February 9: United States sent its first troops to South Vietnam to fight in the Vietnam War in 1965.

              The first 3,500 US Marines land near Da Nang in South Vietnam.

The Vietnam War lasted 19 years, from December 1956 until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. It was a major conflict of powers of the "Cold War" period that occurred between the West, led by United States of America, and East, led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, after the Second World War.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson began sending U.S. ground troops to stave off the defeat of the South Vietnamese Army.

In English we speak of "proxy war" to that which results when two opposing powers use third parties as substitutes in the battlefield. In other words, it is a war instigated by a major power that does not itself participate.

In this case, was the confrontation of the communist powers of the USSR and China, against the capitalist powers led by the United States of America.

The background of the conflict is framed in the French invasion of Indochina by vagaries of Napoleon III, in the late 1850s. The invasion was completed in 1893 by the Treaty of Hue, signed the following year, which completed the foundations of French colonization in Vietnam for the next 70 years.

                                   Napalm Attack: This photo became global.

During World War II, the Japanese occupied the area. A movement called "Viet Minh" or "Vietnam Liberation Front" was founded by Ho Chi Minh, with the natives to counter French and Japanese domains, also in 1945.

                                                        Protest in USA

The Communists’ victory at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 marked the end of French involvement in Indochina. The Geneva Accords of July 1954 divided Vietnam into a Communist state in the North and an anti-Communist state in the South.

Make love not war

President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered A U.S. Marine Corps Hawk air defense missile battalion to be deployed to Da Nang in order to provide protection for the key U.S. airbase there.

In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon introduced a program called Vietnamization, in which the South Vietnamese Army assumed an ever-larger combat role.

The Vietnam War was the only military defeat that has taken the United States. They were expelled and had to send planes of urgency to bring the refugees who could run faster to reach the last plane moving amid the euphoria Vietnamese celebrating victory, April 30, 1965.