The Geneva Accords had promised elections to determine a national government for a unified Vietnam. However, only France and the North Vietnamese government (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) had signed the document. The United States and the Saigon government refused to abide by the agreement, fearing that Ho Chi Minh would readily win the election due to his popularity. The result was the "Second Indochina War," known as the "Vietnam War" in the West and the "American War" in Vietnam. The war reached its height in 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson ordered 500,000 American troops into South Vietnam. Fearing the Chinese would directly enter the war with a massive army, as had occurred when U.S.-led United Nations forces approached the Chinese border during the Korean War, American ground troops were forbidden to enter North Vietnam.

The massive 1968 Tet Offensive by Communist forces was a military defeat for the Viet Cong but a stunning political victory, as it led many American people to view the war as unwinnable. President Richard Nixon entered office with a pledge to end the war "with honor." He normalized US relations with China in 1972 (Sino-American relations) and entered into Détente with the USSR. With the Paris Peace Agreement of 1973, American military forces withdrew from Vietnam. Despite the peace treaty, the North continued the war, and defeated the South in April 1975. In 1976, Vietnam was officially reunited under the current Vietnamese government as The Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Aftermath of the Vietnam War and Reunification

After April 30th, 1975, an exodus of several hundred thousand Vietnamese fled the country either by sea or overland through Cambodia. They settled in refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Phillipines and Indonesia. The lucky were picked up by US Navy ships, sent to Guam, and eventually settled in the United States, Canada, France, Australia or in various European nations. Those not as lucky were robbed, raped or killed by pirates in the South China Seas. Many lived in these makeshift refugee encampments for years. While most were resettled to other countries within 5 years, others languished in these camps for over a decade. Some refugees were deported back to Vietnam. The last of the refugee camps were closed in 2005.

Nguyen Ngoc Ngan, a novelist and a popular host of the video music program Paris by Night, exemplifies these Boat People's experience. A former sailor in the South Vietnamese Navy, he was sent to a "re-education" camp for 3 years and nearly died from disease. He was released from the camp and ordered to report to a new economic zone labor camp in the jungle. Instead, he with his wife and 4 year old son, boarded a fishing vessel crammed with over a hundred other refugees. After a week at sea, the boat capsized off the coast of Malaysia, killing his wife and son. Nguyen Ngoc Ngan wrote about this ordeal in his first novel in a Malaysian refugee camp, titled "Những Người Đàn Bà Còn Ở Lại," or The Women Left Behind.

Debate about the significance of the Vietnam War continues to this day: whether the war was an internal civil war or a proxy war; whether the Vietnam War disproved the Domino Theory or that the war mitigated the consequences of the fallen domino, Vietnam; whether the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the resulting genocide, is a direct result of the Vietnam War or not; whether if Nixon had avoided the Watergate scandal, he would have prevented the fall of Saigon or he had intended to abandon Vietnam all along.