The Vietnam War: A Cruel And Unyielding Machine

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It’s been a year since Vietnam ended, but the war still lasts on in the people’s minds. Some came back with visible wounds, scars of a life left behind. Some came back with scars on their hearts and on their minds. The war was unwanted and seemingly unnecessary to the people that were forced to be a part of it. Not everyone wanted a war, but everyone was touched by the conflict. We lost many and took many… war is a cruel and unyielding machine. When the war arrived, everyone was thrust into a new world. We were required to fight in a war that was vaguely understood. Some supported it, some rejected it. Some ran and dodged, and some ran straight for it and took it on. Everyone conformed to the new struggle. Some conformed by protest, balancing those who conformed by joining. Either way, everyone was in the hat when the war began. Anyone could be taken up by the cruel machine and thrust into the battle. The war didn’t care who you were or what you did. Everyone was to be a part of it, a piece in a catastrophic game. …show more content…

The sheer violence of the war was enough to kill many people. People were no longer people—they became objects in a game played by some higher powers. Real living, breathing people became numbers and statistics and graves and mist. Good and bad people died in the war, but altogether, people died. We fought an unseen threat lurking in the jungles and villages. In Vietnam, we lost our humanity, our sense of the human condition. We became blind to what we were truly destroying, and this is what in turn destroyed

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