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Vietnam won independence and Le Loi, the Vietnamese military leader, became the new emperor after the rebels drove the Chinese out of Vietnam.
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France took control over Vietnam and formed French Indochina (one of its richest colonial possessions) by combining Vietnam with Laos and Cambodia.
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Southeast Asia was threatened after the Japanese army occupied Indochina.
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Ho Chi Minh, a nationalist, discussed to an American journalist about the Vietnamese people’s determination to succeed in the war against French.
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Vietminh, the League for the Independence of Vietnam from France, was aided by China’s communist government. China hoped to limit U.S. influence in the region and wished to prevent the establishment of a strong, unified Vietnam.
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Vietminh defeated the French and forced their surrender.
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An international conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland to settle the Indochina conflict.
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After the French regained of the region south of the 17th parallel, general elections to reunify the country were scheduled.
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Armed revolution had erupted in the south and military from the north came to the south to assist the Vietminh.
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Southern Vietnamese Buddhist leaders opposed Diem’s rule (the president of the newly established Republic of Vietnam), and Diem waged a brutal campaign to control the Buddhists. Many Buddhists were arrested and killed, and Buddhist monks publicly set themselves on fire.
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Diem and his brother were murdered by plotters, which upset U.S. advisers who had been prepared to fly Diem out of the country.
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President Lyndon B. Johnson appeared on national television to announce a new stage in U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.
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The Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution to give President Johnson the authority to take “all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States.” President Johnson also launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against military targets in the North, and the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam grew from 185,000 to about 486,000.
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The Selective service notified 13,700 draftees to serve in the armed forces.
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The Students for a Democratic Society movement organized the first national antiwar demonstration in Washington D.C., and the participants delivered to Congress a petition demanding that lawmakers “act immediately to end the war.”
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Vietcong guerillas and North Vietnamese troops snuck out from their jungle camps and city hideouts to execute a planned strike against the South Vietnamese and their U.S. allies.
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Guerilla Warfare | In August, troops started the slow process of withdrawing, and when Nixon took office, the U.S. troops in Vietnam numbered about 540,000. Nixon planned to expand the war into neutral Cambodia to cut off North Vietnamese supply lines, so he ordered the widespread bombing of Cambodia.
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The Kent State Shootings took place where the National Guard troops sent to control demonstrators shot randomly into a large group of students and caused 4 deaths and nine injuries.
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Congress repealed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution because they were upset by the Cambodian invasion.
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The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a collection of secret government documents relating to the war, which revealed that the government had misled the American people about the course of the war.
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North Vietnam staged a major invasion of South Vietnam in order to reveal the weaknesses of Nixon’s Vietnamization strategy (help train the south Vietnamese soldiers to give them more control their fighting in the Civil War), and as a response, Nixon ordered heavy bombing of North Vietnam.
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A peace settlement was created where negotiators in Paris announced a cease-fire, a prisoner-exchange agreement was created, and the US pledged to withdraw remaining forces and help rebuild Vietnam.
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North Vietnamese troops overran the northern part of South Vietnam and new waves of refuges poured into Saigon after South Vietnamese troops retreated.
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South Vietnam surrendered and Vietnam fell under communist rule.