The United States, seeking to contain the swell of communism, trained the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and made available military consultants to facilitate combat the guerillas. The U.S. was forced to actively enter the war when the Johnson administration reported that two U.S destroyers where attacked by the Northern Vietnamese in 1964. Within the first year the number of troops went from sixteen thousand to twenty-three thousand. The U.S. ordered sustained bombing on Northern Vietnam, when that did not work Johnson sent in enough troops to take over from the Southern Vietnamese. They finally had to pull out of South Vietnam after one million Vietnamese as well as nearly 60, 000 Americans lost lives and the administration incurred severe backlash at home (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, chapter 3). .
In being involved in such a war the U.S had failed militarily. The war had shown that even America's vast military might could not stop the spread of Communism. Not only did the USA fail to stop South Vietnam going Communist, but the heavy bombing of Vietnam's neighbors, Laos and Cambodia in secret CIA wars, actually helped the Communist forces in those countries to win support. By 1975 Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia had Communist governments (Westdad, Cuban and Vietnamese Challenges). .
The war sparked a series of social movements and criticism of Johnson's involvement in Vietnam. University-wide administration imposed numerous rules designed to keep politics off of all the University campuses. In protest of such regulations the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California at Berkeley, the first of the 1960s campus student movements to make headlines all over the world, was born. Students protested local and federal governments as well as Johnson's policies in Southeast Asia. Berkeley students as well as residents gathered for more than thirty hours to debate the war issue.