Vietnam is a state.
Operation Passage to Freedom was a term used by the United States Navy to describe its assistance in transporting in 1954 -- 55 310,000 Vietnamese civilians , soldiers and non-Vietnamese members of the French Army from communist North Vietnam ( the Democratic Republic of Vietnam ) to South Vietnam ( the State of Vietnam , later to become the Republic of Vietnam ) . The State of Vietnam ( Quốc gia Việt Nam État du Viêt-Nam ) was a state that claimed authority over all of Vietnam during the First Indochina War although part of its territory was actually controlled by the communist Việt Minh . After the 1954 Geneva Agreements , the State of Vietnam had to abandon the northern part of the country to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam ( DRV ) . Vietnam ( ˌ ; [ vîət nāːm ] ) , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam ( SRV ; , is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia . Vietnam remains one of the world 's four remaining one-party socialist states officially espousing communism .