This book was all about Vietnam and to most people Vietnam is really known as the war that we shouldn’t of been in, in the first place in short terms The war shameful war. This war was not like any other wars when the Vietnam soldiers came home they weren’t not treated with respect they were shamed for even going and fighting for it. "My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame." Chapter 4, pg.
North Vietnamese were against the Americans during the war and had multiple reasons in hating Americans. Some reasons they hated Americans were because the North Vietnamese “deaths were very many” (Adams) and because of the “the poisons Americans dropped” (Adams) onto their land. By having so many deaths, the families of those people were sad and the North Vietnamese troops lessened. The poisons
The effects of war not only affect the soldier, but also cause an effect on families and loved ones. It is hard for the family to accept what had done war to Henry, but it is even tougher for Henry, who is blind by the terrible things he saw and lived at Vietnam, and does not see another way out than committing
Some families acted as if the vet only had been stationed at any other base. It was as if the families were apathetic to the subject (Maberry, and Hunt, n.d.). Many of the vets returning from the fighting came back with issues. Some of the issues experienced were drug use, mental issues, which is now called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), physically disabled, or suffered from the poisoning of Agent Orange. Our country was not prepared for the multitude of issues that Vietnam would cause in the men.
With the working class not being able to side directly with the “hawks” or “doves” it left them without a voice. The questioning of the government trickled into the actual soldiers in Vietnam causing them to desert the military or just refuse to fight. This alienated a large part of the American public and caused a even more divided country then there already was, one without a clear focus, goal or
As the Cold War continued, the American public grew discontent with the handling of the disputes . They grew restless of the ongoing conflict and the injustices that were being committed by the American military towards these countries and the abuse that our American troops were experiencing at home. The Civil Rights movement again saw this as an opportunity to insert their agenda along with other injustices into the national picture. With the sentiment swaying against the established institution it was easier to gain public support for civil rights. The Cold War was fought to end the oppression and maltreatment of other countries citizens.
Such an atrocity rattled the very core of the American people. This massacre took the whole world by surprise and drew massive media attention. This moved Henry Kissinger to attempt to organize another peace talk with the North Vietnamese but this too failed. The Vietnam War had produced many political, social and military disasters for America. Lyndon Johnson kept spending money on the war without adequate funds to pay for the expenses.
Some of these include death of others around them Vietnamese men, women, and children. Also they saw many of the people in their platoon get killed or die. Men tried to close themselves off from what was going on “they carried shameful memories” (482). “Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, not dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.
Veterans returning to the U.S. after duty were rarely honored, and felt alienated from their country and confused as to why they had even been in Vietnam. Further, even Henry Kissinger noted that the U.S. military was not really suited to this kind of war (Henry A. Kissinger. Lessons of Vietnam. Secret Memoranda to The President of the United States, May 12, 1975, p. 3.
government, as much of what was reported defied the intentions of government policy. The media has also fell blame by many for the result of the war, as it is widely believed that the war could not have been won under the scrutiny that came from the American people as a result of the media coverage (Magruder, 2005). The most famous example of effect on media because of advancement during the war came all through the insulting film of the chief of police for Saigon assassinating what appeared to be an unsystematic person was shown to the public. Something not regularly known or reported at the time the film footage was shown was that the shooter was the Chief of Police for Saigon, that the man shoot had been one of the members of a Vietnamese Communist Political Squad that had killed the Chief of Police's second in command. The biased pattern advances illegal practices as the sound of the shoot was also an edited sound that was added because the camera at the time was not recording sound (Cohen,