Art, Vietnam had always historically been one country. It was one country before the French colonized it. It was one country when it fought against the French, prior to WWII. The French found their most willing Vietnamese servants and collaborators amongst the Catholic minority in a Buddhist country.

It was one country when the Japanese took it over in WWII, and the Vietnamese revolutionaries fought the Japanese as they had fought the French before them. Ho Chi Minh was at that time considered a valuable member of the Allied cause, and he was.

The Viet Minh expected to be given Vietnamese independence after WWII, but they were not. Instead the French colonial forces returned, and the war for Vietnamese independence resumed. Vietnam was still one country.

The USA chose to give the French quite a bit of help fighting the Viet Minh. THAT's where your problem between Vietnam and the USA starts. The USA should not have helped the French, they should have pressured the French to leave and to grant independence to Vietnam...as one country.

The French finally threw in the towel in the mid-50's after the lengthy battle at Dienbienphu...and they had to negotiate a French withdrawal from Vietnam, still ONE country.

The withdrawal was to take 1 year. During that year Ho Chi Minh would set up the new Vietnamese government in the north, the French would maintain an interim administration in the south.

The country was thus divided for an offical period of one year by the peace accords to allow the French to disengage in an orderly fashion.

At the end of that year, the line of division was to cease to exist and national elections were to be held.

That never happened.

Why did it never happen? Well, the CIA and the USA and the French had decided that "their people" (meaning the Catholic minority Vietnamese) could not win such national elections, therefore Ho Chi Minh's people would win, and they didn't want that.

They unilaterally therefore broke the agreement when the time came. There's your original violation. They refused to hold the scheduled countrywide elections. They refused to do away with the artificial division of that country into two zones. They thus betrayed the vast majority of Vietnamese, artificially divided ONE country into two ireconcilable halves, and put their half in the south under the rule of a series of Catholic Vietnamese despots who were no proper representatives of a predominantly Buddhist country, but rather former collaborators with the French colonials.

That is when the Vietnamese civil war began. It was as inevitable as your American Civil War, but unlike that one, it was provoked by foreign colonialism...first in a direct sense, then by proxy.

That war ended in the mid-70s when Vietnam became again, one country, and I think that the fall of the southern regime at that time was about as well-deserved as the fall of any regime I can think of, other than Pol Pot's, which was even more deserving of oblivion, needless to say.

The South Vietnamese regime was nothing more than a militarily and politically moribund and incompetent puppet of Washington's special interests in the region. The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, were and are and always have been their own bosses, and they represented Vietnam, period.

Were they nice and gentle and democratic in their ways? No! And neither were the dictators and stooges who worked for Washington in the South of that country.

As the French before them, the Americans had found natural allies amongst the Vietnamese minorities (Catholics and Montagnards). This is what the Empire always does when it engages in economic/military colonization of some foreign country...it finds various disgruntled or frightened religious or ethnic groups who are either in the minority or are disadvantaged in their local power base and then arms and empowers them against the other groups in the country. They proceed to kill each other for America and their country gets devastated. Divide and conquer tactics. In the end the Empire betrays all of them, because the Empire does not go in to help anyone, it goes in to exploit local resources and achieve strategic advantage in a region.

That is exactly what has been done in Iraq too, and you can see with what dire results. Iraq, once considered the most progressive and modernized country in the entire Arab world, has been turned into a complete disaster...and hundreds of thousands have died while millions have been displaced. Many more will die before it's over.

How many Vietnamese died? A million or so? They died for Washington's imperial ambitions, just like Iraqis are dying right now.

Reparations were never paid to Vietnam by the USA. I predict that they will not be paid to Iraq either.