US Navy SEAL (full name: United States Navy Sea, Air and Land) is the name of a special unit serving within the United States Navy. It was formed by a special order of President John F. Kennedy in May 1961, but it dates back to the World War II special unit of the US Navy called UDT (UDT). Underwater Demolition Team). Originally soldiers US Navy SEALs were trained primarily to operate in the aquatic and semi-terrestrial environment, with particular emphasis on the control of enemy ships and ships. Currently, it is a versatile special unit also used in land and surface-air operations. It is also used in anti-terrorist activities or to conduct the so-called special reconnaissance. Each soldier of the formation must undergo a very demanding 41-week training, after which he receives the so-called SEAL trident. Soldiers of this formation took part in many conflicts, including: the Vietnam War (1964 / 1965-1975), both the Persian Gulf Wars (1990-1991 and 2003) or the operations in Afghanistan (from 2001).
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War (called the Vietnam War), was fought from 1964 (events in the Gulf of Tonkin) or from 1965 (the landing of the first, larger American forces in Vietnam) until 1975, i.e. until the occupation of South Vietnam through North Vietnam. The opponents in this war were, on the one hand, the United States, supporting its ally, i.e. South Vietnam and North Vietnam, along with the communist Vietcong guerrillas, supported (in one way or another) by the PRC and the USSR. Assume that at one time, at the maximum, North Vietnam involved about 690,000 soldiers in the conflict, Vietcong - about 200,000 people, while the United States reached the peak of its involvement in 1969, when Vietnam had about 540,000 American soldiers. The immediate cause of the conflict was the claims and ambitions of North Vietnam to take power and control over its southern neighbor, which the United States could not and did not want to agree to. The Vietnam War was an excellent example of a guerrilla war, in which the highly advanced technological armed forces of the USA suffered considerable losses and finally lost in the clash with the armed forces incomparably worse. It is worth adding that from a purely military point of view, the US troops were able to inflict huge losses on their opponent (e.g. the Tet offensive of 1968), but on the so-called The "home front" completely lost it. It is often assumed that the Vietnam War was lost by the US primarily because of tensions in American society, its reluctance to do so, and the inability of the US establishment to provide a convincing justification for it. The Vietnam War finally ended in 1975 with a complete defeat of the United States, which was forced to withdraw from Vietnam and come to terms with the unification of Vietnam by the communist government in Hanoi. The prestige of this country in the international arena has also decreased significantly for some time.