I generally have a very hard time understanding war motives, and I’m always afraid answers might be biased.
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After the French military withdrawal from Indochina in 1954 – following their defeat in the First Indochina War – the Viet Minh took control of North Vietnam, and the U.S. assumed financial and military support for the South Vietnamese state. The Viet Cong (VC), a South Vietnamese common front under the direction of the north, initiated a guerrilla war in the south.
This would have been just another civil conflict, except that the USSR and US funded their respective sides (the USSR funded the North, the US funded the South) and used it as one of several proxy wars between the two great powers. At the time, domino theory was prevalent – that as developing nations developed, they would either choose to be capitalist or communist and whichever camp had the most nations would gain intertia and eventually topple the regimes in all the others. As a result, the USSR and US funded multiple civil wars in an effort to tip the scales to their side.
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