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movielocke wrote:Vietnam permeated and touched every cultural institution I encountered growing up in the 90s and yet no one would ever give me a straight answer on how and why and what happened to embroil us in the war, much less what we fought for.

To contain the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. The USA believed the loss of Vietnam to communist control would lead to similar insurrections in neighboring countries in the region, i.e., the Domino theory.



The anti-communist military junta in Thailand quelled any form of uprising by massacring leftist protestors. Also, Chin Peng in Malaysia led an unsuccessful guerrilla insurgency. The documentary The Act of Killing showed the Indonesian military's communist purge.

Watched this yesterday. I shudder to think about how little has changed compared the accumulative time spent in the Middle East, and how much our misguided efforts to bring democracy wound up bringing as much punitive measures.