Let's talk about what happened in the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War, which took place between 1955 and 1975, pitted North Vietnamese communists, backed by the Soviet Union and China, against South Vietnamese communists, supported by the United States. The bloody conflict had its roots in French colonial rule and an independence movement driven by communist leader Ho Chi Minh.

The Collapse of French Indochina and Rise of Ho Chi Minh.
Vietnam became a French colony in 1877 with the founding of French Indochina, which included Tonkin, Annam, Cochin China and Cambodia. (Laos was added in 1893.) The French lost control of their colony briefly during World War II, when Japanese troops occupied Vietnam.

Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

The conflict between the French and the Viet Minh came to a head at the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu, when, after a four-month siege, the French lost to the Viet Minh under commander Vo Nguyen Giap, marking the end of French rule in Vietnam. The question of who would rule Vietnam and how drew the interest of world superpowers, who watched the situation in Vietnam with growing unease.

The 1954 Geneva Accords Divide Vietnam.

The Geneva Accords were signed in July of 1954 and split Vietnam at the 17th parallel. North Vietnam would be ruled by Ho Chi Minh’s communist government and South Vietnam would be led by emperor Bao Dai. An election was scheduled in two years’ time to unify Vietnam, but the U.S., fearful that a national election would lead to communist rule, ensured it never took place.

“The ‘temporary’ division of the country at the seventeenth parallel into two ideologically-opposed states meant that the civil conflict in Vietnam would collide full-scale with the East-West rivalry,” says Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Dorothy Borg Associate Professor in the History of the United States and East Asia at Columbia University.