To What Extent Was the Us Defeat in the Vietnam Conflict a Result of the Difficulties in Winning the “Hearts and Minds” of the Vietnamese People?

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To what extent was the US defeat in the Vietnam conflict a result of the difficulties in winning the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people? To establish the significance of the failure of America’s attempt to win over the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people, one must look at the other reasons behind the US defeat and compare their significance to the significance of their failure. The first and probably the most significant event was the way in which the war was fought. The Viet Cong were a guerrilla army which used guerrilla tactics, they used the jungle to their advantage and their main tactic was being secretive; they would attack the US camps then disappear. Finding the Viet Cong was very difficult, not only due to their impressive tunnel system, but also the fact that most of the local population supported the Viet Cong due to opposition to Diem’s government and the strategic hamlets they were forced into, it made It impossible for the American soldiers to know who was a Viet Cong member and who was an ordinary villager. The search and destroy scene from the film “Apocalypse” demonstrates the difficulty the Americans had. In the scene, whilst some soldiers were trying to board an injured soldier onto a helicopter, a flustered woman runs up to the soldiers, quickly throwing her hat in the helicopter, which is later shown to contain a bomb. As Peter Riddick writes for the “Modern History Review”, “During 1967-1968, of nearly two million reported small-unit operations, less than 1 percent resulted in contact with the enemy. The VC were found where they wanted to be found” This was not the conventional war that the Americans were used to. The Viet Cong knew they could not beat America using their own tactics as their resources would not sufficiently match those of America. However, very significantly, even when the Viet Cong did use

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