Title: Vietnam After the War | Asia Pacific Curriculum
Headings: Vietnam After the War
Vietnam After the War
Overview
Prologue: The End of the “American War”
Introduction: The Challenges of Reconciliation
Background: The Road to War and Partition
Consolidating Political Control
Building a Socialist Economy
Resistance and Escape
Putting Post-War Vietnam in Context
Doi Moi and the “New” New Vietnam
Vietnamese Youth: Writing the Next Chapter
Acknowledgement

Content: Map 1: The Two Vietnams, Early 1975. By 1960, a civil war was brewing, especially after the North created the National Liberation Front (NLF), a political organization and army, better known as the Viet Cong, in the south. The NLF included both communists and non-communists, and its purpose was to bring down the Ngo Dinh Diem government and unify the country on the North’s terms. As the Viet Cong expanded its control over the south, the U.S. responded by sending more military advisers. Worried that Ngo Dinh Diem was failing to stop the communists from taking over, U.S. President John F. Kennedy supported the South Vietnamese military’s overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Neither Diem nor Kennedy would survive the year. Diem was assassinated by his own military on November 2, 1963, and Kennedy was killed in Dallas three weeks later. Following Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson became the new U.S. president. In 1965, the United States intervened directly in Vietnam by sending troops to South Vietnam.