First Indochina War
Viet Minh against France; Dien Bien Phu; Geneva partition.
Start-dates argue: 1945, 1954, 1959, 1965. This page treats 1954-75 as the core and 1965-73 as the US combat peak.
Laos and Cambodia were not sideshows; they were logistic and political theatres of the same war.
Timeline
- Geneva
France leaves after Dien Bien Phu; Vietnam is partitioned at the 17th parallel.
- Diem killed
A coup in Saigon, with US knowledge, kills Ngo Dinh Diem on 2 November -- three weeks before Kennedy's assassination.
- Gulf of Tonkin
Naval incidents and a congressional resolution that becomes the war's legal blank cheque.
- Ground combat
Marines land at Da Nang; Rolling Thunder; the war Americanises.
- Tet
Urban offensive; Hue is fought street by street; US politics turns.
- My Lai
US massacre of civilians, later prosecuted in part -- a moral rupture in the record.
- Cambodia campaign
US-ARVN incursion; US campuses explode (Kent State).
- Paris Accords
US combat role ends on paper; POWs return.
- Saigon falls
Northern tanks enter the city; Operation Frequent Wind evacuates the US embassy.
- The Wall
Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated in Washington -- a memory turning point.
Eras
Two states and insurgency
Diem, advisers, the NLF, and the Tonkin resolution.
Americanisation
Build-up, Ia Drang, Rolling Thunder, Tet.
Vietnamization
Nixon, Cambodia, Linebacker, Paris.
Southern collapse
Aid cuts, the 1975 offensive, reunification.
Milestones
Televised limited war
The first US war whose images arrived nightly -- a political fact as much as a media one.
Paris without peace
A great-power exit that left the local war to finish in two years.
Diaspora and Agent Orange
Afterlives that outlasted the last helicopter.
The last US helicopter did not end Vietnamese history. Re-education, the boat people, and the 1979 wars did.
US documents (Pentagon Papers, later tapes) make this one of the best-sourced lost wars -- from one side.