In 1973 President Nixon promised the American people that his government had got them "the right kind of peace, a peace that would last." After the cease-fire agreement, almost all the US forces withdrew from South Vietnam. The most powerful state in the world had given up on its attempt to defeat a poor country over the threat of communism. The US first became properly involved in Vietnam when `advisers' were sent to prop up South Vietnam in their war against the Vietcong in 1959. John Foster Dulles the secretary of state increasingly involved the US in Vietnam due to the insistence of the Domino theory. America did not want the west to gradually fall to communism leaving them in the same isolated state as in the time of world war two.

The story of Vietnam first began in the late 1800s when France colonized Cambodia. After the Dien Bien...