The French occupation of Vietnam, also referred to as the Vietnam Wars, was a military event between 1982 and 1996 in which the French Foreign Legion occupied large parts of Vietnam, in particular the Westernized South. The occupation was part of a foreign intervention by the French in the ongoing Vietnamese Civil War to protect the interests of the Saigon government, which had been allied with the French ever since the withdrawal of the United States from Saigon in 1945. Between 1982-1988, the French fought a defensive war against Chinese-armed rebels from the breakaway and communist-sympathetic Republic of Tonkin in the north, which sought independence from the corrupt and dictatorial Saigon regime and a closer allegiance to China, which France viewed as unacceptable. The war was directl