The Vietnam war: fifty years ago, the United States stepped up its involvement in a war that tore the nation apart.

• Author: Majerol, Veronica
• Position: TIMES PAST 1964

On the morning of Nov. 9, 1965, 22-year-old Roger Allen LaPorte sat cross-legged outside the United Nations in midtown Manhattan, poured gasoline over his body, and set himself on fire.

"I'm against wars, all wars," the devout Catholic said before dying in the hospital the next day. "I did this as a religious act."

LaPorte's was one of the more tragic acts of protest against the Vietnam War, a decade-long conflict that tore the U.S. apart, spawned a near-revolution by young people, and left many Americans' faith in their nation and its political leaders shaken.

"The Vietnam War was one of those events that touched practically everybody in America," says David L. Anderson, a historian and co-editor of The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War. "It led people to question ... is their country always right? Does America always win?--concepts that Americans had never thought about."

One reason the Vietnam War was so divisive is that many Americans came to see it as a civil war in a faraway country that didn't concern the U.S. Another reason was because of the draft. Since 1973, the U.S. has had an all-volunteer army; no one is now forced to serve. But during Vietnam, when able-bodied men ages 18 to 26 were called up, they had no choice, and many ended up fighting, and dying, in Vietnam. Exemptions for people like college students made the draft even more controversial since the system seemed to favor privileged Americans.

U.S. combat troops first landed in South Vietnam in 1965 to help prevent a Communist takeover. By the time the last U.S. soldiers withdrew in 1975, more than 2.7 million Americans--many of them teenagers--had served in the war and 58,000 had been killed.

The Domino Theory

U.S. involvement in Vietnam was part of America's Cold War battle against the spread of Communism, which had already begun gaining a foothold in Asia. In China, Mao Zedong had successfully led a Communist revolution in 1949, and a year later, the Korean War began when Communist North Korea, with Soviet and Chinese support, invaded South Korea. A U.S.-led United Nations coalition intervened on South Korea's behalf. By the time the war ended in a stalemate in 1953, 34,000 Americans had been killed.

The following year Vietnam was partitioned into a Communist North and a pro-Western South after France lost its century-old colonies in Southeast Asia (see Timeline, p. 20). But Ho Chi Minh, the Communist and nationalist leader whose forces had defeated the French, wanted all of Vietnam to be a single Communist state. Communist guerillas in South Vietnam, the "Vietcong," had the same goal.

That alarmed President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who feared that a Communist victory in Vietnam would lead to the fall of other Asian countries. The "domino theory" became the foundation for U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia for the next two decades. To prevent a Communist takeover, Eisenhower sent military advisers to train and arm the South Vietnamese Army.

President John F. Kennedy (1960-63) continued sending American advisers to Vietnam. After Kennedy's assassination, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, grew increasingly concerned about the situation there. "I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went," he told the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam in 1963.

In August 1964, Johnson told the nation that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked a U.S. destroyer without provocation in the Gulf of Tonkin (see map, p. 19). Whether his account was accurate is still disputed; but Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the president to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack"...