Vietnam: 50th anniversary of the US invasion

This year is the 50^th anniversary of the US invasion of South Vietnam: the worst atrocity in the post war period. It killed millions of people and destroyed four countries. There is hardly a word about it in the media. It's like it didn’t happen. To explain why this 50^th anniversary is so important, here is an extract from Afghanistan and South Vietnam, a 1984 essay by Noam Chomsky (quoted in The Chomsky Reader, p224). Chomsky contrasts the way that mainstream history recognises that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980, but does not recognise that the US ever invaded South Vietnam, in the one case rejecting, and in the other case allowing the excuse that the invaders were invited in by the government of their client regime.
In 1962, the US attacked South Vietnam. In that year, President Kennedy sent the US Air Force to attack rural South Vietnam, where more than 80 percent of the population lived, as part of a program intended to drive several million people to concentration camps (called “strategic hamlets”), where they would be surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards and “protected” from the guerrillas who, we conceded, they were willingly supporting. … In the following years, the US continued to resist every attempt at peaceful settlement and in 1964 began to plan the ground invasion of South Vietnam which took place in early 1965, accompanied by bombing of North Vietnam and an intensification of the bombing of the South, at triple the level of the more publicized bombing of the North. The US also extended the war to Laos, then Cambodia. ...

For the past twenty-two years, I have been searching to find some reference in mainstream journalism or scholarship to an American invasion of South Vietnam in 1962 (or ever), or an American attack against South Vietnam, or American aggression in Indochina – without success. There is no such event in history. Rather, there is an American defense of South Vietnam against terrorists supported from outside (namely, from Vietnam), a defense that was unwise, the doves maintain.

(extract from Afghanistan and South Vietnam, 1984, The Chomsky Reader, p224)