Watch the Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick on Netflix.... Great documentary by the was.... The intro said over a 30 year war.... The conflicted actually started but what we call the Vietnam War today was 1955-1975.
Actually that war had been going on a lot longer than that. The following is from Wikipedia:
French Indochina (previously spelled as
French Indo-China)
[1] (
French:
Indochine française;
Lao: ສະຫະພັນອິນດູຈີນ;
Khmer: សហភាពឥណ្ឌូចិន;
Vietnamese: Đông Dương thuộc Pháp/東洋屬法, IPA:
[ɗə̄wŋm jɨ̄əŋ tʰûək fǎp], frequently abbreviated to
Đông Pháp;
Chinese: 法属印度支那), officially known as the
Indochinese Union (
French:
Union indochinoise)
[2] after 1887 and the
Indochinese Federation (
French:
Fédération indochinoise) after 1947, was a grouping of
French colonial territoriesin
Southeast Asia.
A grouping of the three
Vietnamese regions of
Tonkin (north),
Annam (centre), and
Cochinchina(south) with
Cambodia was formed in 1887.
Laoswas added in 1893 and the leased Chinese territory of
Guangzhouwan in 1898. The capital was moved from
Saigon (in Cochinchina) to
Hanoi (Tonkin) in 1902 and again to
Da Lat (Annam) in 1939. In 1945 it was moved back to Hanoi.
After the
Fall of France during
World War II, the colony was administered by the
Vichy governmentand was under Japanese occupation until March 1945, when the Japanese overthrew the colonial regime. After the Japanese surrender, the
Viet Minh, a communist organization led by
Hồ Chí Minh, declared Vietnamese independence, but France subsequently took back control of French Indochina. An all-out independence war, known as the
First Indochina War, broke out in late 1946 between French and Viet Minh forces.
In order to create a political alternative to the Viet Minh, the
State of Vietnam, led by former Emperor
Bảo Đại, was proclaimed in 1949. On 9 November 1953 the
Kingdom of Cambodia proclaimed its independence. Following the
Geneva Accord of 1954, the French evacuated Vietnam and French Indochina came to an end.
So, you see, it goes all the way back to the end of World War II. The USA became military advisors in 1955.