Tim Foley - What Was the Vietnam War?

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam (that is the countrys name today) is a small country in Southeast Asia. It is smaller than the state of California. Vietnam is bordered by China to the north; Laos, as well as Cambodia, to the west; and the South China Sea to the east. It has a tropical climate, with temperatures often nearing one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The coasts, where the land is flat and open, are great for growing rice, so Vietnamese people eat a lot of it. Its mountainous in the central and northern parts of the country, and there are dense jungles throughout the far south.

Today, Vietnam has a population of around ninety-six million. But at the end of the Vietnam War, there were only about forty-four million people. Now, 61 percent of the population is under the age of thirty-five. Hanoi (say: hah-noy) is the capital and the second-largest city after Ho Chi Minh City (say: hoh chee min). (Until the wars end, it was known as Saigon.)

Ho Chi Minh City

For two thousand years, Vietnams greatest enemy was China. China invaded Vietnam many times and finally conquered it in 111 BC. The Chinese ruled the country for over a thousand years.

The Vietnamese hated the Chinese and tried many times to regain their independence. Finally, in AD 939, they were successful. The Chinese rulers were pushed out. After that, the Vietnamese ruled themselves until the middle of the nineteenth century.

In AD 39, two Vietnamese sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, led a revolt against China.

That is when the French arrived. It was an era when many countries in western Europe decided to colonize (seize control of) countries in southern Asia and in Africa. By 1884, France had control of all of Vietnam.

Over the next seventy years, the French held Vietnam. They tried to make as much money off the country as they could. The French exported so much of the rice grown in the south that there was not enough for the Vietnamese peasants to eat.

The French in Vietnam grew rich. Many lived on large plantations where they grew rubber trees, tea, coffee, and, most of all, rice. They paid no taxes on their income. The poorest Vietnamese people were heavily taxed on the little money they made.

The French used Vietnamese workers to build roads, bridges, and railroads. They built many beautiful buildings in Saigon. One railroad line went from Saigon in the south to Hanoi in the north, a distance of about one thousand miles. However, instead of paying for labor, the French forced entire villages to work on the railroad line for free. Many workers, underfed and overworked in the tropical heat, became ill and died. Twenty-five thousand Vietnamese people, as well as Chinese workers, died building one three-hundred-mile stretch of railway.

Poppy

To make a lot of money, the French also encouraged the Vietnamese to use the drug opium. Opium comes from the poppy flower, and poppies grow easily in Vietnam. The French set up a building for processing opium in Saigon. It produced opium that was very pure and burned fast. (Opium is smoked through a pipe.) Opium addiction grew. The Vietnamese bought more and more opium. The French taxed opium sales so heavily, at one point the drug counted for one-third of Vietnams economy.