The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War is an armed conflict between The Socialist Republic of Vietnam (an independent communist state allied with The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and The People's Republic of China) and The Imperial Domain of Indochina (a colonial government controlled by The German Empire and supported by The United States of America). It has become synonymous with the Cold War as a proxy conflict between East and West for the fate of Southeast Asia.
Its predecessor, the First Indochina War, began in 1946 when Allied troops landed and wrested control of the region. Indochina was restored to its pre-war borders and status as a German colonial domain, though it would face resistance in the form of the Soviet and Chinese supported Viet Minh, a communist insurgency. In 1954 the Germans were dealt an unprecedented defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in which an elite division-sized force of 15,000 men (mostly veterans from World War II) was annihilated by a numerically superior Vietnamese irregular army. North Vietnam's independence was secured during the 1954 Geneva Conference, which sought to foster permanent peace in Southeast Asia.
From 1955 to 1964 the conflict was marked by a widespread insurgency in the south, the German invasion of Cambodia and the North Vietnamese invasion of Laos. Cutting-edge asymmetric tactics and strategy were employed by North Vietnam to execute the most successful irregular war in history, aided by Soviet and Chinese military aid, particularly modern weapons systems and field advisors. Their primary tool for this type of war is the Viet Cong (VC), a Northern-led guerilla force operating in the South.
In late July, 1964, light shore bombardment was orchestrated by the American covert operations group MACV-SOG, which North Vietnamese leadership believed was an escalation for further military operations. A few days later on August 2nd, 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred, during which a US Navy ship was attacked. Yet another incident supposedly occurred on August 4th, though conspiracy theorists say that this "second attack" was in fact staged by the US military. Regardless, beginning in late 1964 the United States began deploying massive amounts of troops to South Vietnam in coordination with the German Empire and local forces.
The American ground war on Vietnam is characterised by grim images such as napalm carpet bombings, the ever-present threat of VC ambushes, innovations in airmobile cavalry, a bloody aerial campaign where cutting-edge American airframes face off against similarly advanced Soviet anti-air networks, the planning and execution of black operations by both sides, and above all, the seemingly endless green hell of Vietnam's jungles.