Vietnam war?

why was the vietnam war started?
Why did we/ they attack??

http://vietnam.vassar.edu/overview.html
It has a summary of what happened

my uncle fought in it and now has some traumatic problems from it. He watched his best friend get blow to bits. Some people say it was pointless and we lost. Not sure what it had to do with but yeah.

It had to do with the spread of communism. The US was simply trying to stop the influence of the USSR

The Vietnam conflict was a civil war between the communist North and the anti-communist South.

To understand the conflict you have to consider the mindset during the cold war. On one hand you had the communists who believed that communal ownership of property was the best system and the capitalists who believed that the private property and the free market was the best system. The US and the USSR were the two world superpowers, the US capitalist, the USSR communist. The concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) kept the two enemies from attacking each other. Since both sides had nuclear missles and would have fair warning of each other's launch a nuclear war between them would at the least cost each side more than it could possibly gain and at worst be the end of mankind.

There were a number of proxy wars during this era. The US and USSR could not attack each other directly so they made smaller countries pawns in a global chess game. The conflict in Vietnam was one of these. The USSR supported the North Vietnamese while the US supported the South.