Vietnam War Experience

On March 16, 1968, over 300 unarmed civilians were killed in South Vietnam during an indiscriminate, mass murder event known as the My Lai Massacre. Conducted by a unit of the United States Army, the My Lai Massacre ranked one of most appalling atrocities carried out by US forces in an already savage and violent war. All victims involved were unarmed civilians, many of which were women, children, and the elderly. Victims were raped, tortured and beaten, even mutilated before being killed. The massacre was forever seared into the hearts and minds of the American people as the day “the American spirit died.”

The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.

Wars are a difficult place to be. “THE VIETNAM WAR transformed a generation” (Roberts 1). With all that happened during the war such as exposure to

Vietnam was an entirely new type of war for the United States. It still remains morally and historically problematic in today’s society. The Vietnam War had a tremendous impact on American society and culture, primarily because it was the first war to be televised. The American press played a significant

For many in the United States "Vietnam" is a term which conjures up visions of war, anarchy, and finally defeat and humiliation. It was a war that many felt the U.S. should never have gotten involved in, and was a waste of more than 50,000 American lives. And for many years after the war ended the prevailing wisdom remained that the U.S. had failed. But as years turn to decades, and Vietnam is fading into the recesses of history, one can begin to look at the war in an objective manner; as just one part of the larger "Cold War." When viewing Vietnam as part of the larger Cold War, one can see that the United States should not only have been there, but it was necessary as part of the overall strategy to defeat Communism world wide.

The war in Vietnam was a war against communism that tore apart the US. The United States of America plunged together with its allies and played a tremendous role as far as fight against communism is concerned. A huge number of American soldiers were deployed in Vietnam a practice that coupled with much unpreparedness. The soldiers were not aware what exactly they were up to in Vietnam. Most Americans at the time were very much against the act. It was one of the most deliberating wars America plunged herself into and the only one to have been lost. Most intriguing is the amount of publicity and media buzz created by the film industry. Vietnam War was the topic of many television networks, music and Hollywood. Journalist and veterans and scholar were never left behind and went ahead to produce tones of literature on the legacies and lessons to be learnt from the war (Hochgesang, Lawyer, and Stevenson). The exploitation of the soldiers and rejection of the veterans created just as much interest as the war had created. One such commentary came from George Kennan, who depicted the war as one of the most disastrous mission The United States has ever undertaken (Westheider 155-159).. This essay will establish the effects the war had to the US soldiers.

The Vietnam war did not even have to happen. Vietnam was all the way across the world and it did not even matter if it was a communist country, at least then we would have it for a ally. When we started to fight with them we became not on the same side anymore. The TV’s showed us being the good guys down at Vietnam. John Kerry wrote an article explaining Vietnam’s war. “We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coooly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum” (p.3). The idea of what we were doing in Vietnam was twisted to make it seem as gentle as possible.

Howard Zinn says it best when he writes that “from 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny peasant country – and failed” (Zinn, 460). Zinn does not mince words when expressing his thoughts about the Vietnam War, because as Zinn says, Vietnam was basically a modern portrayal of David vs. Goliath. One could even go as far as to say that Vietnam was in essence a case of mass genocide in Vietnam. Thousands and thousands of Vietnamese and America soldiers were killed along with thousands upon thousands of innocent, Vietnamese citizens. War is an infectious disease and the Vietnam War is a perfect example of how deadly of a disease war can be. Everybody involved in the Vietnam War was affected, whether it was Vietnamese citizens, Vietnamese soldiers, American soldiers, or even American citizens back home. The disease that was the Vietnam War infected the hearts and minds of two countries half way across the world from each other.

The Vietnam War was the critical conflict that altered our “post modern” societal view of what war is really about. Tim O’Brien shows the brutal reality of war to our “post modern” society without adding the propaganda and fluff that our society has come to accept. In our trying times today, Operation Iraqi freedom has supposedly come to an end. With the amounts of embedded reporting, our society has been able to see battles as they occur. The news ran non stop coverage on the war, where T.V. audiences were enthralled with scenes of battle. These broadcasts did not accurately depict the American casualties. The only live broadcasts were images of U.S. soldiers were taking out objectives with little resistance from Iraqi forces.

Wars are fought for freedom and independence and usually when soldiers come home we receive them with open arms ready to praise them and thank them for putting their lives on the line. If you were asked to describe a soldier, you’d probably say heroic, brave, courageous, or honorable. After the Vietnam War, parades weren’t the welcoming soldiers got; instead, they were shunned and booed at.

Vietnam has beautiful sceneary. The trees are green, the outdoors smell great, and the beaches are breath taking, but was it always like this? The answer is no, the green jungle, the lovely smell, the beautiful beaches used to be a hidden base headquarters, the smell of gunpowder, and the beaches used to be battlefields. But, what made this particular war stand out was the number of innocent casualties. This number was at and astounding 4,000,000, making up more than half of the war’s deaths. The Vietnam War was devastating, but citizens didn 't deserve to die; it should be a right to be safe during the time of a war, and is should be the government 's responsibility to keep citizens safe.

The life of an American soldier in Vietnam was a extremely difficult one. They had to deal with the terrible conditions of the jungle, a sneaky enemy, racism, and a lack of support from home. The rough terrain and conditions of the jungles in vietnam was rough. It was hot, and humid. There were wild animals most deadly, and it would rain a lot. The viet-cong were a very sneaky enemy. They mostly relied on guerrilla warfare and booby traps. The people of vietnam mostly out of fear would support them with food and housing, and there are even reported cases of the viet-cong convincing mothers to either use their babies or young children to act as a suicide bomber. This often lead to our soldiers mistakenly killing civilians because they did not

In 1955 young college aged Americans were pulled into the messy Vietnam War without choice. The Vietnam War was a war that America joined to prevent communism. The war was shown on many news channels during the time and people from all over the world watched from the comfort of their home. In the war the American government used chemicals which terribly harmed the Vietnamese land and citizens. Agent orange, the chemical, killed thousands of people. Soldiers could not believe how harmful the war was. A Lot of soldiers died and a numerous amount of the soldiers suffered from terrible trauma, Post-traumatic stress disorder, after the war from all the horrors. A lot of Americans hated that America was involved

A quarter of a century after the Fall of Saigon, Vietnam continues to exercise a powerful hold of the American psyche. No deployment of American troops abroad is considered without the infusion of the Vietnam question. No formulation of strategic policy can be completed without weighing the possibility of Vietnanization. Even the politics of a person cannot be discussed without taking into account his opinion on the Vietnam Ware. This national obsession with Vietnam is perfectly national when viewed from a far. It was the only war that the United States has ever lost. It defined an era of American history that must rank with the depression as one of this nation’s most traumatic. It concluded with Watergate and led many to believe that the

It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting.