War, we have to rewind all the way back to the late 1800s

when France was colonizing Southeast Asia.

And in particular, it colonized what is now Laos, Vietnam,

and Cambodia-- and they were collectively

called French Indochina.

You can see Cambodia here, Vietnam along the coast,

and then, Laos, right over here.

And France stayed the colonizing power--

I have a little gap in my timeline here--

and they stayed a colonizing power

all the way through World War II.

And so you can imagine, during World War II,

France was quickly overrun by the Germans.

The Vietnamese wanted their independence,

and so you have a liberation movement that rises up.

And it was led by the Viet Minh, and the Viet Minh

were led by Ho Chi Minh.

This right here is a picture of Ho Chi Minh.

And besides being a liberation movement,

they were also communist, which, you could imagine, later

on during the Cold War will kind of bias

the United States against them.

But you fast forward through World War II.

Eventually, the Japanese take control over Indochina,

over Vietnam.

But by the time '45 rolls around, or at least

the end of '45-- and we know that the United States defeats

Japan-- now, all of a sudden, the Viet Minh

are able to declare a somewhat temporary independence.

And it's temporary because shortly

after that-- and the region is occupied temporarily

by the Chinese in the north, and the British in the south, who

were part of the Allied forces against the Axis.

But eventually, you have the French coming back,

and they want to reassert their control

over their former colony.

And you have this war that develops-- the First Indochina

War between the French and the people

sympathetic to the French-- the Vietnamese

who were loyal to the French-- and the North.

And the French-- just to make it clear

how it sets up, at the end of World War II

when you had the temporary occupiers, the British

and the Chinese, the Chinese, obviously,

had more influence in the North.

The British had more influence in the South.

When the French come back they, essentially,

are able to reinstate control over the South.

So right when the Indochina War is beginning,

the French already have more control over the South.

And actually, historically the French

had more influence in the South, as well.

During French colonial rule it was really the southern third

of Vietnam where you had a lot of French influence.

And this is a current map, and the current map

does not have this orange boundary over here

that we'll talk about in a second.

Vietnam is now unified.

But before the Vietnam War, this was not Ho Chi Minh City,

this was Saigon.

And Saigon was kind of where most of the French control

was centered.

But you fast forward to 1954, this

ends up in a bit of a stalemate.

And so you have the Geneva Conference of 1954

that partitions Vietnam along the 17th parallel between North

Vietnam and South Vietnam.

And the whole point of this partition

was, really, to just allow for a cooling

off period, a period where you can have thing

settling down, and then having elections.

It wasn't meant to be a permanent partition.

But there was a 300-day period where

people could move across the partition.

And during that partition, you actually

had 900,000 people, mainly Catholics, move from the North

to South.

You also had several hundred thousand people

moving from the South to the North,

so it wasn't a one-way movement.

But net net, most of the movements by Roman Catholic

Vietnamese was from the North to the south.

You fast forward a little bit, you eventually have--

and I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation here--

Ngo Dinh Diem take control.

He starts off as prime minister in '54,

eventually he takes control, and becomes president in '55.

This is him right here.

He takes control of South Vietnam,

and this guy is not a big fan of things like elections,

or non-corrupt government, and all the rest.

And he takes control of South Vietnam.

But you could imagine that the United States is positively

inclined to him.

One, he dresses in nice Western suits and all of that,

and had nicely combed hair.

But he was also anti-communist.

And at this time period, the United States

is starting to think in terms of the Cold War.

And in terms of, how do we stop communism?

How do we contain it?

This whole theory of containment--

that the best way to stop the Soviet Union

is to just make sure that communism can not spread.

That it gets contained.

We have the domino theory in the United States

that if one country falls to communism in a region,

that the rest of the countries will eventually fall.

And that is not good for containment.

So we did not want South Vietnam to fall.

We essentially start supporting these characters over here.

And even from the early '50s, the United States

starts supporting the anti-communist.

And at first, this support, it's in the-- I

guess we should say-- the guise of advisers.

But these advisers-- one, we start

sending more and more aid, and more and more advisers.

And these advisers started getting more and more involved

in the actual conflict.

And so after this partition, you can imagine,

that you still have an ongoing conflict

between the North and the South.

And on top of that, you have actors

who are sympathetic to the North,

sympathetic to the Viet Minh, sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh,

in the South.

Some of them were in the North, they come back to the South.

Some of them were just in the South.

And they did not like the Diem government.

Besides just being sympathetic to Ho Chi Minh,

Diem was a fairly corrupt autocratic ruler,

who wasn't a big fan of democracy.

And so these players in the South

who started to rise up against President Diem or the Viet

Cong.

And so this really sets up what the Vietnam War is all about.

You have the communist Ho Chi Minh-controlled North

that was fighting a conventional war against the South.

You have this partition on the 17th parallel.

And on top of that, you have an unconventional fighting force--

I guess you'd call them guerrillas--

in the South of Vietnam called the Viet Cong.

So it was, kind of, a double-- There were two things

that the South had to fight against-- the North officially,

and also this insurrection that was occurring within the South.

And so the whole time the United States did not

want this insurrection to succeed-- they did not

want all of Vietnam to become communist.

We keep sending more and more advisers.

It actually started even before Kennedy,

but Kennedy he starts sending-- he escalates

the number of advisers that gets sent.

It's still not, at this point, it's still not a formal war.

We haven't officially declared-- where

we don't have, officially, soldiers in battle.

You fast forward to 1963, besides all

of the great characteristics of Diem that I already mentioned,

he also was into persecuting Buddhists.

So to make matters worse, not only was he corrupt,

not only did he not like elections,

but he liked persecuting his own people.

And by 1963, this kind of got out

of hand, his level of persecution of the Buddhists.

He started toward storming temples, and all the rest.

And so he was assassinated.

And not only was he assassinated,

it kind of leaves this power vacuum,

and you have all these people jockeying for control,

none of these really especially savory characters

inside the South.

These two guys eventually come to power, Nguyen Cao Ky

and Nguyen Van Thieu.

Wait a few years, Nguyen Van Thieu

is able to get this guy out of the picture.

And then by 1967-- I don't have it

over here-- you have Thieu has now taken control.

But during that period-- or actually,

before Ky and Thieu take power-- in 1964,

you have one of the shadiest incidents in American history.

As you can imagine, we, in our function as advisors,

we had sent ships into the Gulf of Tonkin, right off

of the coast of North Vietnam.

So the original story goes-- and this

is a very suspect original story-- in 1964,

the US Maddox-- and this is the original story-- claimed

to that it was attacked, or it was

claimed that the US Maddox was attacked

by North Vietnamese patrol boats,

and that there was a little skirmish-- there

was an exchange of fire.

And it was also claimed that a few days later another boat

in the Gulf of Tonkin, another US vessel,

was attacked by a North Vietnamese boat.

That was the original story.

This angered Congress, this angered the American people.

How dare they attack ships that are sitting off of the coast,

warships that are sitting off the coast.

And so this kind of gave the emotional fuel

to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

So these incidents, or these purported incidents-- this,

kind of, attack on the USS Maddox,

and this other thing that might have happened-- these

were called the Gulf of Tonkin Incidents.

This angered Congress, angered the American people,

so we passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,

and what's relevant about it is that it gave LBJ, here,

it gave him the authority to officially

engage in a war in Vietnam, to officially escalate it

to an actual war that the US was involved in.

And this whole time I've been saying it's

shady, because it's now been shown

that one, the Gulf of Tonkin-- well it's not clear

that really anything happened.

There might have been some firing from the USS Maddox.

They might have actually engaged the North Vietnamese patrol

boats.

The other possibility that might have happened

is that nothing happened.

But any way you look at it, it's now been fairly established

that it was not a real incident.

It was not really North Vietnam attacking the United States.

But it was relevant because it really escalated the war.

So now you have Johnson-- did I say North Korea originally?

I apologize for that.

We're talking about North Vietnam.

I don't remember what my brain actually said.

Of course, North Vietnam.

But it gave Johnson the power to escalate the war.

And so his administration is really

the heart of the Vietnam War, when

the war was really escalated.

We eventually get to 500,000 US troops.

But the whole time this is happening, you can imagine,

Johnson and the American military leaders in Vietnam

are telling the American people, oh, we're fighting communism.

We're about to win.

This is a noble war.

And you fast forward, and especially,

the part about to win-- you fast forward to 1968,

and all of a sudden you have the Viet Cong, who

the American leaders have told the American people

and the Congress, that they're about to be defeated,