The Vietnam War affected millions of veterans and showed the United States that even though they had the most powerful and best military in the world they could still lose a war. Many veterans all across the United States came back from the war with hatred and psychological problems. America’s society had changed after the war, people were not willing to go to war any more and America as a society saw the tragedies that occurred in
This failed badly and led to there being a 300% rise in NLF membership. Through helping Diem to implement a poor policy, it increased the North’s presence in the south, and gave Kennedy further reason to amend his mistakes and send in even more men into Vietnam. Richard Nixon said ‘North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.’ This again supports the quagmire theory that by getting more involved Kennedy was entering an irreversible situation which he had to follow through on. A situation of deeper involvement, problems and complexities that he ultimately
Nixon • Republican president elected in 1968 and 1972; resigned from office in 1974 due to Watergate scandal • Promised he would reduce U.S. troop levels in Vietnam, but force levels remained high and Nixon actually expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia • Pursued a plan he called “Vietnamization” to push the South Vietnamese army to shoulder the bulk of the fighting • In the first months of his second term, the last U.S. combat soldiers left Vietnam EVENTS 1963 Buddhist Protests • Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, set himself on fire in protest against South Vietnamese government policies, including religious intolerance • Other Buddhists followed his example in the following months • His suicide shocked and confused many Americans and created doubt in their minds about U.S. support for the South Vietnamese government 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution • Gave President Johnson the power to take any military action he deemed necessary to defend South Vietnam against the Viet Cong • Passed in response to an unconfirmed attack on the USS Maddox off the coast of Vietnam 1968 Tet Offensive • Occurred on 31 January, beginning of Vietnamese Tet
It certainly seems that they tried to mend the damage done by appearing on public affairs programs and making speeches about how the Tet was an allied victory and a Communist defeat, but it seems that the damage had already been done. [7] “The Johnson administration’s public relations efforts to salvage popular support for the US Vietnam War policy in the aftermath of the Tet assault failed. Maybe the media is given the same freedom to report and access today, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, as they were in Vietnam. It may just be that the heart of the American people today are just so hardened with hate for the people we are fighting that we just overlook the atrocities and incompetence that is reported. I am sure that looking back on it, the Johnson administration wished that it had a better handle on the media by maybe using more censorship and giving the media less access to the fighting.
But it was not a declaration of war. Then by 1965, more troops were sent to South Vietnam to fight the Viet Cong. The war quickly became an American conflict. The U.S ended up looking bad, and many people opposed the war by 1968 due to the number of casualties of U.S soldiers. On 1973 the last troops were return to the United States by President Nixon promise to withdraw the troops.
America, as Harman describes, was seemingly invincible, until its involvement in the Vietnam War. In the 1950s, France had already been at war which divided Vietnam into the North and South. France was backed by the U.S. who funded a majority of the war effort and helped take over South Vietnam. But according to Harman, “The US was trapped in a war of attrition from which there was no easy way out,” (Harman 572). He sees the Vietnam War on the whole as not only a waste of time, men, and resources for the Americans, but also a cause of “huge fissures …in US society” (Harman 572).
Many people began to protest the U.S. government. Most of the protesters were young and born at the end, or after the Second World War In 1968, Nixon won the presidential election, due to because he said that he would “end the Vietnam War.” In 1969 there were over 500,000 American troops fighting in Vietnam. Nixon announced his policy, Vietnamization. This caused the U.S. making South Vietnamese army to be
Source B9 is clear in doing this, Josh Brooman comes to the conclusion that Dunkirk was ‘a great defeat’ by focussing on the ’70,000’ men that were killed wounded or taken prisoner, the abandonment of ‘150,000’ French allies and the number of rifles and vehicles left behind. Source B9 also tells us that behind closed doors even Winston Churchill called Dunkirk ‘the greatest military defeat for many centuries’. As Prime Minister, Winston Churchill knew this information would have damaged the morale of the British people, which he didn’t want to do during a war. Although Source B9 fails to tell us how may soldiers were successfully evacuated from Dunkirk, and could be seen as one-sided, I don’t think this takes away from the reliability as it was written by a school history textbook
Paradoxes of the Vietnam War that affected America “But the hospital had changed all that…Now I wanted to know what I had lost my legs for, why I and the others had gone at all.”(Born on the Fourth of July, ) Vietnam soldiers return home and realize they have missed out on a lot. Soldiers are left physically and mentally scarred and no legit reasons as to why. The Vietnam War resulted in serious contradictions that changed America as a nation. The American people were split over whether the war was right or wrong. There was the anti-war and pro-war Americans fighting about patriotism and if the government was right or wrong.
Then the rioters turned their murderous wrath against the black community (Bernstein 3). By the end of the riots on July 16-17 1863, at least 105 people were killed (Bernstein 259). This is one example of how American citizens acted toward the draft and their retaliation against it. When a national tragedy strikes, the number of citizens volunteering for military service seems to go up. This was the case after both Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 (Rich and Gerson 1).