Ch.37 Two Short Wars and One Long One
The Vietnam War
- In 1959, Ho Chi Minh ordered the Viet Minh to begin a guerrilla war against the South Vietnamese government. He intended for this guerrilla war to go on until South Vietnam surrendered to the north.
- This was the beginning of the longest war the United States had ever fought. It would drag on for eight long years. In 1969, at the height of the war, over half a million American soldiers were in the tiny country of Vietnam. American soldiers fought against the Viet Cong in the south, while American fighter planes bombed North Vietnamese military bases and cities.
- By 1972, the United States had agreed to meet with the North Vietnamese to talk about peace terms. Right at the beginning of 1973, the United States signed a treaty with the Viet Cong and both Vietnamese nations.
- In 1975, the communist armies of North Vietnam invaded the south, captured the southern capital city, Saigon, and took over the South Vietnamese government. One year later, Vietnam was reunited into one country, under communist rule: the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
Trouble in the Middle East
- In 1967, after Israel had been a country for almost twenty years, another war began. We call it the Six-Day War. It lasted for six days.
- At the end of the war, Israel took land away from all three of the defeated countries. These territories-the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights quadrupled Israel‘s size.
- This third war between Israel and her Arab neighbors is called the Yom Kippur War, because Egypt and Syria launched their attack on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
- OPEC’s oil embargo against the United States
- Five years after the Yom Kippur War and the embargo, the new president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, helped to bring a measure of peace between Egypt and Israel.
- In 1978, Begin (the Prime Minister of Israel) and Sadat (the president of Egypt) won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work at Camp David. But not everyone was thrilled.
Many Arab leaders were outraged because Sadat had signed a treaty with Israel- which meant that he was recognizing Israel‘s right to claim part of Palestine.
