9781422285992

The Vietnam War

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province. His parents named him Nguyen Sinh Cung. He would later take many different names. During the 20th century, the world would come to know him best as Ho Chi Minh, meaning “Bringer of Light” or “Enlightener.” Ho received his formal education at the Quoc Hoc School in Hué, then spent much of his early life traveling the world. After serving as a cook on a French steamer for two years, he came to the United States in 1911. He worked at odd jobs in Boston, San Francisco, and New York, before mov- ing on to London for two years. During World War I, Ho moved to Paris, where he worked as a gardener, a waiter, and at other unskilled labors. While there he met other Vietnamese living in France and became inter- ested in politics. During 1919, Paris was the site of a major peace conference that ended World War I. Before the war ended, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson had issued a document known as the Fourteen Points, which would be used as a basis for the peace agreements. One of Wilson’s key points was that the boundaries of countries should be determined on the basis of national- ism . During the conference, the victorious Allied Powers (particularly the United States, Great Britain, France, and Italy) broke up the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, creating many new countries based on the nationalities of people living in those territories. Ho attended the conference along with other Vietnamese nationalists.

Vietnamese peasants harvest rice in the Mekong delta region. Most Vietnamese were poor farmers who lived on the food they produced. The Vietnamese peasants had been exploited for years by French colonial authorities and a wealthy landowning class. The peasants overwhelmingly supported the Vietminh and the communists, because they were willing to distribute the land among the people more fairly.