How did Ho Chi Minh's army defeat the USA in the Vietnam war? In March 1965, US President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave order to send 3,500 marines to South Vietnam and consequently started America's involvement in the Vietnam war. In short, the main reason that Johnson, Nixon and Kennedy continued to involve the USA in the Vietnam war, was to stop the spread of communism. Also, since the USSR and China had also become communist states, 'losing' more countries to communism would cause America to forfeit its powerful position as 'the leader of the free world'. America assumed it would be easy for them to win the war against North Vietnam, they were a huge military machine against a peasant army, yet this huge underestimating of the Viet Cong …show more content…
The public put unavoidable pressure on the government to cease involvement in the war, especially as it was eating massive amounts of tax payer’s money. In November 1969, 500,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington DC. Also, Viet Cong aims were to simply never give in and inflict enough damage on the USA to withdraw. Whereas US strategies included forcing North Vietnam to give in, making them agree to an acceptable solution to the conflict, insuring China or the USSR wouldn’t be drawn into the conflict, all whilst ‘protecting’ South Vietnam and building support there. As well as these aims being more difficult from the offset, there was also much more initiative for the Viet Cong soldiers, who were fighting for an ideology they whole-heartedly believed in and for their country. Compared to US soldiers, often still in their teens and unsure of what they were even fighting for, being placed in a foreign country and feeling as though they were constantly making little to no progress against the