Why won’t Americans forget about the Vietnam War?

There are so many reasons Tom; perhaps too many to even mention here. So, I will touch on just a few reasons. First, America had just become a “superpower” following WWII. We fought a very bitter war with North Korea (with the support of Russia and China) to a draw. We were now engaged in a ideological, economic, political, and surrogate war with Communist Russia and China, which became known as the Cold War, for what many claimed was a war for global democracy and freedom.

Then too, we blundered badly in our attempts to remove Castro form Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion. We had come close to a nuclear Armageddon during those seven days in October known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then we (and the world) witnesses the murder of a president live right there in our living rooms. I think that was simply a precursor of what we would be seeing nightly. We also had a growing social movement, the Civil Rights Movement, which made some of us to begin asking how can we be fighting for freedom and democracy elsewhere when we don’t have it here?

We got involved in Vietnam after France, its colonial overlord, had been soundly defeated, and on the advise on the CIA and State Department. As with most things, it started small-as advisers-then as instructors to operate the equipment we were now sending, and then light support, and then, following the Gulf of Tonkin incident, we started putting boots on the ground-lots of them. I think that at this point, we were still fighting for an ideal; spreading American style democracy. We were also told that the Vietnamese wanted us there; that this would be a quick little war and be over (never mind that the Vietnamese had fought the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, and the French again).

Of course, that never happened. The war dragged on and on. We were provided with body counts by the Army as proof we were winning (we weren’t). Most of the numbers, as we soon learned, were faked). Then came the Tet Offensive. While a strategic loss for Hanoi, it was a brilliant PR piece. The North wasn’t as weak and teetering on collapse as were told. So, we bombed and bombed and bombed some more with little change in the result.

Meanwhile, resistance to the war grew into a national social movement. Like the Civil War, it was tearing families apart. This same movement had its own music, lifestyle, values, culture-which includes its own clothing and hair styles! Through this, our political system began to fracture as well. Parties broke off into various wings hawks, doves, and so forth. We had pro-war and anti-war politicians and candidates. We witnessed again the murders of Martin Luther King and then jut a few weeks latter, the brother of the slain president, Bobby Kennedy, who many had hoped could end the war and bridge this expanding gulf. We saw the corruption of politics unfold in Chicago in 1968, and the police riots. We saw the Ohio National Guard murder students at Kent State.

Finally, and perhaps most damning of all, was the nightly news reports which brought us daily images in living color of the fighting in Vietnam, and now too in Cambodia and Laos. Instead of reading censored print news reports like we did in WWII, we could now watch the carnage from the comfort of our living rooms and kitchens. Of course, things continued to escalate thanks to the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the SLA, Hippies, Yippies, Woodstock, and so much more.

We watched as one president, Lyndon Johnson, leave the White House in disgrace and a new one, Richard Nixon, enter. He was an unlikely savior of America. Despite his words to the contrary, he was a very conservative war hawk, and although he promised to end the war quickly, he thought he could bring about victory by quickly expanding it. He was wrong. Ultimately, the war did end, but now we faced corruption all the way up to the Oval Office in what became known as the Watergate Hearings. We would see first a Vice President leave office in disgrace, and then for the first time ever, a president resign.

Vietnam represents so much to Americans. It was our first military defeat, thanks mainly to a lack of political will and an inability of commanders to adapt. Those who came home from the war were treated like lepers, or worse. They were completely ignored. It divided the country into countless pieces. It revealed numerous lies by the military and government. It revealed a level of corruption we all knew existed but never imagined how widespread it was. The war even created two cultures mainstream and a counterculture. It showed the hypocrisy of fighting for an ideal overseas which didn’t exist at home. It shook America to the core, and in many ways, it still shakes us to this day.

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Here is a third comment taken in part: As for the Vietnam War” America indeed inflicted disproportionate casualties on the enemy and never lost a real stand up fight. HOWEVER, America’s political and strategic goal in the war was to “maintain an Independent South Vietnam”. South Vietnam was eventually overran by the North so America lost.

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