The Second Indochina War, known in the West as the Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Việt Nam), and known in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America (Vietnamese: Kháng chiến chống Mỹ) or simply The American War, was a collection of conflicts that occurred side-by-side in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1955 to 1975. It was officially a conflict between North Vietnam, supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies, and South Vietnam, supported by the United States, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and other anti-communist allies. The war is therefore considered a Cold War-era proxy war.
The National Liberation Front (known in the West by the insult "Viet Cong", or VC, meaning "Red Vietnamese"), a South Vietnamese communist common front aided by the North, fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region, while the People's Army of Vietnam, also known as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), engaged in more conventional warfare, at times committing large units to battle. Opposing them both was South Vietnam's Army of the Republic of Vietnam. At the same time, communist-supported insurgencies fought against Western-supported governments in both Laos (Pathet Lao) and Cambodia (Khmer Rouge), and fighting in Vietnam frequently spilled over into those two countries.
American involvement in the war peaked in 1968, the same year that the communist side launched the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive failed in its goal of overthrowing the South Vietnamese government, but became the turning point in the war, as it persuaded a large segment of the U.S. population that its government's claims of progress toward winning the war were illusory despite many years of massive U.S. military aid to South Vietnam. Direct U.S. military involvement in the region ended on 15 August 1973.
The capture of Saigon on 30 April 1975 by the North Vietnamese Army marked the end of the war in Vietnam, and North and South Vietnam were officially reunified the following year under a communist government. The Khmer Rouge and Pathet Lao also successfully took control of their respective countries in 1975.
Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 to 3.8 million. Some 240,000–300,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, and a further 1,626 remain missing in action. In addition, another conflict soon erupted between Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China, and others in the region, lasting until 1991 and causing further destruction in the region.
