The First American combat troops in Vietnam landed at Da Nang in 8 March 1965 to defend the air base. With the exception of the nuclear weapon, every piece of equipment in America's mighty arsenal was used in the war. The USA President Lyndon Johnson said "Our goal was to deter and diminish the strength of the North Vietnamese aggressors and try to convince them to leave South Vietnam alone"#. Johnson limited the conflict to an air war at first, hoping to pound away and push the Viet Cong into giving in. He used planes such as the B-52 bomber to try to win the war as quickly as possible. So he unleashed a continuous bombing raid on North Vietnam. This was the raid kno

Weapons were another problem in Vietnam. The Americans weapons were useless in the dense jungle. The M-16, a revolutionary new infantry rifle, was prone to jams as well as water damaage. And in a country when it rains almost every day, was not good news. Also, US commanders underistimated the power of the Viet Cong's weapons, thinking that they only had muskets and bolt-action rifles. But since the Chinese and Russians were supplying the Viet Cong with modern AK-47s and other similar arms, the officers were faced with a nasty suprise. This suprise occurred when the communists' Tet offensive launched in January 1968 quickly extinguished the "light at the end of the tunnel". The Vietcong struck throughtout South Vietnam, including a penetration of the US embassy compound in Saigon.

Following the Tet offensive, the American leaders began a slow and agonizing reduction of U.S. involvement. Johnson limited the bombing, began peace talks with Hanoi and the NLF, and withdrew as a candidate for reelection. His successor, Richard M. Nixon, announced a program of Vietnamization, which basically represented a return to the Eisenhower and Kennedy policies of helping Vietnamese forces fight the war, Nixon gradually reduced U.S. ground troops in Vietnam, but he increased the bombing; the tonnage dropped after 1969 exceeded the already prodigious levels reached by Johnson. Nixon expanded air and ground operations into Cambodia and Laos in attempts to block enemy supply routes along Vietnam's borders

Why did the United States lose the war? Some postmortems singled out media criticism of the war and antiwar activism in America as undermining the will of the U.S. government to continue fighting. Others cited the restrictions placed by civilian politicians on the military's operations or, conversely, blamed U.S. military chiefs for not providing civilian leaders with a sound strategy for victory. These so-called win arguments assume that victory was possible, but they overlook the flawed reasons for U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Washington had sought to contain international communism, but this global strategic concern masked the reality that the appeal of the communists in Vietnam derived from local economic, social, and historical conditions. The U.S. response to the Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survi

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Approximate Word count = 1807
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)