vietnam

“Teaching the Vietnam War makes one realize how the shape of a narrative determines, and is determined by, its content”. The Vietnam War was one of America’s most controversial wars. Many of its aspects are still plagued with great uncertainty. Those aspects of the Vietnam War are argued and debated about, they were argued during the time of the war and the arguing has continued. The Vietnam War was indeed a time of confusion. Why did the war start? What was the United States’ real reason for getting involved? What was the objective of the war? What were the American soldiers really fighting, or in reality, dying for? How do you explain a war to someone who has not experienced firsthand, especially if you were not around yourself? There is no real answer. You can give the facts and figures, but that leaves out the true grit of a war. The human perspective must also be given. As with any war, the Vietnam War had many perspective: the protestors, the politician, and lastly, but most importantly, the soldier (Although there are many other stories that could and should be told). Through the facts and figures and the eyes of those who were there, an individual could learn about the Vietnam War, although how many actually want to understand war is uncertain.
The facts and figures are one of the first things that should be learned about the war (Although many would argue the facts). The Vietnamese waged an anti-colonial war against France between 1945 and 1954. They received $2.6 billion in financial aid from the United States to aid their efforts. The Geneva Convention followed the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, where Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam all received independence. Vietnam was momentarily divided into Communist North and anti-Communist South. Then in 1956, South Vietnam, with help from America, refused to hold the unification elections. In 1958, Communist-led guerrillas, eventually known as the Viet Cong, began to battle the government of the South Vietnamese. The United States then sent 2,000 military advisors t support South Vietnam’s government. This number grew to 16,3000 by 1963. The military force slowly deteriorated. By 1963 the fertile Mekong Delta was lost to the overpowering Viet Cong. The war rose in 1965, when President Johnson issued commencing air strikes on North Vietnam and ground forces, which had risen to 536,000 by 1968. The Tet Offensive by North Vietnam turned many Americans against the waging war. President Nixon, following Johnson, promoted Vietnamization, the withdrawing of American troops and handing over the great responsibility of the war to South Vietnam. Protesting of the war dramatically increased, especially after Nixon’s attempt to slow North Vietnam forces and supplies into the South by sending American forces to destroy supply bases in Cambodia in 1970, which violated Cambodian neutrality. This provoked antiwar protests on many of the United Stats’ college campuses. In 1968 through 1973 attempts were made to end the ongoing conflict through diplomacy. Then in January 1973, an agreement was reached. U.S. forces withdrew from Vietnam and the U.S. POWs were released. In April 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to the North and Vietnam was once again united. The Vietnam War ended, but it took the lives of 58,000 American soldiers, with a total casualty count of 350,000, and between one and two millions Vietnamese deaths. The war also resulted in the United States Congress enacting the War Powers Act, which requires the president to have Congressional approval before committing our forces overseas. Even though it is important to know the facts and figures of the Vietnam War, it is even more important to know what the war did and was for individuals, such as those who protested the war.
What is a war without protestors? The Vietnam War had one of the biggest outcries from protestors than almost any other war, many still protest against it today. Many protestors fought their own kind of war here in America, although not nearly as horrific as the one the American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam. They fought for the immoralities they believed plagued the war. They fought for their right of freedom of speech and assembly. They fought for the unheard voices of those thousands of miles away, some of those voices came from the dead, “At the end of the march, each of us stood on a small wooden platform and shouted that name at the White House: Glendon Waters…I know now that he was killed in July 1967—about the time I began protesting the war—and that his name is on the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial”. They fought police, fellow Americans, and themselves. “At 7:00p.m., about 1,500 people listened to speeches by Bobby Seale and Jerry Rubin. At 7:30p.m., police attacked, maced, and dispersed a march of more than 500…Without a search warrant, badges or nameplates, a group of officers invaded an apartment in Old Town, held its student occupants at gunpoint, and searched it. On departing, they allegedly took a camera, cash, and other valuables”. Overall protesting became a big part of the Vietnam War. The protestors were made up of mainly college students, as well as conscientious objectors and others who escaped the draft. “I filed for conscientious objector status on the first day of spring, 1968. No one knew it, but old men, women, and children had just been massacred by American soldiers at My Lai”. Some felt that many Americans were not being told the truth and that they did not really know what was going on in Vietnam, “I came to see that the Americans, too, could be content to follow orders, unmindful of the devastating impact their ordinary actions here at home had on others far way” . The protestors were fighting for what they believed in, in hope that their country’s wrongs would be righted, those that they many fought were the American politicians and government.
The Vietnam War was one of the longest wars in American history and one of the most unpopular wars. It resulted in the death of nearly 60,000 Americans and an estimated 1-2 million Vietnamese deaths. Still today, many Americans still ask whether the American effort in the Vietnam War was necessary, a sin, a mistake, or a noble cause, or an idealistic, if failed, effort to protect the South Vietnamese people from the North. In order to truly understand the war you and to determine your own answer to the many questions it is still pending, you must look at the war from every perspective and understand the many facts it produced. Dr. Carl Sagan wrote, “You have to know the past to understand the present”. The Vietnam War is a large part of America’s past. It is important to know of the Vietnam War and to know of those who experienced, so you may learn of how America came to be as it is today and were it may be heading, of whether or not we learned from our mistakes or if we are destined to repeats those made during the Vietnam War again.
Sources
http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war http://history1900s.about.com/od/vietnamwar/a/vietnamwar.htm