Beginning of the Vietnam War

The conflict in Vietnam began in Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when communists overthrew the French occupation of Indochina and set up a communist, nationalist regime. In North Vietnam the leader of the group, Ho Chi Minh, was viewed as a national hero for ridding the nation of foreign imperial oppression. The United States, however, disregarded his role as a nationalist and saw him only as a communist, even though he was a nationalist first and a communist second. Due to the ideological conflicts of the Cold War and the policy of containment, the US was determined to prevent North Vietnam's fall to communist spread to its neighboring countries in a theory called the domino affect. To try to stop the communists aka the Vietcong from conquering South Vietnam, the US sent advisers and support to the dictator in South Vietnam. The dictator with US advisory burned the South Vietnamese peasants' villages to the ground and sent them to “fortified hamlets” to isolate them from the Vietcong. However this just made the villagers more angry with the government and more inclined to join the Vietcong, and it went on in this cycle of being increasingly more violent to control the people but it just made them more angry until finally his dictatorship was overthrown and then he was assassinated by his own army. Seeing that the unstable South Vietnam would be doomed without American intervention, President Johnson sent more aid to South Vietnam, including naval and air support. At the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam, American ships were attacked by torpedo submarines. Shortly after the commander of a ship claimed that they were under attack, even though there was never any evidence of a hostile. Despite this, Johnson claimed that there had been two attacks, and he used the unprovoked attacks (even though there was only one attack) to convince Congress to give him the ability to do what ever was necessary to help the cause of suppressing the communists in Vietnam. Congress then handed its check of the ability to declare war to the president, and then Johnson sent the first ground troops into Vietnam, and the war had begun.