User:Nguyentuonglan98/sandbox

Carlos Latuff's cartoon about Vietnam War.

Article evaluation The article I am planning to work on is about Vietnam War. While this is considered a notable topic and has been covered by numerous reliable sources, there are some major problem with this article. The first problem is that it is considered too long by Wikipedia. While I believe the size of the article right now is appropriate for such an extensive topic, there are some unpolished works and unrelated content in the page that make the article very confusing to go through. For example, the section about "Woman in Vietnam War" and "Black serviceman in Vietnam" is really unrelated to the overall topic, they take up two headings, do not provide substantial information and lack reference to reliable sources. Another example is the overview of the article is too long and confusing, it was edited by various users each time they add some things to the page, therefore, there are contents that are already covered by the following sections and thus, do not need to be included entirely in the overview. It has to be condense so that the readers find it easier to understand and navigate through this article. There are also problem with the organization of the article, for example, the section about history of each sides and their goals in the war, which deserve it own section, are included in the "Name for the war" and written in lackluster manor. Despite this, there are things that missing from this article that I want to add, including an overall timeline of the war recording the main events from the beginning to the end; a section about Ho Chi Minh trail, as this important reason for Viet Cong' victory was never mentioned in the article; another section about the opposition with the war in South Vietnam; and finally a section about the "landmines" problem as the result of US's heavy bombing of the country. Even though this is such a well-known topic, it is a C-class article and main reason is the article is very biased. Contributors to this page also admitted this problem in the talk page, because there are little known about the opposing side (the Viet Cong side). The is largely due to the lack of sources that covered the war from Vietnamese perspective, therefore, most of the sources are from American side of view and heavily contain biased against their opponent. While some of these information are considered neutral, some of them, such as the part about Vietnamese refugees and re-education camp, are completely one-sided, also, the section about Vietnam's involvement with the Khmer Rouge after the war lack any reference to a source, and thus did not completely represent the truth about the situation. Nguyentuonglan98 (talk) 19:52, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Viewpoint and goal

There were 4 military organization total that involved in this war, however, they can be divided into 2 sides based on their common goals, the communist side and the anti-communist side. On the communist side, there were the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the U.S. military, and, on the other side, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) (more commonly called the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA, in English-language sources), and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF, more commonly known as the Viet Cong in English language sources).

Communist side:

+ The People's Army of Vietnam (PAV): the front line force of the Democratic Republican of Vietnam, or North Vietnam army. They fought in the conventional warfare with the South.

+ The National Liberation Front (NLF): also known as the Viet Cong, is a resistant group based in the South, and a guerrilla style army. They received large support from the local peasants, "75 percent support for the NLF, 20 percent trying to remain neutral and 5 percent firmly pro-government" ^[119].

The PAV and NLF had close relationship with each others, mainly because they both support the socialist government of the North and aim at the reunification of Vietnam under that same government.

·       North Vietnamese and those who support the NLF in the South saw the American as another foreign invader that threaten their independence and national reunification ,as proven in their common name for the war,“Kháng chiến chống Mỹ” (The resistance war against America).The common mission of the PAV and the NLF is, therefore, to stop the US’ influence in the South, overthrow the Republic of Vietnam and finally achieve national independence and unification under the leadership of the communist government of the North.

Anti-communist side:

+ The Army of the Republic of Vietnam: the main military force of the South. Facilitated by the US, the ARVN fought both the conventional warfare against the PAV from the North and the guerilla warfare against the NLF from the South. They relied heavily on air superiority and advanced weaponry facilitated by the US.

+ The US: The US’s involvement in the war started when they invested in the French war effort during the 1950s, they offered military support to the South and directly involved on the battle field during the 1960s until they completely withdrawn their force in 1973 .

To the US government, this was the war between two ideas: communism/socialism and anti-communism. The US feared that a communist government will spread throughout Asia with the support of the Soviet Union and China (see Domino Theory), so they wanted to turn South Vietnam into their anti-communism foothold in South East Asia ^[65]. The main goal of South Vietnam is to keep itself as a sovereign country, separated from the North, even though it was stated in the 1954 Geneva Conference that this was just a temporary division and a national election would have happened. The US and the State of Vietnam (the Republic of Vietnam in the future) consequently refused to sign the agreement because they believed that a free election is impossible under the current situation of the North.

The dynamic of the war revolved around the US government and South Vietnam tried to prevent communism from spreading across South East Asia, and North Vietnam tried to free the country from the US's influences and subsequently, reunify the country.

Aftermath

After the conflict officially ended in April 30th, 1975 with the fall of Saigon, government officials were sent from the North to take over the old regime. However, without financial support from the US to the South, and the North already received heavy lost after the war, the newly united Vietnam was in serious condition both economically and socially.

Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Prize winner journalist, described South Vietnam as a “False paradise” after the war, when he visited this country in 1980: “The cost of this delirium was stupefying: 360,000 people mutilated, a million widows, 500,000 prostitutes, 500,000 drug addicts, a million tuberculars and more than a million soldiers of the old regime, impossible to completely rehabilitate into a new society. Ten percent of the population of Ho Chi Minh City was suffering from serious venereal diseases when the war ended, and there were 4 million illiterates throughout the South.”

However, in the years following the war, a vast number of South Vietnamese was sent to re-education camps. According to Amnesty International Report 1979, this figure varied considerably depend on different observers: “[...] included such figures as "50,000 to 80,000" (Le Monde, 19 April 1978), "150,000" (Reuter from Bien Hoa, 2 November 1977), "150,000 to 200,000" (Washington Post, 20 December 1978), and "300,000" (Agence France Presse from Hanoi, 12 February 1978).” These large variation may be due to “Some estimates may include not only detainees but also people sent from the cities to the countryside.” According to a native observer, there were 443.360 people who had to register for a period in re-education camps in Saigon alone, some of them were released after a few days, while others stayed there for more than a decade.

“The relationship between Vietnam and Cambodia, then ruled by the Khmer Rouge communist party, escalated right after the end of the war, April 1975. In respond to the Khmer Rouge taking over Phu Quoc on 17th April and Tho Chu on 4th May of 1975, and was thought to be responsible for the disappear of 500 Vietnamese native on Tho Chu, Vietnam launched a counter attack to take back these islands. After several failed attempt to negotiate from both sides, in 1978, Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) and outed the Khmer Rouge,”

There was a total of 7.85 tons of explosive dropped by the US in Vietnam during the war, this amount of explosive is equal to 3 times the amount used in War World II, 250 times the force of the nuclear bomb dropped in Hiroshima. It is estimated that the explosive that still remains buried in the ground will not be remove entirely until the next few centuries.