The problem with first steps is that it they don't seem like first steps at all, do not appear to be leading one in any particular direction. The first steps toward American involvement in what would become the Vietnam War did not at the time seem to be first steps toward a war at all but simply part of the deadly but courtly dance of the Cold War. As the United States finds itself involved in precisely the same sort of another vaguely defined but potentially horrific and drawn-out war - this time not the fight against Communism but the war on terrorism - the lesson of Vietnam should be kept close at hand. Or rather the lesson of the beginning of the war in Vietnam, for in reality there are a number of different lessons that might be learned from this conflict. But the analogous lesson, the lesson that comes from the beginning of the war (from the same point in time that the nation may at the moment be in), is that often a nation is marching to war while pretending to its allies and its people that it is not (Caputo 41; Kerry 21).
American involvement in Vietnam war grew generally out of Cold War paranoia about Communism (as Goldman, 1982, describes) and specifically out of the Franco-Viet Minh conflict, which is now sometimes called the First Indochina War, a conflict that had lasted nearly for eight years and that the Vietnamese in many ways saw as being less about Communism than about colonialism. During this phase of the conflict, the Viet Minh forces established headquarters in between the Chinese border and Red River Valley, a highly mountainous area that allowed them to train forces for a major counter-offensive without being discovered. The French tried but failed to capture Ho Chi Minh and so failed to quash the growing guerrilla movement.
In an attempt to limit the power of those forces, the French then set up a new government under Bao Dai, who would be the last Nguyen dynasty emperor. But this would last only until 19...