Country Study

Canada

                                           we are learning to write diferent types of poems

                                                                     white

white looks like a cold frosty day
white sounds like the crunch under foot
white smells like daisy's blooming as the day warm 
white tastes like a cool vanilla ice cream
white feels cold as the snow begins to gently drift down

What started the Vietnam War.
During World WarII , Japan invaded and occupied Vietnam, a nation on the eastern edge of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia that had been under French administration since the late 19th century. Inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism, Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam, to fight both Japan and the French colonial administration. Japan withdrew its forces in 1945, Ho’s Viet Minh forces rose up immediately, seizing the northern city of Hanoi and declaring a Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) with Ho as president.

Tunnel Rats

Communist forces began digging a network of tunnels under the jungle terrain of South Vietnam in the late 1940s, during their war of independence from French colonial authority. Tunnels were often dug by hand, only a short distance at a time. As the United States increasingly escalated its military presence in Vietnam in support of a non-Communist regime in South Vietnam beginning in the early 1960s, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops (as Communist supporters in South Vietnam were known) gradually expanded the tunnels. At its peak during the Vietnam War, the network of tunnels in the Cu Chi district linked VC support bases over a distance of some 250 kilometers, from the outskirts of Saigon all the way to the Cambodian border.   

VIETNAM WAR WEAPONS OF THE AIR

The war saw the U.S. Air Force and their South Vietnamese allies fly thousands of massive low-altitude bombing missions over North and South Vietnam as well as over sites of suspected Communist activity in neighboring Laos and Cambodia. The B-52 heavy bomber, developed by Boeing in the late 1940s, helped the U.S. and South Vietnamese dominate the skies, along with smaller, more easily maneuverable fighter planes like the F-4 Phantom. Also widely used was the Bell UH-1 helicopter, dubbed the “Huey,” which could fly at low altitudes and speeds and land easily in small spaces. U.S. forces used the Huey to transport troops, supplies and equipment, aid ground troops with additional firepower and evacuated killed or wounded soldiers.

Agent Orange was a powerful mixture of chemical defoliants used by U.S. military forces during the Vietnam War to eliminate forest cover for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, as well as crops that might be used to feed them. The U.S. program of defoliation, codenamed Operation Ranch Hand, sprayed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides over 4.5 million acres of land in Vietnam from 1961 to 1972. Agent Orange, which contained the chemical dioxin, was the most commonly used of the herbicide mixtures, and the most effective. It was later revealed to cause serious health issues–including tumors, birth defects, rashes, psychological symptoms and cancer–among returning U.S. servicemen and their families as well as among the Vietncamese population

Napalm During the World War I, gasoline was used in combat flamethrowers. However, the essential problem with gasoline was that it burned out too quickly to be effective. To increase its effectiveness, the US Chemical Warfare used latex from rubber trees to jell gasoline. With natural rubber, the mixed gasoline now could shot further, stuck to the target better, and burned longer. Nonetheless, when the US entered the war in Pacific, natural rubber was in shortage. From 1942 to 1943, a team of chemists led by Louis Fieser at Harvard University developed successfully a replacement which later known as Napalm.