingoism in (ex-)communist countries would make you shit your pants. They don't interpret things in this or that light, they make things up wholesale.
There is way too much history to put in one single comment, but at the time that the French were in conflict with the vietnamese, the country was developing a very big split politically. And trying to pack decades worth of History into a single comment: at that point in time the individual translating would not have been a traitor to Vietnam. We were actually allied with the South Vietnamese. And the French were before us as well. It was only the Communist backed Vietnamese in the north that we were at war with. When the Tet offensive happened, it ended up changing the direction of how the war went, and thanks to Congress, the US wasn't allowed to fight the war in the way that was "necessary" whatever that means. I personally think we shouldn't have been there at all. There's actually quite a number of Vietnamese who fled to the US at the end of the war, many we brought over were spared from death. They were being executed for political dissonance. Obviously that's history now. It's not happening today. But it is a dark part in history. It's reminiscent of the things that happened in Laos just a few decades ago. I'm just glad that it seems your country is recovering, hopefully it continues to recover, and the people are doing well now.
The Vietnamese Soldier was not a trader. So do not hate his character. The American Soldier was not sent there to attack Vietnam. At that time Vietnam was split between Communist North Vietnam supported by Russia and China; and Democratic South Vietnam supported by America. The North was trying to reunify all Vietnam under Communism and America was trying to stop the spread of Communism by supporting the South. In actuality the North was attacking the South so they were technically the aggressors but from their perspective they saw all Vietnam as one. So there were no typical “bad guys” in this situation unless you count the political leaders. Many Veterans of that war on both sides in later years built strong relationships and Vietnam helped America find and account for their war dead who had been lost. Even many years after.
Ho Chi Minh was a central figure in Vietnam's history, striving throughout his life for the country's unification and independence. His efforts can be divided into two phases: initial cooperation with the United States during World War II and the subsequent confrontation during the Cold War. Efforts to Unite Vietnam 1. Cooperation with the United States: During World War II, Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the United States to resist Japanese occupation. His organization, the Viet Minh, received support from the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), including weapons, equipment, and training. Ho hoped that this cooperation would lead to U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence after the war. 2. Diplomatic Outreach: After Vietnam’s declaration of independence on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent multiple letters to U.S. President Harry Truman, appealing for support and referencing the American Declaration of Independence. However, these appeals were ignored as the U.S. prioritized supporting France, its European ally. 3. First Indochina War (1946-1954): Ho led North Vietnam in its fight against France, which sought to retain Vietnam as a colony. The conflict culminated in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Accords, which temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Ho anticipated national elections in 1956 to unify Vietnam, but the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold them. --- Why Did Conflict Arise Between North Vietnam and the U.S.? 1. Ideological Clashes: During the Cold War, the U.S. viewed Ho Chi Minh's government as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. This led to significant U.S. military and financial support for South Vietnam to prevent communist expansion (the Domino Theory). 2. Support for South Vietnam: The U.S. bolstered Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime despite its repressive policies against opposition forces, including the Viet Cong, who were supported by North Vietnam. The escalating conflict ultimately drew the U.S. into direct military involvement by 1965. 3. Resistance from North Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese leaders saw U.S. actions as neocolonialism and considered the conflict a struggle for national liberation. They received significant backing from the Soviet Union and China. --- Conclusion Ho Chi Minh initially sought peaceful unification and diplomatic ties with the U.S. However, America’s disregard for his appeals and Cold War geopolitics led to escalating tensions. The division of Vietnam and U.S. support for the South made confrontation inevitable, resulting in the Vietnam War.
The South Vietnamese army fought with the Americans. They were called ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnan and was trained and equipped by the United States.
The war was not between Vietnam and the United States, but between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, where the United States tried to help South Vietnam - so the Vietnamese interpreter was not fighting against Vietnam, but for South Vietnam.
The Americans instigated the war by propping up a puppet government in the Republic of Vietnam. Had they not intervened the war would never have happened.
North Vietnam's primary goal during the Vietnam War was to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, aiming to unify the entire country under communist rule through military action and political subversion, effectively attempting to "overthrow" the existing South Vietnamese government.
This is typical of all people who lived and live under communist and ex-communist regimes. Even if they now live in a more liberal society, instead of learning about the world, they focus on pop-culture and pretty clothing.
Because the North won the war, they write the history. What young Vietnamese may not know is that the war was a civil war between the Vietnamese. The U.S. was trying to prop up the South Vietnam government and army. The education system teaches that it was a war of liberation, freeing the southern half of the country from the Americans. But those in the south know it was a civil war. PLEASE react to the film Heaven and Earth by Oliver Stone. It shows the war from a Vietnamese woman's perspective. Wonderful movie!
I see a lot of comments objecting to the reactors calling the South Vietnamese traitors, but all I have to say is living in a southern US state, I see the Confederate soldiers still being called traitors 160 years after the Civil War.
Regardless of the historical political dialogue that is happening here in the comments section, I have never seen Chi crying like that. I could feel her sadness. War is always such a horrible thing, how I wish our leaders were aware of this.
I was hoping it was going to be the other two ladies reacting to this, they seem more educated on the conflict as a whole with well rounded understanding of both sides and generally why they fought. The US also didn't invade North Vietnam, they were primarily advisors for the South Vietnamese military until the incursion of North into the South. This was form of war is known as a Proxy war, in which capitalism vs communism.
Oh cool wich communist power was also military ocupying the places forcefuly making half the country refuges and bombing it more them germany was in ww2? Sure if it was merely a proxy bolth external sides should be equaly involved Also south vietnam was literary created by ex western colonial authorities, north vietnam overtrowed those, how those two are even comparable as proxys?
Hey, kids. I'm 71 years old and a veteran. I'm still learning about our shared history. There are a ton of books that can teach more than any movie. Movies are not documentaries. They are entertainment. I am currently half way through 'Hue 1968' written by Mark Bowden. (I was 15 y.o. in 1968. USMC 1972-78.) 'Hue 1968' was published in 2017. Mark also wrote 'Blackhawk Down.' P.S. I ❤ your reactions.
General George Armstrong Custer was a cavalry Commander back in the Indian wars, he was the head of the seventh Calvary and led his men into a massacre almost every member of the seventh was killed including Custer. Crazy horse was the leader of the Lakota Sioux who defeated Custer.
It was pretty funny that you referred to the South Vietnamese soldier/translator as a "traitor" since he was fighting for his country South Vietnam. He was a patriot fighting against an invasion from the north that was defying internation law and forcing the submission of South Vietnam under a communist government that millions of Vietnamese in the south did not want. The death toll from this conflict was 200,000 to 250,000 South Vietnam soldiers and 58,000 American soldiers that were not in any way invading Vietnam, but honoring their commitments with the South Vietnam government, and 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers also died in combat in the conflict. The only thing keeping the south as an independent country was Americas involvement as soon as those troops were removed South Vietnam was no longer able to defend itself and South Vietnam lost the war.
start looking at Vietnam Pre Second World War and then follow it through to the present day. Vietnam has always been technically been one country although partitioned after the Geneva Accords separated into the north and the south as a temporary measure prior to elections which in July 1956 Ho Chi Minh was predicted to win. The United States used the excuse of the 'Domino effect' to prop up a puppet government in the Saigon which never very popular. The Americans had no business in Vietnam but saw the opportunity to expand their capitalistic economy in Southeast Asia. Propping up the puppet government in The Republic of Vietnam was used as a means to an end. This drew them into a long and protracted war which should never have happened. Of course we know that their loss to the North Vietnamese and subsequent withdrawal was mainly due to the anti war feeling back home in the United States. So the translator can be seen as a traitor to the country of Vietnam as he was supporting a regime that the people didn't want and was being supported by a foreign power.
Ho Chi Minh was a central figure in Vietnam's history, striving throughout his life for the country's unification and independence. His efforts can be divided into two phases: initial cooperation with the United States during World War II and the subsequent confrontation during the Cold War. Efforts to Unite Vietnam 1. Cooperation with the United States: During World War II, Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the United States to resist Japanese occupation. His organization, the Viet Minh, received support from the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), including weapons, equipment, and training. Ho hoped that this cooperation would lead to U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence after the war. 2. Diplomatic Outreach: After Vietnam’s declaration of independence on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent multiple letters to U.S. President Harry Truman, appealing for support and referencing the American Declaration of Independence. However, these appeals were ignored as the U.S. prioritized supporting France, its European ally. 3. First Indochina War (1946-1954): Ho led North Vietnam in its fight against France, which sought to retain Vietnam as a colony. The conflict culminated in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Accords, which temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Ho anticipated national elections in 1956 to unify Vietnam, but the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold them. --- Why Did Conflict Arise Between North Vietnam and the U.S.? 1. Ideological Clashes: During the Cold War, the U.S. viewed Ho Chi Minh's government as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. This led to significant U.S. military and financial support for South Vietnam to prevent communist expansion (the Domino Theory). 2. Support for South Vietnam: The U.S. bolstered Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime despite its repressive policies against opposition forces, including the Viet Cong, who were supported by North Vietnam. The escalating conflict ultimately drew the U.S. into direct military involvement by 1965. 3. Resistance from North Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese leaders saw U.S. actions as neocolonialism and considered the conflict a struggle for national liberation. They received significant backing from the Soviet Union and China. --- Conclusion Ho Chi Minh initially sought peaceful unification and diplomatic ties with the U.S. However, America’s disregard for his appeals and Cold War geopolitics led to escalating tensions. The division of Vietnam and U.S. support for the South made confrontation inevitable, resulting in the Vietnam War.
@@millinamillota7537 Uncle Ho had been a hardcore communist since the 1920s, it is more accurate to say he and his guerillas fought against the aggression and expansion of the Empire of Japan than to say he was an ally of the US although he was trained as an asset by the OSS (for a modern-day equivalent see Osama Bin Laden trained by the US military to oppose Russia in Afghanistan). Ho Chi Minh was thrown into prison in China by Chiang Kai-shek who distrusted the communist ally who would later use his US trained guerillas to stage a revolution against the French in Indochina. Any overtures by Uncle Ho would have obviously been rebuked by the US who had opposed the expansion of communism since the end of World War 2. Of course, the sitting president would support their WW2 allies the French over the expansion of communism throughout southeast Asia. Following the Geneva Accords in 1954 North Vietnam officially became a communist country under Lao Dong who was a student of Ho Chi Minh. Under Lao Dong's reforms up to half a million people were executed (landlords, Catholics, intellectuals) according to Hoang Van Chi a Vietnam historian. When the elections called for in 1956 by the Geneva Accords were not held because the government of South Vietnam never signed the accords and were therefor not bound by them. The north government then sent terrorists (Viet Cong) into South Vietnam to wreak havoc while they prepared for an invasion of the south (30,000 civilians were killed by North Vietnam during the war), building roads like the Ho Chi Minh trail.
"We want him alive." HA! The French that survived the attack, wounded or not, were murdered in cold blood. Shot or bayoneted while totally defenseless. "An M-16." Nope, it was an SKS supplied to the NVA and Viet Cong by the then Soviet Union and China. The massacre of French Troops in the Ia Drang valley was in 1954, prior to the U.S. having entered the war and 10 years before the M-16 became the standard issue service weapon of the U.S. military. -- There seemed to be some confusion about the term Indochina. How can you know so little history about your region of the world? I know the meaning of Indochina when I was about 8 or 9 years old, so 60 to 61 years ago.. and I'm American, born and raised. - No, Col. Hal Moore was not talking about the Bible. The Sioux are a Native American people who are known for their semi-nomadic lifestyle and equestrian skills. The term "Sioux" dates back to the 17th century when the people lived in the Great Lakes area. The Sioux are made up of several subcultures, including the Lakota, Eastern Dakota, and Western Dakota. -- "How can they do that to their own people?" - In war there are accidents, 'death or wounds by friendly fire.' There has never been a military force of any nation in any war that did not by accident kill or wound some of it's own troops. It is tragic but it is inevitable, not intentional, but, again, inevitable. -- "You don't know what's coming" -- Is what followed what you expected? Between cheering for Vietnamese troops killing Americans and saying how terrible Americans were take a little time and research The Huế massacre (Vietnamese: Thảm sát tại Huế Tết Mậu Thân, or Thảm sát Tết Mậu Thân ở Huế, lit. translation: "Tết Offensive massacre in Huế") was the summary executions and mass murder perpetrated by the Viet Cong and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during their capture, military occupation and later withdrawal from the city of Huế during the Tet Offensive, considered one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. North Vietnamese Army Regulars, on orders from Vietnam's infamous "war hero" General Vo Nguyen Giap, rounded up and marched the civilians to a dry river bed and summarily executed them with bullets, bayonets and clubs. Some were buried alive with their hands tied behind their backs. Their only crime - they believed in democracy or they were Christians. You may also enjoy researching a Vietnamese female sniper known as 'Apache." Her exploits should give you a lot to cheer about and to use to brag about how much better those fighting to bring Communism to all of Vietnam were compared to those like the ARVN soldier fighting to bring freedom and democracy to all of Vietnam, the ARVN soldier you called a "traitor." Yep, 'Apache' and all the others like her are people you should look up to and be proud of how they committed war crime after war crime after war crime ... just as in the case of when the NVA massacred the French when they were helpless, after the battle was over and the French were all defenseless but the NVA slaughtered in cold blood every last French troop .. committing a major War Crime, a major breech of The Geneva Convention which North Vietnam was a signatory of .. but still ignored on a regular basis. The female Viet Cong sniper and interrogator, known as “Apache,” enjoyed torturing 5th Regiment, 1st Marine Division US Marines and South Vietnamese troops and letting them bleed to death. She was known for cutting off the eyelids and saving them as souvenirs. She was of Vietnamese and French ancestry and grew up in Hanoi. She operated around Hill 55, in the vicinity of Duc Pho, 8 miles (13 km) from DaNang. She used a 7.62mm Model 44 Russian-made Mosin-Nagant rifle, with a scope. In 1966, legendary sniper, Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock, II and his spotter, Captain Edward “Jim” Land were sent from DaNang to hunt for Apache. She was notoriously well-known to the Marines around Hill 55. Because of her brutal tactics and infamy, she quickly became a high profile target One day she had captured a young Marine during an ambush. Within hearing range of the hilltop camp defenders, she tortured him through the night. Hathcock and Land heard horrendous screams and the next morning a Marine private staggered toward camp. He was bleeding profusely, much of his skin had been cut away and his fingernails had been removed. He had been castrated, and his arms were hanging limp, the bones were broken and exposed. Land said, “Carlos ran towards the Marine who collapsed dead, a few feet in front of him.” It took several days for Carlos and Jim to locate the Viet Cong sniper team. Late one afternoon Land spotted the group with a Vietnamese woman that fit Apache’s description, 700 yards away. He pointed her out to Hathcock. She was a small woman walking towards a ridgeline with her squad of five Viet Cong guerrillas. All of them were armed, and Hathcock noticed that the woman was carrying a rifle with a scope. Carlos did not want to shoot the wrong one so he waited. When she squatted down to urinate, Land called in an artillery barrage on the group of snipers. The group started running towards Hathcock and Land. At that point Jim told Carlos to take her down. Hathcock put a round in her with his bolt-action Winchester Model 70 30.06 (7.62mm) rifle and she collapsed on the ground. Land told Hathcock to “put another round in her.” Hathcock fired again and her body convulsed. She was 31 years old and that was the end of that “sadistic bitch.” This was a major morale victory. The artillery strike killed the other five snipers. Watch "Hamburger Hill" next.
You this hurt by someone from Vietnam not cheering for the US soldiers in a war between Vietnam and the US ? I bet you watch other war movies with the US and cheer every time the US soldiers kill a German, or Italian, or Korean, or Vietnamese, or Iraqi, or Afghan. But still you get hurt right in the feels when someone is against the US in the movie. And honestly, not really that against the US either. Their reaction shows them disliking anyone getting killed, whether US or Vietnamese. As for your long winded finger pointing at atrocities done by the Vietnamese. I find it deeply amusing how you completely omit the atrocities done by US troops. Rape, torture, burning down villages and killing innocent civilians. The US is not some holy army levitating above the rest of us completely free from sin. The US has committed a long, dark list of atrocities in every conflict and war they have been involved in. Whether the killing of civilians in Vietnam or firebombing civilians in Japan. You need to get off your high horse, take a deep breath of reality and understand that just because many movies represent the US as "good guys" most of us around the world outside the US are fully aware of how cruel a war is and how atrocities are done by ALL sides in a war. Again, get off your high horse!
@@user-cx4px3jh2f - "Taking it way too seriously dude." --- They are many decades detached from the conflict and clearly do not know very much about it. Or at least not as in the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth. They need to know the truth, or at least they should know the truth. They clap for 'the good guys,' of course being the Vietnamese. I would really like to hear them explain how the North were the good guys when in 'The Hanoi Hilton' prisoners repeatedly suffered torture like how they put your arms behind your back and they'll cinch up your elbows until your ribs start pulling apart here. Then they rotate over your head until your shoulder dislocates, and no man can stand the pain. And then they'd force a metal bar down the prisoner's throat to keep them from screaming. And there was worse done to prisoners. Will the they clap at that like they clap when they see an American shot while reacting to a movie? Murder, kidnapping, torture and intimidation were a routine part of Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) operations during the Vietnam War. They were intended to liquidate opponents such as officials, leaders, military personnel, civilians who collaborated with the South Vietnamese government, erode the morale of South Vietnamese government employees, cow the populace and boost tax collection and propaganda efforts. During the early years of the war, assassinations, and similar activity was organized via "special activity cells" of the VC. As the conflict continued, efforts were centralized under the VC Security Service, estimated to number 25,000 men by 1970. This extensive use of terror received comparatively little attention from Western journalists, who were preoccupied with covering the conventional warfare aspect of the conflict. Notable VC/PAVN incidents of terror include the Đắk Sơn massacre, Massacre at Huế, Son Tra massacre and the Thanh My massacre. 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. On 5 December 1967, two VC battalions attacked Dak Son village, and after a battle with the militia, killed 252 civilians and kidnapped an estimated 100 civilians in a "vengeance" attack on the hamlet of Đắk Sơn, home to over 2,000. The Huế massacre (Vietnamese: Thảm sát tại Huế Tết Mậu Thân, or Thảm sát Tết Mậu Thân ở Huế, lit. translation: "Tết Offensive massacre in Huế") was the summary executions and mass murder perpetrated by the Viet Cong and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during their capture, military occupation and later withdrawal from the city of Huế during the Tet Offensive, considered one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. The Battle of Huế began on 31 January 1968, and lasted a total of 26 days. During the months and years that followed, dozens of mass graves were discovered in and around Huế. The estimated death toll was between 2,800 and 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war, or 5-10% of the total population of Huế. The Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) released a list of 4,062 victims identified as having been either murdered or abducted. Victims were found bound, tortured, and sometimes buried alive. Many victims were also clubbed to death. The Sơn Trà Massacre was a massacre of South Vietnamese civilians committed by the Viet Cong (VC) during the Vietnam War, in Sơn Trà village, Bình Sơn District, Quảng Ngãi Province, South Vietnam on 28/9 June 1968. Sơn Trà was a fishing village located approximately 5 miles (8.0 km) southeast of Chu Lai Base Area. It had a population of approximately 4,000 people, including many resettled refugees. The attack began at 23:10 on 28 June 1968 with a mortar attack. Many of the civilians took shelter in their defensive bunkers and then between 75 and 300 VC moved through the village throwing satchel charges into bunkers killing their occupants and starting fires. Other villagers fled toward the CAP position, blocking the forces there from engaging the attackers. Soldiers from the 198th Light Infantry Brigade were landed at the CAP position by helicopters approximately 30 minutes after the attack began but they waited until dawn to move into the village. he Thạnh Mỹ Massacre was a massacre of South Vietnamese civilians committed by the Viet Cong (VC) during the Vietnam War, in Thạnh Mỹ hamlet, Phú Thạnh commune, (now Bà Rén village, Quế Xuân 1 commune) Quế Sơn District, Quảng Nam Province, South Vietnam on 11 June 1970. At 02:00 on 11 June, the VC, later identified as elements of the V-25th Main Force Battalion and the T-89th Sapper Battalion, launched a coordinated attack. It began with a barrage of 60mm and 82mm mortar fire. The mortars, located north and south of Phu Thanh, dropped a total of 200-250 high explosive and white phosphorus rounds on the village. The VC had destroyed 156 houses and damaged 35 more, most of them in Thanh My, the hardest hit of the village's hamlets. Civilian casualties totalled 74 dead, many of them women and children; 60 severely injured; and over 100 lightly wounded. I cannot find enjoyment from watching people clapping for and cheering for those who committed repeated mass atrocities against their own people, murdering, torturing, burying alive their own people .. not the barbaric conditions, treatment and torture prisoners of war, that are supposed to be protected, were forced to endure. My bet is the girls know extremely little of such things, if they know anything whatsoever about them. I wonder if while in school they were taught about how 'The Apache' tortured both Vietnamese citizens and American servicemen .. and cut off their eyelids to keep for souvenirs? If they were taught those facts did they smile and clap and cheer and say 'hooray for us because we're the good guys!'
Jeez-sus, dude, why are you so outrageously aggressive and hostile about it?! These ladies aren't sniping at anybody. And they're products of what was once the North Vietnamese government and who knows what they were taught about their history, but I'd bet it's not exactly pro-South Vietnamese. Plus, I just now watched them be very affected by the deaths of both Vietnamese and American soldiers. You're laying an awful lot of shit at their feet that they had nothing to do with and to suggest that maybe they would idolize torturers if you told them about it is pretty damn disgusting. Get a grip on yourself.
This movie takes place in the early phase of American involvement, and the Air Cav units were entirely voluntarily enlisted Soldier, which is very different from Apocalypse now or Full Metal Jacket, where most of the soldiers are disgruntled disenfranchised Draftees. This makes a huge difference in performance, and morale.
One of the tragedies of this war, was that the Americans better than most should have been able to understand a people fighting a revolutionary war for their independence from a Colonial master (France). They themselves fought such a war for their independence from Great Britain, and won.
By the time we got directly involved it was NOT a war for independence, the French had already been defeated. It was a civil war between the communist North and the democratic South. We came to support the South when the North invaded to prevent the spread of communism and the growing influence of the Soviets. It was a similar scenario to the Korean War but with a far different result. It was also far more political and messy. And while we were the most heavily involved several other countries were fighting as well, the Australians for example. I'm guessing you're not American, I suggest you educate yourself about the details of the war before making such comments.
@@Nandrall18-25 You still don´t get it. How come a small poor country could defeat the strongest military power in the world with the biggest economy? The regime in South Vietnam by this time (after the assasination of Diem in 1963: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_assassination_of_Ng%C3%B4_%C4%90%C3%ACnh_Di%E1%BB%87m) was little more that a US puppet. Maybe you should read a little more?? And not believe the propaganda of your country so much.
@@Nandrall18-25 Maybe you know many details - but you still don´t get the big picture. Is it not strange that a small and poor country managed to defeat the strongest army in the world, backed by the (then) by far biggest economy? By this time (after the coup and assasination of Diem in 1963: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_assassination_of_Ng%C3%B4_%C4%90%C3%ACnh_Di%E1%BB%87m) the regime in South Vietnam was basically a US puppet. Try to think a bit independently and believe less in US propaganda.
@@Nandrall18-25 You still don´t get the big picture. How could a small poor country defeat the strongest army, backed with the biggest economy (especially at that time) in the world? At this time (after the coup and assassination of Diem in 63) the regime in South Vietnam was little more than a US puppet, and most vietnamese saw the US as just France i new clothing (another tragedy).
Hello Movie Munchies, your reactions are so honest, so true. You comment on what you see, which gives your channel an honesty that is great to see. Movies can teach us, and your reaction to this movie shows that. Keep up your great reactions, beautiful ladies. .
A great movie. Amazing cast. Somehow one scene always does it for me and stands out. When the Taxi Driver has to make his rounds, handing out all the telegrams. A quick scene, but the actor Dan Beene really delivers there.
The real people were part of the making of this, so its as realistic as we could possibly get. A lot of Hollywood movies that are set in Vietnam are fictionalized to be action, rather than tragedy, because war is tragedy
I always find that interesting, Hollywood has never really dealt with the Vietnam War it’s mostly a lot of fictionalized stories, or the stereotypical disgruntled vet going back to look for lost friends. Unlike a WWII film which is very black and white.
@@garycollins7750 this movie had the actual Hal Moore and the reporter guy (I forget his name) involved in the making of it, he's not prone to exaggeration either, apparently the most annoying for set designers was planting all the grass, this was filmed in America so the plants had a hard time surviving for weeks at a time
I also see a lot of bravery And patriotism in the Vietnamese, like I see with us in the United States. The normal every day, people like you guys and us are very patriotic and love our countries, but it’s the war machine that keeps growing, and it needs to be stopped. There is no reason whatsoever that we cannot all get along! I know we and the Vietnamese do get along, but why can’t the Middle East? Why does everybody think their God is better? And they hate and kill for that God?! What kind of God would want you to do that? When are humans in power going to learn? Probably never, that’s why we need to stand together as people of the land and not people of government!
The war was south Vietnam against north Vietnam, China was backing the north, and the US was backing the south. At the end of the war many south Vietnam people fled to the US in fear for their lives. My home city in the US took in many south Vietnamese people as refugees. This is the same thing that happened in Korea, only that war never really ended, South Korea is still backed by the US in defending its northern boarder from communist North Korea. The real war is communism against the free world, but I don’t see that Vietnam ever truly embraced communism, because your county allows freedom of religion, freedom to travel, and a high level of freedom of speech.
The Ia Drang Valley is located in what was South Vietnam (Saigon the Capitol). So - North Vietnam soldiers invaded this area. The South Viet soldier was defending his country from the North Viet invaders with the help of US Army.
You do realize that hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese if not millions fled to the USA rather than live under Communist leadership, consequences of losing that struggle. Why would the Vietnamese go to live with Americans if they were enemies. Lots and lots of options other than the USA. You do realize that Vietnamese immigrate to the USA every day. The largest population of Vietnamese, outside of Vietnam are in the USA. Are they held here against their will as prisoners of war?
@@BetterDays-e8h 300.000 out of a population of 16.000.000 is a minority. 71% of the South lived in rural areas where the communist found a lot of support. Thats why the VC existed.
@@vicheller3945 We were talking about Vietnamese people that fled to the US and in 1980 there lived 261,729 Vietnamese people in the US. Its true that people also fled to other places but again still a minority. Only 10% of South Vietnam was Christian.
Ft. Benning was the largest oldest training station in America. They train Basic training soldiers, ait, mechanized, jump school, and other schools. It was recently renamed Fort Moore, in his Honor. He was a loving and religious, family man, who loved his soldiers deeply, and they loved him. It was Communism, China, and money, that started this war, first with the French, then America.
CHI!!!! The Vietnam War was not a War between Vietnam and the USA, The Vietnam War was between the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese, The South Vietnamese were being slaughtered losing, That's when they turned to The US for help, The US came to help the South Vietnamese.
this wasn't told to them in school.. Vietnam was divided and fighting each other decades before the US showed up.. it wasnt even a declared war it was a "police action" .. but what blows my mind is that they don't know Who the Cong was and they don't know Who ARVN was...
Ho Chi Minh was a central figure in Vietnam's history, striving throughout his life for the country's unification and independence. His efforts can be divided into two phases: initial cooperation with the United States during World War II and the subsequent confrontation during the Cold War. Efforts to Unite Vietnam 1. Cooperation with the United States: During World War II, Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the United States to resist Japanese occupation. His organization, the Viet Minh, received support from the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), including weapons, equipment, and training. Ho hoped that this cooperation would lead to U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence after the war. 2. Diplomatic Outreach: After Vietnam’s declaration of independence on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent multiple letters to U.S. President Harry Truman, appealing for support and referencing the American Declaration of Independence. However, these appeals were ignored as the U.S. prioritized supporting France, its European ally. 3. First Indochina War (1946-1954): Ho led North Vietnam in its fight against France, which sought to retain Vietnam as a colony. The conflict culminated in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Accords, which temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Ho anticipated national elections in 1956 to unify Vietnam, but the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold them. --- Why Did Conflict Arise Between North Vietnam and the U.S.? 1. Ideological Clashes: During the Cold War, the U.S. viewed Ho Chi Minh's government as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. This led to significant U.S. military and financial support for South Vietnam to prevent communist expansion (the Domino Theory). 2. Support for South Vietnam: The U.S. bolstered Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime despite its repressive policies against opposition forces, including the Viet Cong, who were supported by North Vietnam. The escalating conflict ultimately drew the U.S. into direct military involvement by 1965. 3. Resistance from North Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese leaders saw U.S. actions as neocolonialism and considered the conflict a struggle for national liberation. They received significant backing from the Soviet Union and China. --- Conclusion Ho Chi Minh initially sought peaceful unification and diplomatic ties with the U.S. However, America’s disregard for his appeals and Cold War geopolitics led to escalating tensions. The division of Vietnam and U.S. support for the South made confrontation inevitable, resulting in the Vietnam War.
@PhilipZeplinDK Due to a physical disability, I am unable to type texts myself. Therefore, I rely on speech recognition technology to write or express myself in writing. This allows me to communicate efficiently and independently despite my disability. I kindly ask for your understanding if this affects the way I phrase or express my concerns.
Is this the only time Chi has ever cried in a reaction? That's so sweet. I have actually never seen this film but now am really excited to check it out! 🙂🙂
Vietnam was a civil war that went multi-national thanks to communist expansionism. US government policy was to deny that. The people of Southern Vietnam were not traitors. They were the losing side. You see, the majority of Vietnamese people in the south and people in places like the US ultimately cared more about peace than what form of government was in Vietnam. Your government was the cause, you're lack of understanding is the result.
North Vietnam had no intention to "expand" communism, they just wanted to reunify their country and call it a day. Vietnam is unified now, how much "expansionism" does it engage in?
@@shatterquartz He talked about communist imperialism, not specifically vietnamese imperialism. Communist countries as a whole are the 20th century mongol horde that goes around to loot, rape and conquer, they just use the "spread of communism" as a crutch to destabilise other countries with partisan forces first and then move in to create a vassal state with local communists in power. All ex-communist bloc countries today are colonial states which oppress the ethnic minorities within the borders they conquered. Just because they didn't sail across the sea to plunder other people doesn't make them any less colonialist and imperialist.
It wasn’t the US vs Vietnam. It was the US and south Vietnam vs communist north Vietnam. We wanted Vietnam to not become a communist country so the people like “Movie Munchies” can grow up and live in a free democratic country.
@@TippyToes527 Direct democracy can never work, even the Greeks found out about it as their experiment into it barely lasted 40 years before civil war broke out.
I wouldn't quite say the South Vietnamese guy was a traitor. A lot of people in South Vietnam didn't want to be under the North Vietnamese communist regime - and a lot of them came to the US instead.
He was direclty fighiting with the invasor, supporting soith vietnam existence alone inst nescesary suporting the foreing invasion meant to maintain it wich sure makes you a traitor
@@bernardoblanco4286 first of all you really need to work on your English. Second, we were not invaders, the North Vietnamese were! We were there at the request of the South Vietnamese and fought alongside them in defense of their own country primarily within South Vietnam itself. The communist North had invaded them just like North Korea invaded South Korea in the Korean War. That South Vietnamese soldier was defending his own country from the communist invaders. By your crazy logic every South Korean was a traitor for defending themselves when North Korea invaded their country. Just because the South Vietnamese lost doesn't make them traitors.
@@Nandrall18-25 That is a very americanized viewpoint of the war. The war would never have happened had it not been for the The US's support of an unpopular puppet government. The reunification of the partitioned Vietnam would have happened naturally in the elections in 1956 and millions less people would have died. By intervening financially and eventually militarily the American War in Vietnam made a lot of money for the us, and cause millions of deaths across Southeast Asia. They should never have got involved.
@@digitalbegley I wouldn't say that; you think there would have been millions of people who wouldn't have died. But as history has shown, no reunification is bloodless. Just as many would have died, if not more.
It's super interesting to see your perspective, it makes it obvious that regional history is written by the victors. Even though the US shouldn't have been there in the first place, I would assume people in Vietnam still see the "south" as enemies/traitors despite them also being Vietnamese. The war started before the US was even involved, the US only provided support for South Vietnam until North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the U.S.S. Maddox and U.S.S. Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin
Chi I can never say this enough...I am so proud of you, of Hella and all of your girlfriends who take a very serious look at these movies and try to understand their history. There is a deleted scene from this film that I really wish they would have left in the theatrical release, but for whatever reason it was cut out. It shows that despite the US's initial success in this first battle, that we really overestimated that success, and how we never should have allowed things to escalate. Here is that deleted scene. ua-cam.com/video/xlVcduLh6ec/v-deo.html
The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, November 14, 1965 marked a pivotal moment in U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Elements of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) entered the first major land battle of the war at landing zones X-Ray and Albany, which would turn out to be proving grounds for a whole new kind of warfare. On the morning of November 14th, the 1st Cavalry landed at Landing Zone X-Ray at the base of the Chu Pong mountain and by noon they were already under attack from the North Vietnamese. The fighting continued all day and into the night with the enemy relentlessly making assault after assault. The North Vietnamese forces had succeeded in engaging the U.S. forces in very tight quarters. The cavalry regiment returned fire, but the enemy were dug into prepared fighting positions and many of the American leaders had died or were wounded during the initial stages of the attack. Temperatures reached 100 degrees, and by the afternoon there was a firestorm battle for survival. Battalion Commander Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore and his men continued on, receiving support from artillery units and air strikes, helping the American troops hold themselves against the enemy. During a 14-hour period, Major Bruce Crandall and Captain Ed Freeman, repeatedly landed their helicopter under intense enemy fire at Landing Zone X-Ray. They resupplied ammunition, water, and supplies, while evacuating the wounded. They saved some 70 soldiers. Both later were awarded the Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest award for heroism in combat. By the end of the first day, the 1st BN, 7th Cavalry was reduced to approximately 340 men. North Vietnamese forces had higher casualty rates, due to the U.S. airstrike and artillery support. On the second day, North Vietnamese forces launched a heavy attack including hand-to-hand combat. Charlie Company took the brunt of the assault. A “Broken Arrow” was declared over the radio by the Battalion Forward Air Controller, which meant that an American unit was in imminent danger of being overrun. It was the signal for all available American aircraft to converge and provide aid to the American unit. The fighting continued for three hours. Charlie Company held their position, exemplifying extraordinary heroism and courage. By the end, there were no officers left and only 49 men that were not wounded. With the arrival on foot of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry commanded by Lt. Col. Robert McDade, on the morning of November 16, there were now three Cavalry battalions crammed into the clearing, including Lt. Col. Walter Tully’s 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry. By the third day of the battle, the Americans had gained the upper hand. As the fighting around Landing Zone X-Ray subsided, McDade’s 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was ordered to move cross-country to Landing Zone Albany, where it was to be picked up by helicopter and moved to a new location. The U.S. unit was moving through the jungle in a long column when the 8th battalion of the North Vietnamese 66th Regiment sprang in to a massive ambush. Of the 500 men, 150 were killed and only 84 were able to return to immediate duty. Companies C and D took the brunt of the Communist attack, and most of the men were quickly hit. It was the most successful ambush against U.S. forces during the course of the entire war. Before the Battle of la Drang was over, 305 Americans had been killed along with an estimated 2,000 North Vietnamese troops. American officials declared the Battle of the la Drang Valley a victory. The service members killed in the Battle of la Drang are remembered on Panel 3E of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
its sad that people dont seem to know what South Vietnam was? About 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war fighting against the North Vietnamese and for the direction they wanted their country to go. By the end of the war there were over a million South Vietnamese fighting against the North.. I'm not sure if they teach that in schools or not. The South Vietnamese were fighting along with the US, South Korea, New Zealand, Thailand, Australia, Philippines as their allies. They were fighting North Vietnam which was allied with Russia, China and Czechoslovak.
History is written by the victors. And there is nothing communists love more than covering up their crimes and failures.
They don't teach that in Vietnam, are you kidding? That's like asking if you would find Tianmen Square in a chinese history book. Communist countries completely invent their own history like bad fanfiction.
i think the distinction you are missing is what both sides were fighting for.
@@cjr-en4wr I don't think VolkXue was saying one side was more right, simply that the girls didn't seem to know that the US was fighting *with* the Vietnamese just as much as they were fighting against them. Right or wrong, the fact is that it seems the girls haven't learned about the south's part in this. Perhaps they have and their reactions in a foreign language don't bring out the nuance.
@@michaelm.1947 jingoistic, patronizing nonsense. How could a Vietnamese person possibly know their own history? Lets have a white American man come and tell them right?
The book he was reading with the red cover at the beginning is in French (I am an native French speaker) the title of the book is "The wars of Indochina" which was the name the French gave to Vietnam when it was one of it's' "colonies". That book was required reading for officers as it gave a fairly good understanding of the background of the situation there, the strategic aspect of the rice crop and so on.
The thinking at the time was that "whoever controls Vietnam's rice harvest gets to decide who eats" so it became of strategic importance to not allow it to fall into communist hands as it was believed it would lead to it being used as a weapon to cause famines and foster communist expansion throughout Asia. Something that was called the "domino theory". It was one of the main causes for American involvement.
The guy who played the NVA comander was from Vietnam. His involvement in this film and another called Green Dragon got him banned from the entertainment industry in Vietnam and he later immigrated to the United States and settled in San Francisco, California until his death in 2011.
As far as I can recollect Full Metal Jacket was based in I Corp in Da Nang and Hue. Forest Gum was in IV Corp in the Mekong Delta. Apacolypse Now and We Were Soldiers were based in II Corp in the Central Higlands.
You mean a communist govt took trigger issue with his hot take outside of state sanctioned narrative and forced him to flee to a freedom of expression based democracy? Gee, ya don’t say??
You nailed. Vietnam actually took his passport and denied him the right to be involved in pictures. His letter to his son was published in the L.A. Times and there was world wide outrage and that's when the Government allowed him to leave the country with his family.
that's communist countries for you
It's so surreal watching Vietnam war movies with you guys.
Edit: And I'm curious, do they not teach you about the over one million men of The Army of the Republic of Vietnam who fought alongside the Americans? Not saying we should have been there, but when you call them traitors I am a bit perplexed.
ARVN were pretty much treated as traitors once Saigon fell in 1975 and the shooting stopped, pretty sure their side of the story is not told within Vietnam today, you pretty much have to go outside to find out much about it.
They are reflecting what they are taught and I'm sure the government of Vietnam minimizes the south vietnamese cause in their teachings of the war. Remember they renamed Saigon to Ho Chi Minh city.
@@PV1230 Vietnam is still a one party pseudo-communist state, no doubt the history is taught in a certain way to favor them.
They only learned what their government taught them. The 1 million who fought for South Vietnam to them were traitors. Those so-called traitors thought the North Vietnamese and Vietcong themselves to be traitors to their people.
Yeah I don't believe the Communist Party of Vietnam would EVER allow education about the South. Just like the CCP, anything even remotely questioning of Communism is taken to be seen as treason because the Communist Party has crafted propaganda that synonymizes the Nation with the Party. Typical one-party-state behavior and so I cannot fault anyone who lives there/was born there for not knowing. But they can't stop people from using the internet and finding out more :)
The Vietnamese soldier with the Americans is not a traitor but is actually in the Vietnamese Rangers which was a light Infantry in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
Which makes him a traitor to Vietnam.
In Vietnam they're generally not taught that. They're just taught that America came and started attacking and bombing. The propaganda surrounding the war is pretty wild, borderlining on just rewriting history.
@@patrickholt2270 There was no single unified Vietman at this time but 2 with one being communist and the other not being communist.
@@Waterford1992 don't bother. I've seen that guy comment many similar replies all over this video.
He's either:
A) dumb.
B) ignorant.
C) a propagandaist.
D) a mega simp.
@@patrickholt2270@patrickholt2270 no, because he didn't belong to the North idiot. You can't be a traitor if you don't belong to the north side.
I really enjoyed seeing this from your perspective. My wife is also Vietnamese, she is from a farm outside of Saigon and she talks about how her family had to use a steel American soldiers helmet to cook in because they had no stove or anything like that. As Americans, we sometimes forget that both sides had people who fought for what they believed in. I was fortunate enough to work with a great group of Vietnamese men who served and helped the Americans. Several of them told me of how after the U.S. left they were imprisoned for fighting against the North. Thank you for your honest comments and genuine thoughts and feelings.
In my country (I’m not American), the conflict in Vietnam isn’t discussed in much depth. When it does come up, it’s usually in a simplistic way, such as, “Oh, the US intervened in Vietnam to take control of the country,” and that’s the end of it. Movies often reinforce this narrative to some extent. Personally, I always felt there was more to the story.
During the "cold war" the Soviet Union supported various movements to expand its communist ideology, while the US sought to counteract these efforts. In Vietnam, this translated into a division between the North and South, with the North attempting to overthrow the South’s government, which was aligned with Western powers. The situation led to widespread violence and significant suffering for the civilian population.
The US became involved after repeated requests for assistance from the South Vietnamese government, aiming to stabilize the region. However, external support for the opposing side made the situation increasingly complex. Despite tactical successes, the conflict ultimately ended due to political decisions, with agreements that were not consistently upheld. Following the withdrawal of US forces, the North consolidated control over the country, leading to a significant shift in the nation’s trajectory.
It’s similar to what happened in Korea, but with a different outcome.
I believe that the official narrative in Vietnam is quite different. We can observe this in the way the girls refer to Vietnamese individuals who fought alongside the Americans as traitors.
You may not be American but you seem to have the intelligence and knowledge of one. (lack thereof)
@@cjr-en4wr stop reading propaganda and go to study dumbass
that ignores the facts of French Colonialism and how the North Vietnamese clans and South Vietnamese clans had had civil wars in the past. The US was caught up in historical forces it didn't understand and drew the wrong conclusions.
After the end of WWII, there was the Truman Doctrine, which had two missions: 1) containment of the USSR sphere of influence, and 2) support those, originally indirectly, those who are defending their countries against communist parties and doctrines. First case after WWII, before the Korean War, was the Civil War in Greece. This was the first proxy conflict of support US and its allies, against support of the USSR. In the case of Vietnam, its original purpose of the US involved was containment, as President Eisenhower feared a "domino" effect would occur, which he though that the conflict would spill over into nearby nations. In post-war Europe, allies were stationed in Germany and created a containment against the "Iron Curtain" which was the satellite states in Eastern Europe that fell under USSR sphere of influence. As well as military presence in Europe, the Marshall Plan was implement, giving aid in rebuilding Western Europe.
I really don't think the story of Vietnam can be told without the perspective of the Vietnamese boat people who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.
The Vietnamese man at 17:10 was from South Vietnam. The war was essentially North Vietnam vs South Vietnam with the US siding with the South against the North, and ultimately the North won.
but didt beat us American, but yes communist won there sadly.
@@UMADtouchgrass wdym they didnt beat America? Ofcs they did, otherwise they wouldnt have won.
@@UMADtouchgrass They did beat the US, in one of the most humiliating defeats your country has faced (other than maybe Afghanistan), and subsequently Vietnam is an amazing place with amazing people. If the fascists had of won, we wouldn't have amazing reactors like these two. Try reading a book dummy.
@@SovermanandVioboy did you took history class? the American people didt want that war there, riots, protest ect thats why we pull out, not because they beat us.
@@SovermanandVioboy Americans left the Vietnam due to politics reasons. The high number of victims and the anti-war propaganda made US settle an agreement with the vietnamese communist and withdraw
At that time, Vietnam was divided into two countries. North Vietnam's capital was Hanoi, and South Vietnam's capital was Saigon. The South was allied with the US, while the North was allied with the communists (China and the USSR, currently Russia). That's why there was inevitably a war.
Correct. The girls don't know this, unfortunately.
The SOUTH Vietnamese government asked the USA for help against the oppression of NORTH Vietnam....that's why the USA went to Vietnam. The South Vietnamese soldiers TOGETHER WITH THE USA soldiers, fought against NORTH Vietnam ( who was supported by China and Russia with money and weapons. )
The girls just think some Vietnamese men were traitors which is totally wrong. The ENTIRE SOUTH VIETNAM joined together with the American soldiers to fight the NORTH.
And the south came to existence by being created by ex french colonial authorities and survived trough repeatly refusing to make fair elections wich president ensenhower admted that if it happened the communists would won by 80%.
The war was fully evitable, literary just needed ok fair election already agreed by bolth states at UN so it didnt happened
it was really a civil war and all sides allied with Vietnam to represent their ideologies.. North Wanted Communism hence Communist nations backing them and the South wanted Democracy hence the Democratic nations supporting them. By the end of the war there were over a million South Vietnamese troops. I think the US was only able to evacuate around 150,000 South Vietnamese at the end of the war. After the war the North Vietnamese sent the South to forced labor camps. Where they were reindoctrinated with communist ideology and often faced harsh treatment, including torture, while their property was confiscated and businesses nationalized.. No doubt something they dont teach everyday today..
Also a lot of people fled the country by boat to escape what the North Vietnamese were doing.. They became known as "boat people" at the time.
@@VolkXue you're arguing with a Brazilian communist. You're not going to get anything more from him than excuses.
@@Chamomileable oh, i'm more mentioning the facts because it feels like people dont know them.. I'm not saying one side right or wrong, or if the US should have been involved to start with. We know the Gulf of Tonkin incident was highly questionable today..
One thing i will say though, after it started and all.. I'm not really into leaving that many allies to suffer at the end.. I wasnt into doing it in Vietnam, Afghanistan and i dont want to see it happen in Ukraine either.
This movie is pretty respectful of the both sides compared to most American war movies. Usually the enemy is just like sharks
_Flags of our Fathers_ and _Letters from Iwo Jima_ do something similar, each depicting the same conflict as the other, but from opposing sides.
One main reason I am subscribed, seeing your reactions to movies made in USA that involves Vietnam especially when it involves history between the two countries. It gives different perspective from the other side, and I feel it's beautiful to witness and see. Thank you for the reaction and thank you for being you!
I agree wholeheartedly. I am amazed at their perspective on the war since it's been only 50 years since it ended and the Vietnamese people are still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. I don't know if I would be as forgiving as these two marvelous young ladies are of Americans if some nation had done to my people what we did to them. That unnecessary war cost the lives of over 2 million Vietnamese 😮😢 and it was all based on a lie. I recall watching a documentary on the war and listening to an American soldier talk about how confused he was that the Vietnamese hated him while he was there to help them. American soldiers for the most part fought bravely and with good intentions. It was our government that was evil. I remember the scandal surrounding McNamara's Morons. If you don't know about this issue, look it up. Our government was 100% at fault in that war. Today Vietnam is about as close to being our strongest ally as you can get. They are also the fastest growing economy in the region with the highest standard of living for its people. They basically have a free market economy though they still call themselves Communist🤔 go figure. Ho Chi Minh was never going to be a puppet of China or Russia. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Let's face it, we fucked up.
Do Vietnamese schools actually characterize the Vietnam War as being between the US and Vietnam? Because that's totally NOT what the Vietnam War was. It was a Vietnamese civil war first and foremost. The US was merely fighting on behalf of the South, with the North & Viet Cong supported by the Soviet Union & China. They know they were split into two countries at the time... right?
South Vietnam only existed because of foreign support. Had foreign powers stayed out of it, Vietnam would have been reunified within months of independence.
You think history books in (ex-)communist regime are not censored and rewritten to hell and back to suit the narrative of the regime?
@@shatterquartztrue but that doesn’t change the fact it was a civil war
Communist North Vietnam will tell lies when they won the war so when the later generations grow up the government will have teachers tell a different story probably not related to the civil war unless they come to America they would learn the actual truth of what really happened in their country from the U.S. history books these ladies were shown propaganda in their school so when you hear them calling South vietnamese soldiers traitors you know they were learning a different history instead of being told the real truth that's what living under communism is like the government who won get to tell a different story to their liking for centuries....
@@JohnShepherd117 It wouldn't have been a civil war if America hadn't intervened, it was a completely unnecessary war, if America hadn't supported a puppet regime millions Less would have died
the vietnamese who fights as you said for the US ARMY is not a traitor, he is from the south vietnam army and at that time south vietnam was an ally of the USA
USA was betrayed them as now they trying to do same to Ukraine.
But on Ukraine was based American World Order.
It's scary how people would have 2 months of piece and then go to BIG WAR, then just help Allie to win war and protect and to not have a big war...
The story is told by the winners. For them they were traitors because they supported a foreign army in their conflict, although in the north army also had a lot of foreigners, like chinese and soviets. The losers in a conflict will always be the "bad guys"
@@danilokenobi yeah ....my country also donated few guns to north
@@danilokenobi I'm guessing the girls here were taught just the "winners side". China and Russia definitely manipulated this was just as the US did. If the roles were reversed, these girls might be calling the north Vietnamese traitors
He's a traitor because he fought for a puppet dictator and against the people of Vietnam.
If I'm not mistaken, the American task force didn't realize they landed right near an entire division of the North Vietnamese Army.
No. They didn't realize how far the underground bases actually had expanded.
Also, US Army NEVER invaded North Vietnam. A lot of bombing from the air, yes but no US soldiers in North. Just as in Full Metal Jacket, all fighting on the ground was done in the country of South Vietnam to repel the invading North Viet troops.
"South Vietnam" was the American invasion. It was a puppet state with no popularity or legitimacy whatsoever, created by force to keep part of Vietnam under foreign control.
There were US forces in the North.... unofficially. They were there for intelligence gathering and sabotage. I believe that they were part of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam - Studies Observation Group) people.
There were huge numbers of CIA staff in Laos. We ran a 'secret war' in Laos.
At 8:12 Moore is talking about the Sioux, a Native American people who are known for their semi-nomadic lifestyle and horse riding skills.
The US Army fought them from 1875 to almost 1900 in The Great Plains Indian Wars.
A lot more Vietnamese died than Americans died.
Something like 700 to 3, if memory serves.
@@DomLab-g2n I was in Vietnam just under a month ago, for 5 weeks. Judging from what I saw at museums, that's not something they are taught. They are shown a version where Vietnam pretty much won every major battle, and the US mostly terrorised the civilian population. It's also shown as a war between Vietnam and the US (where the US just suddenly decided to come in and kill everyone for largely no reason), not the North vs South.
Doesn't matter they achieved their goal
how do these girls not know that the Vietnam war was a war with Vietnamese on both sides?
Do they not explain that now? The south Vietnam government was very corrupt, basically just the old local elites who converted to Catholic to curry favor with the French colonizers.
Because propaganda. Did you think they'd teach the entire truth in Communist schools?
@@thedragondemands5186 Yes, South Vietnam was a "corrupt" regime according to the modern history they are taught there. Only to legitimize Communism. But we'll just ignore that Communism didn't find it's way into North Vietnam from free choices people made...they were also influenced. If you believe otherwise, you sir are a moron. This is how history gets passed on, not unlike that of genes, carefully selected then passed on.
Because Communism took control and thus they get to control what information the later generations are taught in schools. The old saying that "History is written by the victors." isn't just a random thought. They call the Southern Vietnamese traitors...but don't consider themselves as corrupted by Communism.
The Vietnamese education system is incredibly demeaning toward the South Vietnamese because the party that won and took control of the country considered them traitors. They aren't seen as Vietnamese, but as traitors who helped the Americans. I don't like the glee over the idea of "hehehe we won" because it wasn't a victory for anyone. Countless Vietnamese died in what can best be described as a combination of a proxy war on behalf of Russia and an attempt to free themselves from French rule that the US had the unfortunately idea to wander into. I don't do business with the countless ethnic grievances in Southeast Asia because once you start digging it just goes on forever and follows you across the earth. The Vietnamese are mostly a bit arrogant about the US pulling out but their real foe the entire time has been China. China battled them for hundreds of years in various conflicts and had enslaved many Vietnamese. Even so, whether they realized it or not, their cult of personality behind Ho Chi Minh led them into joining the same loosely connected eastern coalition that China was also part of. Even the war with China after we left didn't seem to convince them. Now they're a minor southeast Asian tourist destination known for cheap textiles and their current cordial relationship with the US isn't enough to erase the fact that their old enemy China is breathing down their neck and we're the most likely force to defend them if things go hot in Southeast Asia.
Thank you ladies for watching this one.. it was a tough story to experience but it's important so we can honor and value their sacrifice by not making the same mistakes again.
I don't think the story of the Vietnam war can be told without the perspective of the Vietnamese boat people who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.
Every civil war has its refugees. After the American Revolution the Americans loyal to England had to flee to Canada. The Vietnam War is similar in so many ways to our War of Independence.
The black and white pictures shown after the 'broken arrow' scene are actual battlefield photographs taken by Joe Galloway on that fateful day. The dropping of napalm on U.S. troops was an accident, the soldier directing the airplanes miscalculated the distance. It is uncommon thanks to good training, but it does happen.
More US troops died from friendly fire.
The men attacking the Americans are north Vietnamese and your enemy. As south Vietnamese your grandparents fought with us Americans and that is how your grandparents were able to come to United States as refugees .
It's the governments that declare war on other countries. But it's never the government that does the actual fighting and suffering.
in America - the government is the people......people elected that senator who voted to send in troops.. so while we can point to the government... in the end it's us. So it's weird to hear when a foreigner says something like 'we love America and the American people... it's their government we hate' - - um... well....
@@blueboy4244 -- No, that's not accurate at all. American elections are pure political theater.
bro the government can't do the fighting who the hell is gonna run the country once they're killed? If the government did the actual fighing the country would collapse after the first wave of fighting lol
You can't really say that you are anti-war, then vote for the politicians and pay the taxes that enabled it.
The US didn't invade Vietnam to depose Ho Chi Minh's Communist government. The US was part of a multinational coalition of anti-communist forces supporting the Republic of Vietnam (Saigon government) in its efforts against a Communist insurgency (the National Liberation Front or VietCong) backed by the People's Republic of Vietnam (Hanoi government), who had assistance from the People's Republic of China and the USSR. The US and its allies fought the PAVN on the ground and through a bombing campaign to make North Vietnam withdraw its support of the VietCong. Once a ceasefire was reached in 1973, the US and the other nations withdrew. The PAVN invaded the South again in 1975 and the US refused to reinvolve itself in the conflict, leading to the unification of Vietnam, plus the creation of Communist regimes in Laos and Cambodia, and the following Cambodian Genocide.
The nuances of the Vietnam war are lost on most of the current generation (hell it was lost on the Vietnam generation). They just see a US invasion when it was the US defending South Vietnam from the North. In wars of national unification, the morality is always difficult. Two generations after Bismark's reunification of Germany the Saxons and Bavarians generally were proud Germans and didn't think of the Prussians as enemies, just overbearing.
The Soldiers of South Vietnam were certainly not traitors, just defending their country from the invading communists from the North. These ladies growing up in a unified Vietnam with its capitol in Hanoi undoubtedly grew up with a skewed history of this war as the communist party still rules the country though thankfully has opened up a lot since the early 90s. I applaud these ladies for watching these difficult movies though. The war was certainly brutal on both sides and this movie was as realistic as could be reasonably done.
Also, from what I understand about the Vietnamese 'charging' tactics, as we see briefly in the film they liked to close in on US troops as quickly as possible as at longer range US firepower and marksmanship would cause more casualties than a charge from the nearest covered and concealed fighting position.
And then the Vietnamese economy collapsed and millions of people starved to death.
Everything you say is correct. But change the perspective, you change the answer.
The Vietnamese won independence from France through military means. We'd probably have cheered for them if they had not been a communist independence force. Who were all these outside powers, on both sides of the cold war, to come in and divide the country after? What promises did Ho Chi Minh owe foreign empire builders? In fact, they already betrayed him. The peace deal included a elections to unify the country which never happened for fear the communists would win easily.
And for the criticism I could level at the communist system, the southern government was corrupt as hell. Not worth fighting for.
It's honestly amazing how effective the pro-communist propaganda has been in reframing the Vietnam War.
There is nobody that laments the existence of South Korea when compared to North Korea, yet the situations were virtually identical.
Vietnam only exists as it does today because they effectively abandoned communist principles in favor of market principles. (they still claim to be a "socialist oriented market economy", but in reality that just means it's 95% capitalist.) They should consider themselves VERY lucky that their leadership abandoned the sinking ship of communism after the cold war, otherwise they would be far closer to North Korea than South Korea today. They are communist in name only, which is kind of funny.
Please react to The Killing Fields
Col. Moore sent that red diary back to the soldiers wife with a note telling her that he fought bravely and died quickly without fear.
I wonder what is it you ladies where taught about the war. Who started it, and how other countries got involved. Especially since you ladies yelled 'traitor' to a South Vietnamese soldier.
Ho Chi Minh was a central figure in Vietnam's history, striving throughout his life for the country's unification and independence. His efforts can be divided into two phases: initial cooperation with the United States during World War II and the subsequent confrontation during the Cold War.
Efforts to Unite Vietnam
1. Cooperation with the United States:
During World War II, Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the United States to resist Japanese occupation. His organization, the Viet Minh, received support from the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), including weapons, equipment, and training. Ho hoped that this cooperation would lead to U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence after the war.
2. Diplomatic Outreach:
After Vietnam’s declaration of independence on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent multiple letters to U.S. President Harry Truman, appealing for support and referencing the American Declaration of Independence. However, these appeals were ignored as the U.S. prioritized supporting France, its European ally.
3. First Indochina War (1946-1954):
Ho led North Vietnam in its fight against France, which sought to retain Vietnam as a colony. The conflict culminated in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Accords, which temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Ho anticipated national elections in 1956 to unify Vietnam, but the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold them.
---
Why Did Conflict Arise Between North Vietnam and the U.S.?
1. Ideological Clashes:
During the Cold War, the U.S. viewed Ho Chi Minh's government as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. This led to significant U.S. military and financial support for South Vietnam to prevent communist expansion (the Domino Theory).
2. Support for South Vietnam:
The U.S. bolstered Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime despite its repressive policies against opposition forces, including the Viet Cong, who were supported by North Vietnam. The escalating conflict ultimately drew the U.S. into direct military involvement by 1965.
3. Resistance from North Vietnam:
Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese leaders saw U.S. actions as neocolonialism and considered the conflict a struggle for national liberation. They received significant backing from the Soviet Union and China.
---
Conclusion
Ho Chi Minh initially sought peaceful unification and diplomatic ties with the U.S. However, America’s disregard for his appeals and Cold War geopolitics led to escalating tensions. The division of Vietnam and U.S. support for the South made confrontation inevitable, resulting in the Vietnam War.
More than you. It's their country.
@@patrickholt2270 whether it's someones own country or not really has no bearing on how well someone is educated.
@@patrickholt2270 that means nothing. As everyone has books nowadays.
They know Jack and Shit... and Jack left on the last chopper outta Saigon!
Joe Galloway is the only civilian to be awarded the Bronze Star for Valor for what he did during the battle. During the Gulf War in 1990, he was our embedded reporter in the 24th Infantry. Our division commander, Gen McCaffrey, said Joe was the only reporter he trusted to report what we were doing honestly. He died in 2021. RIP, Joe.
No one ever truly wins in war.
There are only those who are dead and those who are left broken, on both sides....forever
The problem is that usually someone does actually win, land and resources are won through war, which the descendants of the people fighting the war will inherit forever. In ideology wars the winner imposes his ideology on the losers and all must follow the winners way of life, for instance religious wars and like this one communist wars. But there's certainly winners and losers in war there's no doubt about that.
3:28
His name is Nguyễn Hữu An, and he served as a Vietnamese military officer in the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during the Vietnam War.
He was called the "General of Battles" by the famed General Võ Nguyên Giáp.
The State of Vietnam and the Communist Party of Vietnam presented him with six honors.
He died in Hanoi, Vietnam on April 9, 1995, he was 68.
The actor who played him, the late Đơn Dương emigrated to the United States in 2003.
Also here is another interesting fact! Some Vietnamese actors in the movie had been in the North Vietnamese Army.
Do young Vietnamese people even know about South Vietnam? Are they taught about it at school? The Vietnam war started as a civil war, before the US intervened on the side of South Vietnam after they asked for help when the North violated the peace settlement and attacked the south.
the communist party of vietnam only tells school children the party line, its called brainwashing.
How about you look up the Tonkin incident and see the US joined the war under false pretences. Much like the lie of WMDs in Iraq.
Are you dumb enouth to not consider that they might just consider the people who colaborated with the invasor an traitor just like it is in the whole rest of the world???? Do you ask french people if they know what vichy france was when they acused nazi colaborators of beijg traitors???
"Before the us interved" The usa was funding the french war since before south vietnam was even a thing.
"The north violtated tye peace settlement and attacked". The south a creation of ex french colonial authorities refused to hold reunifying elections wich it had agree to do during the paris accords and wich president eisenhower said that if happened it would result in 80% of the vietnamese voting for the communists.
The south broke the deal and north military reaction only happened after the south started slaughtering pro reunification groups who guess what, asked the north to help.
Dumb american thinks hes invasion is special and thus colaborating does not exist😂
That's like asking if young chinese people ever heard of tianmen square. They obviously don't. Sure, it's not as bad as north korea, but each one of these communist and ex-xommunist governments write their own history like teenage girls write fanfaction. except they try to kill you if you disagree.
Hold on there. Who violated the peace agreement? After Dien Bien Phu fell and the French decided they had had enough, they signed the Geneva Accords at the Geneva Convention of July 21, 1954. The Accords stipulated that the country would be divided into North and South with a general election to be held in 1956 to reunite the country. The US didn't like that part of the Cease Fire agreement so we didn't sign. When 1956 came around the CORRUPT DICTATOR of South Vietnam, backed by the US, refused to participate in any election. The notion that South Vietnam was some sort of democracy is pure bullshit. It was governed by dictatorships that were hated by most Vietnamese.😮
as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides -north and south- and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. That is a lot of death.
@@storagebox1793 what I find interesting about that number is that the girls on this channel clearly think they "killed all the Americans and pushed them out" so to speak, when Vietnamese people had far greater casualties and the US withdrew not because they couldn't fight but because the American population shifted to be against the war.
America lost 58,300 soldiers during the Vietnam conflict. South Vietnam lost between 200k and 250k soldiers. North Vietnam lost in excess of 1.1 MILLION and over 2 million civilians.
America never lost a major military engagement. This is a perfect example of a military success and a political failure. We had the technology to completly annihilate the North Vietnamese, but we were never allowed to take our gloves off and engage the enemy for maximum effect. And we still killed more than 3.1 million with only 58k casualties with one hand behind our back.
41:12. The actress Madeleine Stow here is a lead actress in one of my favorite films called “Last of the Mohicans. Brilliant novel as well. Has one of the greatest actors of all time Daniel-Day Lewis you have yet to see his work. It is about the struggle prior to the US Revolutionary War with the most powerful military nation at that time England. Where English and English soon to be Americans were sorting out their relationship, while at the same time fighting others. These were very turbulent times as European Nations were expanding into what would eventually become over much time the USA. It is romantic, patriotic, violent, beautiful, very troublesome, and speaks to war from two sides if not more in a way. It is a beloved film. I think the MMLs will love it too.
My Father and both my uncles joined the army and were sent to Vietnam. One of my Uncles in particular was there for several tours of duty and was involved in a "Broken Arrow" situation similar to what we saw here in the film and he still gets emotional describing it 60+ years later.
As they explain in the film, Broken Arrow means a U.S. Army unit is being overrun and is in danger of being annihilated by the enemy, what it does is create a highest priority call for help to any and all US Military or Allied units within range to send any aid or support they possibly can regardless of their branch and what other orders they may have (with very few exceptions). As you could see in the film, with the US Army, Navy and Air Force having so much Air Power a Broken Arrow call could bring in hundreds of aircraft deploying thousands of bombs and rockets within a very short time.
The point of training is, think quick, if you hesitate, you're dead
All told, the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) suffered around two hundred thousand casualties while Communist North Vietnam suffered around one million casualties.
There are some excellent movie from the Vietnamese point of view:
THE ABANDONED FIELD: FREE FIRE ZONE
THE GIRL FROM HANOI
THE SCENT OF BURNING GRASS
DIEN BIEN PHI (1972)
That was supposed to be DIEN BIEN PHU (1992).
My understanding of that time was that the US military won the vast majority of the battles. The Americans lost primarily due to the south Vietnamese government being inept and corrupt and American public opinion at home wanting the war to end. The US had many protests about their involvement as it was a non defensive war. The public also grew inpatient with the south Vietnamese government. They essentially could not maintain the advances that the Americans made and were never prepared to lead.
The US didn't lose the war. South Vietnam won the war, for the most part in 1973. The Paris Peace Accords ended US involvement in Vietnam, maintained the status quo of the two independent countries, and included assurances from North Vietnam that they would not engage in further hostilities. When North Vietnam broke the treaty, the US simply did not get involved a second time.
Thank you for making it through this movie - I am sure it was difficult for you. I feel sympathy for you as you react to the heartbreak of Americans dying, then feel the sadness of Vietnamese dying as well. This is the tragedy of war, and the beauty of this movie - it avoids “good versus bad” and tries instead to tell a story of courage and honor regardless of ideology. As for Vietnam, it has slowly flourished as a unified country and “Vietnamized” Communism to become a strong, independent nation you can be proud to call your Mother country. As an American Vietnam-era veteran, I was lucky to marry a Vietnamese woman, and be accepted into a Vietnamese family. We return to VN every year to enjoy the wonderful culture and traditions with our Vietnamese family, friends, and neighbors there. Chúc bạn và gia đình sức khỏe và hạnh phúc ! (…and thank goodness for Google Translate !)
33:05 No, the North Vietnamese didn't win a single battle in the entire war. In fact, it was not even close. In the largest assault the North Vietnamese conducted, the Tet Offensive, the North led a surprise attack having sneaked people into the south for weeks pretending to be civilians and waited, then led a massive attack on many different locations at the same time. I'm sure you know about it, but what I doubt you know is how badly the North lost the battle.
There were about 2300 South Vietnamese soldiers killed, and about 300 US soldiers killed while 60,000 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed. It was such a lopsided victory that then president Lyndon Baines Johnson said that the North Vietnamese were amateur soldiers, and he was right. They were poorly trained and equipped. Just like in the Korean war where the North Koreans and Chinese would try to overwhelm the Americans by with greater numbers of men, sending huge amounts of soldiers into a battle expecting the majority of them to die.
The North Vietnamese lost more soldiers in that single battle than the Americans did in the entire war. The only advantage the North had was that the communist government was willing to sacrifice millions of people to win, which is evident in the death toll from the Tet Offensive which I mentioned earlier. The fact is that the American soldiers were not defeated at all. They never lost ground to the North, and they never lost a battle to the North. The Americans were never pushed back and they were never forced to surrender.
Believe it or not, the Americans never launched an offensive campaign into the north with the intention of taking any ground, instead their goal was to defend the Southern Government from the invading Northern Government, they were purely fighting a defensive war, hoping that the North would realize that they couldn't defeat the US and sue for peace. Had the US military been ordered to invade the North and take over the country then they would have easily done so. They did not invade however because they feared it would cause China to become involved and escalate the war even further. It wasn't China that the US ultimately feared becoming involved, it was the Soviet Union that they were actually concerned with. If China became involved it was feared it might lead to the Soviets becoming involved as well.
The offensive campaigns the US led into the North were bombing campaigns, some of which were not successful due to President Johnson's rigid rules of engagement such as operation rolling thunder, and some like operation linebacker II were incredibly successful. In fact, operation linebacker II caused the North Vietnamese government to attend the Paris Peace Accords and sign a ceasefire, and the US agreed to withdraw but vowed that they replace any equipment the south lost on a 1 to 1 basis. That meant that every bullet, every fighter jet, every tank, every helicopter, and every rifle they lost the US would replace. The war was effectively won.
Then the Watergate scandal happened in America where then President Richard Nixon was caught spying on his political opponents and was forced to resign. This led to an awkward situation because President Nixon's vice president had also resigned before that and was replaced by an unelected man Nixon chose. So when Nixon resigned, America had the first and only President that was not elected, President Gerald Ford. He was quite unpopular and because of all the scandals the opposing political party had taken the majority in Congress. Seemingly to spite their political opponents the new congressional majority chose NOT to honor the replacement deal made with the South to replace military equipment.
So then as the US was withdrawing from the South, the North resumed hostilities and started attacking the South at places where the US had already left. They made sure NOT to attack the Americans so the US wouldn't recommit to the war. The US was not forced out of the country, they freely withdrew.
You have to realize that what you learned in school was honestly just communist propaganda. I mean, you mentioned that the Vietnamese guy was a traitor, but he was a South Vietnamese soldier. They were never communist... You do realize that the Communist North Vietnamese government was the aggressor? Right? The South wasn't trying to invade the North, the North was invading the South. The North actually specifically targeted South Vietnamese civilians, and when the Communist government finally took control of the South there was a purge. Mass executions of South Vietnamese.
I think this just highlights the dangers of single party political systems. All the information you were taught about the war was through a very carefully constructed lens in order to control the narrative about the Communist Party. The reason why this isn't as prominent in the west is because there are multiple political parties that compete with each other, and are more than willing to expose the opposing party. It's not perfect and doesn't always work like that, but free speech being a pillar of western society tends to mean that we have greater access to unfiltered information than in a society where a single party has a monopoly on government.
You actually said multiple times in the video that the US forces had superior technology, which was the case. It was asymmetrical warfare and the North stood no chance against the most technologically advanced military in the world, the US Military. The death tolls highlight that fact perfectly.
Ken Burns: Vietnam is a 10 episode documentary on the Vietnam War. It pretty much sums up the American understanding of the war for most. It would be very interesting to see these girls reaction to it.
Her punching a pillow one second and urging to shoot down helicopters and 10 minutes later sympathizing with the same pilot while he 'purges' out is stomach is the exact reason for this film.
You have watched a lot movies about Vietnam from the American perspective.
Please watch Oliver Stone's film Heaven and Earth, a Vietnamese woman's perspective staring Hiep Thi Le.
You will love it
✌️❤️
Crazy Horse was a war leader of the Lakota Tribe. They are one of the Native American Clans who are members of the Sioux Tribes in the states of North Dakota and South Dakota. Crazy Horse fought in the Black Hills War. He was protecting his people's land against the White Americans who were invading and living on their land. There is a statue of Crazy Horse. It is carved near Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
Land the Lakota stole from the Crow only decades before.
You call the White Americans invading when his tribe invaded and killed another tribe for a part of that land.
@AhmedKoroma-um1rf General Custer was the worst soldier ever. For attacking the Native Americans because they discovered gold on the tribes land and forced them to live on reservations. Crazy Horse was risking his life and led the Crow and Lakota tribes to push Custer back
As I understand it 58,000 Americans died along with 200,000 to 300,000 ARVN(South Vietnam) and around 1,000,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong died.
And Chinese and Soviets.)
@@zacharyballif3212 you’re right on the money and they say the US was destroyed. This was a war that had interference from politicians. The North Vietnamese/Vietcong lost alot more people.
@@Dehwolii Along with South Korean, Australia and New Zealand.
@@AlexisLopez-pb8ms in the end those politicians made us look stupid. The anti war backlash was the consequence of that. In 1995 an NVA officer was asked by a newspaper what the United States could have done to win the war and he said cut the Ho Chi Minh trail. That was the main supply corridor used by NVA and VC.
Plus millions of Vietnamese civilians.
The Vietnamese fighting with the Americans are not "traitors". They were not fighting "for" the Americans, if anything it's the other way around. They are fighting for South Vietnam against North Vietnam.
Hollywood movies that are about history should never be thought of as completely true.
You girls have to realize that half of Vietnam supported the Americans because they didn't want communism in their country. Vietnam wasn't so much China vs US, it was more like a civil war between the Vietnamese who wanted communism versus those who wanted freedom.
41:32 first time I see Chi crying so much. She is always tough.
Pro tip...the little girl is Cindy Lou Who, in the Grinch, and lead singer of Pretty Reckless!
His wife didn't go with a friend, but went with the cab drivers, to each widow, and her and the driver would console them. Because usually, the cab driver was a vet, just like here.
Its simple really, the Vietnam people realize the north and communist soldiers were all brainwashed or forced, and that American troops were just there, to try and help them and stop communism. So they dont hate americans or american soldiers!
I'm a vet myself, never went to an official combat zone, but i went to a few places, u wouldn't wanna go!
A quick thought...we could have won this war easy and fast, if we would have fought it the way Animal Mother said, in Full Metal Jacket. Mine the harbor, bomb the hell out of the North, roll in with tanks, burn up the jungle. But the Media, and LBJ, wanted us to fight a "nice" war, and not be all big and bad!
We should never have been here, but we went because of treaties and guilt, we had to the French, for them aiding us in the Revolutionary War. But good did come out of it. It's a beautiful country, friendly people, friendly to americans, fairly prosperous, and they have a certain amount of freedoms and religion and capitalism , today. I can't remember who said it, a general maybe during ww2, said, the American soldier by his feet, brings freedom and the gospel, better than any other way!
When u go down the list of war movies... Platoon, hamburger Hill, saving Private Ryan, Blackhawk down, 13 hours, zero dark thirty, lone survivor, hacksaw Ridge, warhorse, 1917, Big Red one, thin Red line, boys in company C, Dunkirk, full metal jacket, apocalypse now, fury, and any others u can think of, this one has both the longest and most brutal combat scene or scenes, it takes up at least half the movie, and is about 1 continuous battle OVER 3 DAYS!!
He and the reporter wrote this book together. I believe he's the only civilian ever, to win military
Medals as a civilian! The guy with the burned legs, died 2 days later, but learned his baby was born! hal Moore was, a super religious man and an absolute legend!
Lets not forget Hal's wife. She became a absolute beast because of this. She demanded and start benefits protocols and veterans services, still in place by the military today. and demanded soldiers families get official visits by two men and or a clergymen, when they die. There's many ww2 and Korea vets, who told Vietnam vets, they were glad they didn't have to fight in that hellhole of death torture heat jungles sickness disease, etc. plus the Media, colleges, etc., totally poisoned Americans minds, and they were treated like hell, when they got home. The white exploding grenade is phosphorus. It blows white hot burning pieces, and stays burning, as long as it's in oxygen!
Yes, Hal got that red diary, with a handwritten letter, to that Vietnamese soldier's wife, personally! Telling her he was brave, that he died fast and without pain.
Actually footage of Hal, after this battle. ua-cam.com/video/70zHanLhce0/v-deo.htmlsi=NZpWkzdRUHDm2X63
ua-cam.com/video/ESeRFIGN--c/v-deo.htmlsi=M_becCPjG0UHb3iv
Hal also spent many years during the rest of his time in the military, making sure Snakeshit and TooTall, got medal of honor award.
USA is not the invader here but are there to assist the South Vietnam in fighting the North Vietnamese Communist forces who are invading the South by going through Laos and Cambodia.
one of stupidest things i've ever heard.
@@cjr-en4wr , I suggest you open up a history book and read a little for a change.
@@hermanspaerman3490 You first.
USA people didn't need to go to Vietnam. Should let the Vietnamese unify by themselves. Would have saved lives vs the millions killed
@@TimoDyer There were so many different countries involved in the Vietnam war it was like a mini world war. I think even with out the Americans the death toll would still be pretty high.
"He's a traitor!", no he's fighting for South Vietnam against the North, that doesn't make him a traitor, this is civil war.
What many people forget is the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) were hardened veterans, not only had they fought and won against the French Colonial soldiers, they had fought the Japanese in ww2.
And we assume NVA soldiers were at home in the jungle, but just like anywhere else most people are from cities, so the jungles and wilderness were just as scary to the average NVA soldier as they were to the average American GI
Yeah I think people confuse the VC and NVA quite a lot. It was ultimately the VC that presented the bigger problem for US troops because they were totally OK with putting bombs in villages and setting up traps that could or would kill their own people whereas the NVA followed more or less "moral" war tactics compared to the VC.
but their trainers were more familiar with the jungle conditions, and hopefully prepared them.
Yes, Vietnamese had been fighting the French for a long time whereas the American troops were really green.
A lot of them were just farmers.
@@wowomah6194 what a weird and warped mind you must have.
i think these 2 girls are confused about the vietnam war
Great reaction as always 👍
Soldiers never win in war regardless of which side they are on, all are left as guilt ridden broken people, even those from the victorious nation. All warriors worth a damn come to either regret but accept the things they did to survive or the very fact they survived when their brothers and sisters didn't.
South Vietnamese soldiers were not “traitors”. They were fighting for many reasons but two of which were against Communist rule and those from the North telling people in the South what to be.
There is a reason why over 2 million Vietnamese people left the country after 1975. The retributions by North Vietnamese Army and government, the forced arrests into “re-education camps”. The “boat people” was a problem for the entire region from 1975 to 1990 as these millions left trying to escape the hardship they were under.
You are lucky the current Vietnamese government lets you live in some measure of peace to do your own thing. But try to voice a contradictory opinion involving politics and you could be subject to the Communist Party there and arrested to be “re-educated”.
The South was also a dictatorship....
In a civil war, everyone is a traitor to someone.
Vichy french soldiers were not "traitors". They were fighinting for many reasons but two of wich were fighingt communins and the french who wanted to telll other french people how to live( that is thr original french gorvment isntead of the proped by an ocupying power one who sure did not told french how to live)
Lol
@@brianpack369no cause one of the sides wanstn colaborating with invasors and one was.
The who did is the traitor
@@bernardoblanco4286are you seriously comparing South Vietnam to Vichy France?
Why am I not surprised they don't teach History at school in Vietnam.
I guess they don't teach history in Vietnam.
Or maybe they teach it like they do in the US (and most other countries to be fair): "We're the good guys and our enemies are the bad guys."
You could have also written "I never opened a western history book inmy entire life", it would have been shorter. Western history studies are full of critical analyses of western history, its motivations and outcomes. Western society is literally the only society on the planet that is critical with its own history to this degree.
The jingoism in (ex-)communist countries would make you shit your pants. They don't interpret things in this or that light, they make things up wholesale.
There is way too much history to put in one single comment, but at the time that the French were in conflict with the vietnamese, the country was developing a very big split politically. And trying to pack decades worth of History into a single comment: at that point in time the individual translating would not have been a traitor to Vietnam. We were actually allied with the South Vietnamese. And the French were before us as well. It was only the Communist backed Vietnamese in the north that we were at war with. When the Tet offensive happened, it ended up changing the direction of how the war went, and thanks to Congress, the US wasn't allowed to fight the war in the way that was "necessary" whatever that means. I personally think we shouldn't have been there at all.
There's actually quite a number of Vietnamese who fled to the US at the end of the war, many we brought over were spared from death. They were being executed for political dissonance. Obviously that's history now. It's not happening today. But it is a dark part in history. It's reminiscent of the things that happened in Laos just a few decades ago.
I'm just glad that it seems your country is recovering, hopefully it continues to recover, and the people are doing well now.
The Vietnamese Soldier was not a trader. So do not hate his character. The American Soldier was not sent there to attack Vietnam. At that time Vietnam was split between Communist North Vietnam supported by Russia and China; and Democratic South Vietnam supported by America. The North was trying to reunify all Vietnam under Communism and America was trying to stop the spread of Communism by supporting the South. In actuality the North was attacking the South so they were technically the aggressors but from their perspective they saw all Vietnam as one. So there were no typical “bad guys” in this situation unless you count the political leaders. Many Veterans of that war on both sides in later years built strong relationships and Vietnam helped America find and account for their war dead who had been lost. Even many years after.
Ho Chi Minh was a central figure in Vietnam's history, striving throughout his life for the country's unification and independence. His efforts can be divided into two phases: initial cooperation with the United States during World War II and the subsequent confrontation during the Cold War.
Efforts to Unite Vietnam
1. Cooperation with the United States:
During World War II, Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the United States to resist Japanese occupation. His organization, the Viet Minh, received support from the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), including weapons, equipment, and training. Ho hoped that this cooperation would lead to U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence after the war.
2. Diplomatic Outreach:
After Vietnam’s declaration of independence on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent multiple letters to U.S. President Harry Truman, appealing for support and referencing the American Declaration of Independence. However, these appeals were ignored as the U.S. prioritized supporting France, its European ally.
3. First Indochina War (1946-1954):
Ho led North Vietnam in its fight against France, which sought to retain Vietnam as a colony. The conflict culminated in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Accords, which temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Ho anticipated national elections in 1956 to unify Vietnam, but the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold them.
---
Why Did Conflict Arise Between North Vietnam and the U.S.?
1. Ideological Clashes:
During the Cold War, the U.S. viewed Ho Chi Minh's government as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. This led to significant U.S. military and financial support for South Vietnam to prevent communist expansion (the Domino Theory).
2. Support for South Vietnam:
The U.S. bolstered Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime despite its repressive policies against opposition forces, including the Viet Cong, who were supported by North Vietnam. The escalating conflict ultimately drew the U.S. into direct military involvement by 1965.
3. Resistance from North Vietnam:
Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese leaders saw U.S. actions as neocolonialism and considered the conflict a struggle for national liberation. They received significant backing from the Soviet Union and China.
---
Conclusion
Ho Chi Minh initially sought peaceful unification and diplomatic ties with the U.S. However, America’s disregard for his appeals and Cold War geopolitics led to escalating tensions. The division of Vietnam and U.S. support for the South made confrontation inevitable, resulting in the Vietnam War.
The South Vietnamese army fought with the Americans. They were called ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnan and was trained and equipped by the United States.
The war was not between Vietnam and the United States, but between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, where the United States tried to help South Vietnam - so the Vietnamese interpreter was not fighting against Vietnam, but for South Vietnam.
The Americans instigated the war by propping up a puppet government in the Republic of Vietnam. Had they not intervened the war would never have happened.
North Vietnam's primary goal during the Vietnam War was to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, aiming to unify the entire country under communist rule through military action and political subversion, effectively attempting to "overthrow" the existing South Vietnamese government.
Poor Chi is so unaware of the facts of the Vietnam War. From who "won" to calling South Vietnamese traders. So naive.
This is typical of all people who lived and live under communist and ex-communist regimes. Even if they now live in a more liberal society, instead of learning about the world, they focus on pop-culture and pretty clothing.
Because the North won the war, they write the history. What young Vietnamese may not know is that the war was a civil war between the Vietnamese. The U.S. was trying to prop up the South Vietnam government and army. The education system teaches that it was a war of liberation, freeing the southern half of the country from the Americans. But those in the south know it was a civil war.
PLEASE react to the film Heaven and Earth by Oliver Stone. It shows the war from a Vietnamese woman's perspective. Wonderful movie!
I see a lot of comments objecting to the reactors calling the South Vietnamese traitors, but all I have to say is living in a southern US state, I see the Confederate soldiers still being called traitors 160 years after the Civil War.
You are correct. I'm pretty sure these gals are Vietnamese which some commentors may not realize.
Regardless of the historical political dialogue that is happening here in the comments section, I have never seen Chi crying like that. I could feel her sadness. War is always such a horrible thing, how I wish our leaders were aware of this.
I was hoping it was going to be the other two ladies reacting to this, they seem more educated on the conflict as a whole with well rounded understanding of both sides and generally why they fought. The US also didn't invade North Vietnam, they were primarily advisors for the South Vietnamese military until the incursion of North into the South. This was form of war is known as a Proxy war, in which capitalism vs communism.
Oh cool wich communist power was also military ocupying the places forcefuly making half the country refuges and bombing it more them germany was in ww2?
Sure if it was merely a proxy bolth external sides should be equaly involved
Also south vietnam was literary created by ex western colonial authorities, north vietnam overtrowed those, how those two are even comparable as proxys?
Hey, kids.
I'm 71 years old and a veteran. I'm still learning about our shared history. There are a ton of books that can teach more than any movie. Movies are not documentaries. They are entertainment. I am currently half way through 'Hue 1968' written by Mark Bowden. (I was 15 y.o. in 1968. USMC 1972-78.) 'Hue 1968' was published in 2017. Mark also wrote 'Blackhawk Down.'
P.S. I ❤ your reactions.
Another movie based on real people and events, Chi. Very heavy movie, but one of my favorites. War sucks for all involved.
General George Armstrong Custer was a cavalry Commander back in the Indian wars, he was the head of the seventh Calvary and led his men into a massacre almost every member of the seventh was killed including Custer. Crazy horse was the leader of the Lakota Sioux who defeated Custer.
It was pretty funny that you referred to the South Vietnamese soldier/translator as a "traitor" since he was fighting for his country South Vietnam. He was a patriot fighting against an invasion from the north that was defying internation law and forcing the submission of South Vietnam under a communist government that millions of Vietnamese in the south did not want. The death toll from this conflict was 200,000 to 250,000 South Vietnam soldiers and 58,000 American soldiers that were not in any way invading Vietnam, but honoring their commitments with the South Vietnam government, and 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers also died in combat in the conflict. The only thing keeping the south as an independent country was Americas involvement as soon as those troops were removed South Vietnam was no longer able to defend itself and South Vietnam lost the war.
Yeah, but they live in Vietnam, they have to walk the Party line, wether it’s their opinion or not
start looking at Vietnam Pre Second World War and then follow it through to the present day. Vietnam has always been technically been one country although partitioned after the Geneva Accords separated into the north and the south as a temporary measure prior to elections which in July 1956 Ho Chi Minh was predicted to win. The United States used the excuse of the 'Domino effect' to prop up a puppet government in the Saigon which never very popular. The Americans had no business in Vietnam but saw the opportunity to expand their capitalistic economy in Southeast Asia. Propping up the puppet government in The Republic of Vietnam was used as a means to an end. This drew them into a long and protracted war which should never have happened. Of course we know that their loss to the North Vietnamese and subsequent withdrawal was mainly due to the anti war feeling back home in the United States. So the translator can be seen as a traitor to the country of Vietnam as he was supporting a regime that the people didn't want and was being supported by a foreign power.
Ho Chi Minh was a central figure in Vietnam's history, striving throughout his life for the country's unification and independence. His efforts can be divided into two phases: initial cooperation with the United States during World War II and the subsequent confrontation during the Cold War.
Efforts to Unite Vietnam
1. Cooperation with the United States:
During World War II, Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the United States to resist Japanese occupation. His organization, the Viet Minh, received support from the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), including weapons, equipment, and training. Ho hoped that this cooperation would lead to U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence after the war.
2. Diplomatic Outreach:
After Vietnam’s declaration of independence on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent multiple letters to U.S. President Harry Truman, appealing for support and referencing the American Declaration of Independence. However, these appeals were ignored as the U.S. prioritized supporting France, its European ally.
3. First Indochina War (1946-1954):
Ho led North Vietnam in its fight against France, which sought to retain Vietnam as a colony. The conflict culminated in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Accords, which temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Ho anticipated national elections in 1956 to unify Vietnam, but the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold them.
---
Why Did Conflict Arise Between North Vietnam and the U.S.?
1. Ideological Clashes:
During the Cold War, the U.S. viewed Ho Chi Minh's government as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. This led to significant U.S. military and financial support for South Vietnam to prevent communist expansion (the Domino Theory).
2. Support for South Vietnam:
The U.S. bolstered Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime despite its repressive policies against opposition forces, including the Viet Cong, who were supported by North Vietnam. The escalating conflict ultimately drew the U.S. into direct military involvement by 1965.
3. Resistance from North Vietnam:
Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese leaders saw U.S. actions as neocolonialism and considered the conflict a struggle for national liberation. They received significant backing from the Soviet Union and China.
---
Conclusion
Ho Chi Minh initially sought peaceful unification and diplomatic ties with the U.S. However, America’s disregard for his appeals and Cold War geopolitics led to escalating tensions. The division of Vietnam and U.S. support for the South made confrontation inevitable, resulting in the Vietnam War.
@@feastguy101
Or go to prison
@@millinamillota7537 Uncle Ho had been a hardcore communist since the 1920s, it is more accurate to say he and his guerillas fought against the aggression and expansion of the Empire of Japan than to say he was an ally of the US although he was trained as an asset by the OSS (for a modern-day equivalent see Osama Bin Laden trained by the US military to oppose Russia in Afghanistan). Ho Chi Minh was thrown into prison in China by Chiang Kai-shek who distrusted the communist ally who would later use his US trained guerillas to stage a revolution against the French in Indochina. Any overtures by Uncle Ho would have obviously been rebuked by the US who had opposed the expansion of communism since the end of World War 2. Of course, the sitting president would support their WW2 allies the French over the expansion of communism throughout southeast Asia. Following the Geneva Accords in 1954 North Vietnam officially became a communist country under Lao Dong who was a student of Ho Chi Minh. Under Lao Dong's reforms up to half a million people were executed (landlords, Catholics, intellectuals) according to Hoang Van Chi a Vietnam historian. When the elections called for in 1956 by the Geneva Accords were not held because the government of South Vietnam never signed the accords and were therefor not bound by them. The north government then sent terrorists (Viet Cong) into South Vietnam to wreak havoc while they prepared for an invasion of the south (30,000 civilians were killed by North Vietnam during the war), building roads like the Ho Chi Minh trail.
The battle you hear on the radio is South Vietnamese fighting North Vietnamese.
Chi is so conflicted. Vietnamese die “nooo” US soldiers die “nooo”. I think Chi just doesn’t want war.❤❤❤
All lives matter.
At the end of the day were all humans.
This was the first all-out battle between the Vietnamese and the American soldiers. As the war evolved, both sides adapted, changing their tactics.
"We want him alive." HA! The French that survived the attack, wounded or not, were murdered in cold blood. Shot or bayoneted while totally defenseless. "An M-16." Nope, it was an SKS supplied to the NVA and Viet Cong by the then Soviet Union and China. The massacre of French Troops in the Ia Drang valley was in 1954, prior to the U.S. having entered the war and 10 years before the M-16 became the standard issue service weapon of the U.S. military. -- There seemed to be some confusion about the term Indochina. How can you know so little history about your region of the world? I know the meaning of Indochina when I was about 8 or 9 years old, so 60 to 61 years ago.. and I'm American, born and raised. - No, Col. Hal Moore was not talking about the Bible. The Sioux are a Native American people who are known for their semi-nomadic lifestyle and equestrian skills. The term "Sioux" dates back to the 17th century when the people lived in the Great Lakes area. The Sioux are made up of several subcultures, including the Lakota, Eastern Dakota, and Western Dakota. -- "How can they do that to their own people?" - In war there are accidents, 'death or wounds by friendly fire.' There has never been a military force of any nation in any war that did not by accident kill or wound some of it's own troops. It is tragic but it is inevitable, not intentional, but, again, inevitable. -- "You don't know what's coming" -- Is what followed what you expected?
Between cheering for Vietnamese troops killing Americans and saying how terrible Americans were take a little time and research The Huế massacre (Vietnamese: Thảm sát tại Huế Tết Mậu Thân, or Thảm sát Tết Mậu Thân ở Huế, lit. translation: "Tết Offensive massacre in Huế") was the summary executions and mass murder perpetrated by the Viet Cong and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during their capture, military occupation and later withdrawal from the city of Huế during the Tet Offensive, considered one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. North Vietnamese Army Regulars, on orders from Vietnam's infamous "war hero" General Vo Nguyen Giap, rounded up and marched the civilians to a dry river bed and summarily executed them with bullets, bayonets and clubs. Some were buried alive with their hands tied behind their backs. Their only crime - they believed in democracy or they were Christians.
You may also enjoy researching a Vietnamese female sniper known as 'Apache." Her exploits should give you a lot to cheer about and to use to brag about how much better those fighting to bring Communism to all of Vietnam were compared to those like the ARVN soldier fighting to bring freedom and democracy to all of Vietnam, the ARVN soldier you called a "traitor." Yep, 'Apache' and all the others like her are people you should look up to and be proud of how they committed war crime after war crime after war crime ... just as in the case of when the NVA massacred the French when they were helpless, after the battle was over and the French were all defenseless but the NVA slaughtered in cold blood every last French troop .. committing a major War Crime, a major breech of The Geneva Convention which North Vietnam was a signatory of .. but still ignored on a regular basis.
The female Viet Cong sniper and interrogator, known as “Apache,” enjoyed torturing 5th Regiment, 1st Marine Division US Marines and South Vietnamese troops and letting them bleed to death. She was known for cutting off the eyelids and saving them as souvenirs. She was of Vietnamese and French ancestry and grew up in Hanoi.
She operated around Hill 55, in the vicinity of Duc Pho, 8 miles (13 km) from DaNang. She used a 7.62mm Model 44 Russian-made Mosin-Nagant rifle, with a scope. In 1966, legendary sniper, Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock, II and his spotter, Captain Edward “Jim” Land were sent from DaNang to hunt for Apache. She was notoriously well-known to the Marines around Hill 55. Because of her brutal tactics and infamy, she quickly became a high profile target
One day she had captured a young Marine during an ambush. Within hearing range of the hilltop camp defenders, she tortured him through the night. Hathcock and Land heard horrendous screams and the next morning a Marine private staggered toward camp. He was bleeding profusely, much of his skin had been cut away and his fingernails had been removed. He had been castrated, and his arms were hanging limp, the bones were broken and exposed. Land said, “Carlos ran towards the Marine who collapsed dead, a few feet in front of him.”
It took several days for Carlos and Jim to locate the Viet Cong sniper team. Late one afternoon Land spotted the group with a Vietnamese woman that fit Apache’s description, 700 yards away. He pointed her out to Hathcock. She was a small woman walking towards a ridgeline with her squad of five Viet Cong guerrillas. All of them were armed, and Hathcock noticed that the woman was carrying a rifle with a scope. Carlos did not want to shoot the wrong one so he waited. When she squatted down to urinate, Land called in an artillery barrage on the group of snipers. The group started running towards Hathcock and Land. At that point Jim told Carlos to take her down. Hathcock put a round in her with his bolt-action Winchester Model 70 30.06 (7.62mm) rifle and she collapsed on the ground. Land told Hathcock to “put another round in her.” Hathcock fired again and her body convulsed. She was 31 years old and that was the end of that “sadistic bitch.” This was a major morale victory. The artillery strike killed the other five snipers.
Watch "Hamburger Hill" next.
Taking it way too seriously dude.
lol
You this hurt by someone from Vietnam not cheering for the US soldiers in a war between Vietnam and the US ? I bet you watch other war movies with the US and cheer every time the US soldiers kill a German, or Italian, or Korean, or Vietnamese, or Iraqi, or Afghan. But still you get hurt right in the feels when someone is against the US in the movie. And honestly, not really that against the US either. Their reaction shows them disliking anyone getting killed, whether US or Vietnamese.
As for your long winded finger pointing at atrocities done by the Vietnamese. I find it deeply amusing how you completely omit the atrocities done by US troops. Rape, torture, burning down villages and killing innocent civilians. The US is not some holy army levitating above the rest of us completely free from sin. The US has committed a long, dark list of atrocities in every conflict and war they have been involved in. Whether the killing of civilians in Vietnam or firebombing civilians in Japan.
You need to get off your high horse, take a deep breath of reality and understand that just because many movies represent the US as "good guys" most of us around the world outside the US are fully aware of how cruel a war is and how atrocities are done by ALL sides in a war.
Again, get off your high horse!
@@user-cx4px3jh2f - "Taking it way too seriously dude." --- They are many decades detached from the conflict and clearly do not know very much about it. Or at least not as in the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth. They need to know the truth, or at least they should know the truth.
They clap for 'the good guys,' of course being the Vietnamese. I would really like to hear them explain how the North were the good guys when in 'The Hanoi Hilton' prisoners repeatedly suffered torture like how they put your arms behind your back and they'll cinch up your elbows until your ribs start pulling apart here. Then they rotate over your head until your shoulder dislocates, and no man can stand the pain. And then they'd force a metal bar down the prisoner's throat to keep them from screaming. And there was worse done to prisoners. Will the they clap at that like they clap when they see an American shot while reacting to a movie?
Murder, kidnapping, torture and intimidation were a routine part of Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) operations during the Vietnam War. They were intended to liquidate opponents such as officials, leaders, military personnel, civilians who collaborated with the South Vietnamese government, erode the morale of South Vietnamese government employees, cow the populace and boost tax collection and propaganda efforts.
During the early years of the war, assassinations, and similar activity was organized via "special activity cells" of the VC. As the conflict continued, efforts were centralized under the VC Security Service, estimated to number 25,000 men by 1970. This extensive use of terror received comparatively little attention from Western journalists, who were preoccupied with covering the conventional warfare aspect of the conflict. Notable VC/PAVN incidents of terror include the Đắk Sơn massacre, Massacre at Huế, Son Tra massacre and the Thanh My massacre.
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. On 5 December 1967, two VC battalions attacked Dak Son village, and after a battle with the militia, killed 252 civilians and kidnapped an estimated 100 civilians in a "vengeance" attack on the hamlet of Đắk Sơn, home to over 2,000.
The Huế massacre (Vietnamese: Thảm sát tại Huế Tết Mậu Thân, or Thảm sát Tết Mậu Thân ở Huế, lit. translation: "Tết Offensive massacre in Huế") was the summary executions and mass murder perpetrated by the Viet Cong and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) during their capture, military occupation and later withdrawal from the city of Huế during the Tet Offensive, considered one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War.
The Battle of Huế began on 31 January 1968, and lasted a total of 26 days. During the months and years that followed, dozens of mass graves were discovered in and around Huế. The estimated death toll was between 2,800 and 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war, or 5-10% of the total population of Huế. The Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) released a list of 4,062 victims identified as having been either murdered or abducted. Victims were found bound, tortured, and sometimes buried alive. Many victims were also clubbed to death.
The Sơn Trà Massacre was a massacre of South Vietnamese civilians committed by the Viet Cong (VC) during the Vietnam War, in Sơn Trà village, Bình Sơn District, Quảng Ngãi Province, South Vietnam on 28/9 June 1968. Sơn Trà was a fishing village located approximately 5 miles (8.0 km) southeast of Chu Lai Base Area. It had a population of approximately 4,000 people, including many resettled refugees. The attack began at 23:10 on 28 June 1968 with a mortar attack. Many of the civilians took shelter in their defensive bunkers and then between 75 and 300 VC moved through the village throwing satchel charges into bunkers killing their occupants and starting fires. Other villagers fled toward the CAP position, blocking the forces there from engaging the attackers. Soldiers from the 198th Light Infantry Brigade were landed at the CAP position by helicopters approximately 30 minutes after the attack began but they waited until dawn to move into the village.
he Thạnh Mỹ Massacre was a massacre of South Vietnamese civilians committed by the Viet Cong (VC) during the Vietnam War, in Thạnh Mỹ hamlet, Phú Thạnh commune, (now Bà Rén village, Quế Xuân 1 commune) Quế Sơn District, Quảng Nam Province, South Vietnam on 11 June 1970. At 02:00 on 11 June, the VC, later identified as elements of the V-25th Main Force Battalion and the T-89th Sapper Battalion, launched a coordinated attack. It began with a barrage of 60mm and 82mm mortar fire. The mortars, located north and south of Phu Thanh, dropped a total of 200-250 high explosive and white phosphorus rounds on the village. The VC had destroyed 156 houses and damaged 35 more, most of them in Thanh My, the hardest hit of the village's hamlets. Civilian casualties totalled 74 dead, many of them women and children; 60 severely injured; and over 100 lightly wounded.
I cannot find enjoyment from watching people clapping for and cheering for those who committed repeated mass atrocities against their own people, murdering, torturing, burying alive their own people .. not the barbaric conditions, treatment and torture prisoners of war, that are supposed to be protected, were forced to endure.
My bet is the girls know extremely little of such things, if they know anything whatsoever about them.
I wonder if while in school they were taught about how 'The Apache' tortured both Vietnamese citizens and American servicemen .. and cut off their eyelids to keep for souvenirs? If they were taught those facts did they smile and clap and cheer and say 'hooray for us because we're the good guys!'
Jeez-sus, dude, why are you so outrageously aggressive and hostile about it?! These ladies aren't sniping at anybody. And they're products of what was once the North Vietnamese government and who knows what they were taught about their history, but I'd bet it's not exactly pro-South Vietnamese. Plus, I just now watched them be very affected by the deaths of both Vietnamese and American soldiers. You're laying an awful lot of shit at their feet that they had nothing to do with and to suggest that maybe they would idolize torturers if you told them about it is pretty damn disgusting. Get a grip on yourself.
This movie takes place in the early phase of American involvement, and the Air Cav units were entirely voluntarily enlisted Soldier, which is very different from Apocalypse now or Full Metal Jacket, where most of the soldiers are disgruntled disenfranchised Draftees. This makes a huge difference in performance, and morale.
One of the tragedies of this war, was that the Americans better than most should have been able to understand a people fighting a revolutionary war for their independence from a Colonial master (France).
They themselves fought such a war for their independence from Great Britain, and won.
Exactly
By the time we got directly involved it was NOT a war for independence, the French had already been defeated. It was a civil war between the communist North and the democratic South. We came to support the South when the North invaded to prevent the spread of communism and the growing influence of the Soviets. It was a similar scenario to the Korean War but with a far different result. It was also far more political and messy. And while we were the most heavily involved several other countries were fighting as well, the Australians for example. I'm guessing you're not American, I suggest you educate yourself about the details of the war before making such comments.
@@Nandrall18-25 You still don´t get it.
How come a small poor country could defeat the strongest military power in the world with the biggest economy?
The regime in South Vietnam by this time (after the assasination of Diem in 1963: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_assassination_of_Ng%C3%B4_%C4%90%C3%ACnh_Di%E1%BB%87m) was little more that a US puppet.
Maybe you should read a little more?? And not believe the propaganda of your country so much.
@@Nandrall18-25 Maybe you know many details - but you still don´t get the big picture.
Is it not strange that a small and poor country managed to defeat the strongest army in the world, backed by the (then) by far biggest economy?
By this time (after the coup and assasination of Diem in 1963: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_assassination_of_Ng%C3%B4_%C4%90%C3%ACnh_Di%E1%BB%87m) the regime in South Vietnam was basically a US puppet.
Try to think a bit independently and believe less in US propaganda.
@@Nandrall18-25 You still don´t get the big picture.
How could a small poor country defeat the strongest army, backed with the biggest economy (especially at that time) in the world?
At this time (after the coup and assassination of Diem in 63) the regime in South Vietnam was little more than a US puppet, and most vietnamese saw the US as just France i new clothing (another tragedy).
Hello Movie Munchies, your reactions are so honest, so true. You comment on what you see, which gives your channel an honesty that is great to see. Movies can teach us, and your reaction to this movie shows that. Keep up your great reactions, beautiful ladies. .
A great movie. Amazing cast. Somehow one scene always does it for me and stands out. When the Taxi Driver has to make his rounds, handing out all the telegrams. A quick scene, but the actor Dan Beene really delivers there.
You ladies did great watching this difficult film. I think the most powerful scenes are the ones with the women delivering the telegrams. Thank you!
The real people were part of the making of this, so its as realistic as we could possibly get.
A lot of Hollywood movies that are set in Vietnam are fictionalized to be action, rather than tragedy, because war is tragedy
I always find that interesting, Hollywood has never really dealt with the Vietnam War it’s mostly a lot of fictionalized stories, or the stereotypical disgruntled vet going back to look for lost friends.
Unlike a WWII film which is very black and white.
@@garycollins7750 this movie had the actual Hal Moore and the reporter guy (I forget his name) involved in the making of it, he's not prone to exaggeration either, apparently the most annoying for set designers was planting all the grass, this was filmed in America so the plants had a hard time surviving for weeks at a time
I also see a lot of bravery And patriotism in the Vietnamese, like I see with us in the United States. The normal every day, people like you guys and us are very patriotic and love our countries, but it’s the war machine that keeps growing, and it needs to be stopped. There is no reason whatsoever that we cannot all get along! I know we and the Vietnamese do get along, but why can’t the Middle East? Why does everybody think their God is better? And they hate and kill for that God?! What kind of God would want you to do that? When are humans in power going to learn? Probably never, that’s why we need to stand together as people of the land and not people of government!
The war was south Vietnam against north Vietnam, China was backing the north, and the US was backing the south. At the end of the war many south Vietnam people fled to the US in fear for their lives. My home city in the US took in many south Vietnamese people as refugees. This is the same thing that happened in Korea, only that war never really ended, South Korea is still backed by the US in defending its northern boarder from communist North Korea. The real war is communism against the free world, but I don’t see that Vietnam ever truly embraced communism, because your county allows freedom of religion, freedom to travel, and a high level of freedom of speech.
Calling South Vietnam part of the free world is crazy
Freedom of speech in a communist country? Yeah, right. I would dare any citizen of vietnam to publicly criticize the party.
I hate War.
There's nothing else to say about that.
"Grave of the Fireflies" will haunt me forever when I think about war, who it really impacts.
The Ia Drang Valley is located in what was South Vietnam (Saigon the Capitol). So - North Vietnam soldiers invaded this area. The South Viet soldier was defending his country from the North Viet invaders with the help of US Army.
You do realise the North had massive support from people in the South right?
You do realize that hundreds of thousand of Vietnamese if not millions fled to the USA rather than live under Communist leadership, consequences of losing that struggle. Why would the Vietnamese go to live with Americans if they were enemies. Lots and lots of options other than the USA. You do realize that Vietnamese immigrate to the USA every day. The largest population of Vietnamese, outside of Vietnam are in the USA. Are they held here against their will as prisoners of war?
@@BetterDays-e8h 300.000 out of a population of 16.000.000 is a minority. 71% of the South lived in rural areas where the communist found a lot of support. Thats why the VC existed.
@@Mattdewit about 800.000 christian vietnamese alone fled from communist massacres and you think it's 300.000?
@@vicheller3945 We were talking about Vietnamese people that fled to the US and in 1980 there lived 261,729 Vietnamese people in the US. Its true that people also fled to other places but again still a minority. Only 10% of South Vietnam was Christian.
Ft. Benning was the largest oldest training station in America. They train Basic training soldiers, ait, mechanized, jump school, and other schools. It was recently renamed Fort Moore, in his Honor. He was a loving and religious, family man, who loved his soldiers deeply, and they loved him. It was Communism, China, and money, that started this war, first with the French, then America.
CHI!!!! The Vietnam War was not a War between Vietnam and the USA, The Vietnam War was between the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese, The South Vietnamese were being slaughtered losing, That's when they turned to The US for help, The US came to help the South Vietnamese.
this wasn't told to them in school.. Vietnam was divided and fighting each other decades before the US showed up.. it wasnt even a declared war it was a "police action" .. but what blows my mind is that they don't know Who the Cong was and they don't know Who ARVN was...
Ho Chi Minh was a central figure in Vietnam's history, striving throughout his life for the country's unification and independence. His efforts can be divided into two phases: initial cooperation with the United States during World War II and the subsequent confrontation during the Cold War.
Efforts to Unite Vietnam
1. Cooperation with the United States:
During World War II, Ho Chi Minh collaborated with the United States to resist Japanese occupation. His organization, the Viet Minh, received support from the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), including weapons, equipment, and training. Ho hoped that this cooperation would lead to U.S. support for Vietnam’s independence after the war.
2. Diplomatic Outreach:
After Vietnam’s declaration of independence on September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh sent multiple letters to U.S. President Harry Truman, appealing for support and referencing the American Declaration of Independence. However, these appeals were ignored as the U.S. prioritized supporting France, its European ally.
3. First Indochina War (1946-1954):
Ho led North Vietnam in its fight against France, which sought to retain Vietnam as a colony. The conflict culminated in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the 1954 Geneva Accords, which temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Ho anticipated national elections in 1956 to unify Vietnam, but the South, under Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to hold them.
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Why Did Conflict Arise Between North Vietnam and the U.S.?
1. Ideological Clashes:
During the Cold War, the U.S. viewed Ho Chi Minh's government as a communist threat aligned with the Soviet Union and China. This led to significant U.S. military and financial support for South Vietnam to prevent communist expansion (the Domino Theory).
2. Support for South Vietnam:
The U.S. bolstered Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime despite its repressive policies against opposition forces, including the Viet Cong, who were supported by North Vietnam. The escalating conflict ultimately drew the U.S. into direct military involvement by 1965.
3. Resistance from North Vietnam:
Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnamese leaders saw U.S. actions as neocolonialism and considered the conflict a struggle for national liberation. They received significant backing from the Soviet Union and China.
---
Conclusion
Ho Chi Minh initially sought peaceful unification and diplomatic ties with the U.S. However, America’s disregard for his appeals and Cold War geopolitics led to escalating tensions. The division of Vietnam and U.S. support for the South made confrontation inevitable, resulting in the Vietnam War.
@@millinamillota7537 Jesus dude I've seen you spam this AI least 5 times by now. Same AI answer everywhere. Stop.
@PhilipZeplinDK Due to a physical disability, I am unable to type texts myself. Therefore, I rely on speech recognition technology to write or express myself in writing. This allows me to communicate efficiently and independently despite my disability.
I kindly ask for your understanding if this affects the way I phrase or express my concerns.
@@millinamillota7537
Sure, but everyone is tired of it. Just stop
Is this the only time Chi has ever cried in a reaction? That's so sweet. I have actually never seen this film but now am really excited to check it out! 🙂🙂
Vietnam was a civil war that went multi-national thanks to communist expansionism. US government policy was to deny that. The people of Southern Vietnam were not traitors. They were the losing side. You see, the majority of Vietnamese people in the south and people in places like the US ultimately cared more about peace than what form of government was in Vietnam. Your government was the cause, you're lack of understanding is the result.
North Vietnam had no intention to "expand" communism, they just wanted to reunify their country and call it a day. Vietnam is unified now, how much "expansionism" does it engage in?
@shatterquartz Like I said, Vietnam was a civil war. Communist expansionism didn't stop in Vietnam.
@@shatterquartz He talked about communist imperialism, not specifically vietnamese imperialism. Communist countries as a whole are the 20th century mongol horde that goes around to loot, rape and conquer, they just use the "spread of communism" as a crutch to destabilise other countries with partisan forces first and then move in to create a vassal state with local communists in power. All ex-communist bloc countries today are colonial states which oppress the ethnic minorities within the borders they conquered. Just because they didn't sail across the sea to plunder other people doesn't make them any less colonialist and imperialist.
Thanks for the reaction. Really enjoy your perspective on these films.
It wasn’t the US vs Vietnam. It was the US and south Vietnam vs communist north Vietnam. We wanted Vietnam to not become a communist country so the people like “Movie Munchies” can grow up and live in a free democratic country.
And US got their asses kicked
@@jordand.6755 They won every military engament, lost the cultural war.
I don't think there's a country on this planet that is truly democratic or free.
@@TippyToes527 Direct democracy can never work, even the Greeks found out about it as their experiment into it barely lasted 40 years before civil war broke out.
@AlexisLopez-pb8ms
You did your homework very well!!!
you girls have the best reactions truly heart felt reactions 😁
this is what makes us human to care for the suffering of others
I wouldn't quite say the South Vietnamese guy was a traitor. A lot of people in South Vietnam didn't want to be under the North Vietnamese communist regime - and a lot of them came to the US instead.
He was direclty fighiting with the invasor, supporting soith vietnam existence alone inst nescesary suporting the foreing invasion meant to maintain it wich sure makes you a traitor
@@bernardoblanco4286 first of all you really need to work on your English. Second, we were not invaders, the North Vietnamese were! We were there at the request of the South Vietnamese and fought alongside them in defense of their own country primarily within South Vietnam itself. The communist North had invaded them just like North Korea invaded South Korea in the Korean War. That South Vietnamese soldier was defending his own country from the communist invaders. By your crazy logic every South Korean was a traitor for defending themselves when North Korea invaded their country. Just because the South Vietnamese lost doesn't make them traitors.
@@Nandrall18-25 That is a very americanized viewpoint of the war. The war would never have happened had it not been for the The US's support of an unpopular puppet government. The reunification of the partitioned Vietnam would have happened naturally in the elections in 1956 and millions less people would have died. By intervening financially and eventually militarily the American War in Vietnam made a lot of money for the us, and cause millions of deaths across Southeast Asia. They should never have got involved.
@@digitalbegley I wouldn't say that; you think there would have been millions of people who wouldn't have died. But as history has shown, no reunification is bloodless. Just as many would have died, if not more.
once mel gibson was a star actor.today he is a star director.who would have guessed that back in the day!?
That south Vietnamese translator was not a traitor. He was as Vietnamese as both of you, he just fought on the losing side.
It's super interesting to see your perspective, it makes it obvious that regional history is written by the victors. Even though the US shouldn't have been there in the first place, I would assume people in Vietnam still see the "south" as enemies/traitors despite them also being Vietnamese. The war started before the US was even involved, the US only provided support for South Vietnam until North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the U.S.S. Maddox and U.S.S. Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin
Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a false flag operation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
Chi I can never say this enough...I am so proud of you, of Hella and all of your girlfriends who take a very serious look at these movies and try to understand their history. There is a deleted scene from this film that I really wish they would have left in the theatrical release, but for whatever reason it was cut out. It shows that despite the US's initial success in this first battle, that we really overestimated that success, and how we never should have allowed things to escalate. Here is that deleted scene.
ua-cam.com/video/xlVcduLh6ec/v-deo.html
The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, November 14, 1965 marked a pivotal moment in U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Elements of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) entered the first major land battle of the war at landing zones X-Ray and Albany, which would turn out to be proving grounds for a whole new kind of warfare. On the morning of November 14th, the 1st Cavalry landed at Landing Zone X-Ray at the base of the Chu Pong mountain and by noon they were already under attack from the North Vietnamese. The fighting continued all day and into the night with the enemy relentlessly making assault after assault.
The North Vietnamese forces had succeeded in engaging the U.S. forces in very tight quarters. The cavalry regiment returned fire, but the enemy were dug into prepared fighting positions and many of the American leaders had died or were wounded during the initial stages of the attack. Temperatures reached 100 degrees, and by the afternoon there was a firestorm battle for survival. Battalion Commander Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore and his men continued on, receiving support from artillery units and air strikes, helping the American troops hold themselves against the enemy.
During a 14-hour period, Major Bruce Crandall and Captain Ed Freeman, repeatedly landed their helicopter under intense enemy fire at Landing Zone X-Ray. They resupplied ammunition, water, and supplies, while evacuating the wounded. They saved some 70 soldiers. Both later were awarded the Medal of Honor, our nation’s highest award for heroism in combat.
By the end of the first day, the 1st BN, 7th Cavalry was reduced to approximately 340 men. North Vietnamese forces had higher casualty rates, due to the U.S. airstrike and artillery support.
On the second day, North Vietnamese forces launched a heavy attack including hand-to-hand combat. Charlie Company took the brunt of the assault. A “Broken Arrow” was declared over the radio by the Battalion Forward Air Controller, which meant that an American unit was in imminent danger of being overrun. It was the signal for all available American aircraft to converge and provide aid to the American unit.
The fighting continued for three hours. Charlie Company held their position, exemplifying extraordinary heroism and courage. By the end, there were no officers left and only 49 men that were not wounded.
With the arrival on foot of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry commanded by Lt. Col. Robert McDade, on the morning of November 16, there were now three Cavalry battalions crammed into the clearing, including Lt. Col. Walter Tully’s 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry. By the third day of the battle, the Americans had gained the upper hand.
As the fighting around Landing Zone X-Ray subsided, McDade’s 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was ordered to move cross-country to Landing Zone Albany, where it was to be picked up by helicopter and moved to a new location. The U.S. unit was moving through the jungle in a long column when the 8th battalion of the North Vietnamese 66th Regiment sprang in to a massive ambush. Of the 500 men, 150 were killed and only 84 were able to return to immediate duty. Companies C and D took the brunt of the Communist attack, and most of the men were quickly hit. It was the most successful ambush against U.S. forces during the course of the entire war.
Before the Battle of la Drang was over, 305 Americans had been killed along with an estimated 2,000 North Vietnamese troops. American officials declared the Battle of the la Drang Valley a victory.
The service members killed in the Battle of la Drang are remembered on Panel 3E of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial