After thousands of years of repeated oppression, the people of Vietnam were finally free in 1945. South Vietnam had the support of the United States and the north had the New People's Republic of China helps them. Twenty years later, the Vietnam War broke out. Not a generation had passed when the United States began sending soldiers to Vietnam. The soldiers had no prior training in the customs, culture, history or language of the locals. We began to displace citizens and disrupt the normal lives of Vietnamese people. Southerners wanted to become a united communist nation with the North, but the United States allowed it. Instead of facing these facts, we have failed to understand them. We definitively lost the Vietnam War because the majority of Americans did not understand the political and social wants and needs of the Vietnamese people. Around four thousand years ago, Vietnam was divided into two cultures, north and south, with two different rulers. Farmers and nomads lived in the north, and merchants and traders lived in the south. Despite these differences, these people shared one thing, a common suffering. For thousands of years, everyone was poor across the land, due to a series of feudal systems that left a very small number of people with most of the money and land. Leader after leader revolted, promising a better life for the peasants. But each time, once they came to power, the rulers forced the citizens into another vicious circle of the feudal system. Then came the French and, like all leaders before them, they promised a better future. The peasants revolted and overthrew their leaders. Only to realize that France would impose strict laws and taxes on them, making the already extremely unstable and distrustful medium of who to trust. The country fell into anarchy as we sought to continue the war, run a country, and maintain a stable military. Soon, different militias in South Vietnam rose up and fought against the United States for power. People were afraid of recolonization and feared the United States. Soon we found it difficult to understand who was our friend and who was our enemy. There was no defined "enemy" and so we started accidentally killing a lot of civilians, which created more hatred towards the United States and therefore larger militias to worry about. We dug ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole because we refused to believe the simple truth that we were not fighting a war for South Vietnam. We were fighting a war for ourselves. Before all this happened, if we had realized that the people of South Vietnam did not want to fight, we could have escaped many more bloody years of war..