>>> It’s like saying that China attacked America when we were fighting the VietCong in South Vietnam during the 1960s.
There weren’t any Chinese in Vietnam (except for the non-communists in Cho Lon.) The Vietnamese hate the Chinese. In fact China has been unsuccessfully invading Vietnam about every 30 or 40 years for the last 1300 years.
The last Sino-Vietnam war was in 1979, 4 years after we left Saigon. China sent 200,000 troops and about 200 tanks across the border. They managed to push about 20 kilometers into Vietnam before being stopped. China withdrew after about 2 months. Chinese casualties were 9000 dead, 10000 wounded, 550 military vehicles and 115 artillery pieces destroyed and captured.
It was soon after this 1979 war that Vietnam purged the ethnic Chinese from their population sending them out to sea in small boats and rafts, i.e. the Vietnam boat-people migration we all remember from 1979 into the early 80s.
“... You fools! Don’t you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don’t you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”
Ho Chi Minh