War by Attrition

     The Vietnam War was very different from any other war the United States  had fought before. Vietnam was divided between the communist  and the “free democratic”. During this war the US troops were being attacked from all around, the US fought in every direction. This is why the Vietnam War became a war of “attrition,”meaning not a fight for land or territory, but a fight for destruction and surrender. The war was to be fought until the communist north surrendered.
        Attrition warfare is a strategy tires the enemy to the point of collapse before finishing them off.  When things weren't working for the United States in Vietnam, they decided to use a war of attrition strategy to eliminate the enemy.  This method of warfare was very successful in the sense that they were killing North Vietnamese troops, but this method also caused many civilian casualties.  For this reason, many protests broke out in the United States.  The protesters argued that American troops were completely taking over the war, when their original goal was to simply help the South Vietnamese army stave off the communist regime of the Viet Cong.  Attrition warfare was one of the many reasons the Vietnam War became a lost cause to the United States.
      Vietnam was the longest war in American history and the most unpopular American war of the 20th century. It resulted in nearly 60,000 American deaths and in an estimated 2 million Vietnamese deaths. Even today, many Americans still ask whether the American effort in Vietnam was a sin, a blunder, a necessary war, or whether it was a noble cause, or an idealistic, if failed, effort to protect the South Vietnamese from totalitarian government.