asked the U.S. for support but because they thought that North Vietnam was influenced by Russia, the U.S. turned them down. It was not until later that the Vietminh went to Mao Tse-tung's Chinese Communists for support out of desperateness. From the very beginning, "the U.S. had attached itself to a losing cause" (19). Because the U.S. was obsessed with the domino theory and a communist threat in Southeast Asia, they became involved in and were partly to blame for prolonging a civil conflict.

This leads to the second factor to as why the war lasted so long. The U.S.'s military was not prepared to fight the kind of war that the Vietminh were fighting. They were not used to he guerrilla warfare that the Vietminh used. Americans were trained to fight against massive attacks like the ones in World War II and the Korean War, but that rarely happened. Instead they used the search and destroy methods against the guerillas. This method did not work very well at all. The U.S. never was able to take control of any land because once they came back from their mission the soldiers would go back to base. This enabled the Vietminh to occupy the very land that U.S. soldiers had just searched and destroyed. This frustrated many military leaders. The only way they could tell if they were winning the war or not was by body counts. In the beginning Am

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 913
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)