Titan Fails - Vietnam War : How & Why America Lost the Vietnam War / Titan Fails (ePub)

In 1963, a photograph had sent the world into a frenzy. It was of a monk who sat solemnly as if he was in deep meditation in the middle of a busy intersection in the capital city of Saigon as flames licked all over his body. The egregious image of the monk being burned alive spread like wildfire and set in motion a series of events that will leave utter chaos, anarchy, and devastation in its wake. The monk was Thich Quang Duc and his act of self-immolation was done in protest of the systematic persecution of Buddhists by the Roman Catholic government of South Vietnam. The air in the near vicinity was redolent with the stench of the burning flesh. This, along with the wails of the gathered monks and nuns, the utter despair and shock of the onlookers, all contributed to make it an event in the history of Vietnam that will have ripples to this day. Today, Saigon, the capital city of South Vietnam is no more. Saigon exists only in the realms of turbulent history and burning memories. Saigon itself is history, but its tragic story lives on. It will always be the city of the burning monk; the monk who sat steadfast even when his body was burnt to ashes. A monk had become a martyr, an unlikely scenario even for a post-World War Two world. But what does a monk in the small city of Saigon have to do with a great power like America? Why did America enter the Vietnam War? The Vietnam War had cost America 58000 lives, approximately a trillion dollars, costs a president, stoked severe and unprecedented social unrest, and all of this only to be defeated in the end by a small technologically underdeveloped country like Vietnam. Why did the United States of America plunge itself into the war, jeopardizing the lives of thousands of its troops, and exhausting its economic and military resources for a war that it had no stakes to claim at all. In hindsight, America's decision to enter the war is often stated as a monumental strategic and diplomatic blunder and a humanitarian catastrophe with long-lasting repercussions. The United States of America had no political, strategic, or economic gains in Vietnam. Vietnam didn't possess any resources that America wanted. The Vietnam War was an internal strife and the constant skirmishes were for independence from French colonists, then why did America get itself into a soup knowing fully well that it was an unwarranted war? To know why America lost a war it had never wanted to enter in the first place, let's first know the context. What was the stimulus that triggered the Vietnam War, what were the casualties and the aftermath, and finally how and why did the powerful, technologically-advanced, super-power country like the United States of America lose the war that had been going on for an inordinate twenty years?