Vietnam War Of Regrets And Wastes Summary

A War of Regrets and Wastes

The Vietnam war is famous for many of its characteristics in defining American history and culture. One of the most outstanding characteristics involves how the war, particularly in the years after, stands out as being unpopular and receives the most ridicule by the American population. Several reasons exist for the extreme popularity and disdain for the war, focusing on the concepts of the wasteful aspects and the moral issues of the war.

One major reason the war was very unpopular is due to the United States involves its lack of preparation in dealing with the war. One example that Lt. Philip Caputo brings up was the strength and lethality of the Vietcong enemy. He illustrates this point with the line “So, when

we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.” The U.S. had assumed that due to the lack of advanced weaponry, such as napalm and helicopters, on the Vietcong side, the Vietcong would quickly fold under American military superiority. With their guerilla tactics and strong beliefs in the politics and side, the Vietcong had claimed much more lives during the Vietnam War than the U.S. was prepared for. Another aspect was the length of the war that turned the war into a war of attrition, which Caputo describes with “The tedium was occasionally relieved by...the explosions of grenades and the rapid, rippling bursts of automatic rifles.” Caputo describes the combined aspects of the war being drawn out with little actual battles along with most of the war being waiting and marches in hot, disease-ridden jungles leads to the American soldiers in Vietnam losing conviction and desire to fight in the war. This lack of conviction means that even soldiers fighting in the battles to show disdain at having to participate in the war, only able to express their emotions in violent bursts that end up costing many lives on both sides of the conflict.
Another aspect that makes the Vietnam war unpopular focuses the lives wasted in the conflict on both sides.

One of the most important examples of this involves the My Lai Massacre, where American soldiers targeted and killed dozens if not hundreds of innocent Vietnamese villagers in a quest of vengeance against the Vietcong, including children and the elderly. Lt. Colburn describes how the soldiers almost in a fit of madness targeted everyone in the village, showing no mercy and leaving a massive black mark on the military and its actions during the war. Unlike other conflicts when civilian casualties were the unfortunate byproduct of other conflicts or a necessary evil to end a potentially long and bloody war, the My Lai Massacre was much more of a direct attack out of vengeance and hatred for the other side, with the village chosen as a target because the Vietcong were hard to find in the dense jungle covering the country. The American soldiers responsible for the attack made their targets the villagers out of a bitter vendetta against the actions of the Vietcong, independent of the military value of such an operation or the morality or lack thereof that comes from targeting unarmed civilians. This made the soldiers as evil if not more evil than the Vietcong, the Vietcong noted for their horrible tactics and tortures, in the eyes of many Americans, and would not have been accepted if not for the military covering it up as to continue the war. Such events lead to massive

criticisms of US involvement, particularly in the years after. On the other side, there was a lot of protests and disavowals for the United States’ involvement in the war due to the thousands of soldiers whose lives were lost in the war. This was a massive waste since groups such as the SNCC and the GIs united against the war in Vietnam saw the war itself as unnecessary, that lives were being used in a war that the U.S. did not need to involve or interfere itself with. Unlike other conflicts where the purpose was to prevent the spread of a force that would directly harm the United States and its ideals (such as Hitler’s Nazism and his fascist regime that targets non-Aryan groups), the United States involved itself more as an aggressor in a civil war. The United States, out of its fear and paranoia about the spread of communism felt that it needed to reach into another conflict and involve the military and its troops in a war that had little direct impact on the protection and well-being of the American population. Seeing tens of thousands of lives wasted in a conflict halfway across the world while domestically issues of race and poverty were sidelined for the war combined to increase the dissatisfaction of many American citizens. The other issue described by the SNCC is the idea that it is difficult to justify a war if one is forced to participate in the fighting and slaughter against one’s wills and morals.
The final aspect that made the war in Vietnam very unpopular, which was the moral failings and hypocrisies that it opened within the government and the American people.

The use of the draft lead to much resistance and apprehension to the war since unlike the reasons to join the Second World War, such as fighting an evil and corrupt power that tries to oppress and dominate the world, the Vietnam War almost places the United States in that evil and corrupt role. It forces the men to enter the war as aggressors trying to spread the doctrine of the American government through invasion and interference on foreign soil. Many groups, such as the SNCC, saw this as forcing a situation and dragging American soldiers into a foreign civil war halfway across the world, with an outcome of a lack of a definite victory that seems to waste their lives. Much like the current dissatisfaction with the invasion and maintenance of Iraq and Afghanistan during the Iraq War, the war in Vietnam seemed to indicate the United States, in fear and paranoia about the actions of foreign powers and groups, placed the need to police foreign conflicts and cultures over the local issues of poverty and racism in American society. Though the Civil Rights Act was passed a few years earlier, segregation was still a major issue in the South. The SNCC and the GIs against the war both bring up the ironic hypocrisy that we are more involved in improving the situation of foreign, non-white groups before fixing the

poverty, racism, and political misrepresentation rampant within the United States. To many people, a massive issue was the fact that the US government decided that defending the foreign Vietnamese people from communism was far more important than helping in the conflict against segregation that Black American citizens were facing within the nation’s own borders.
Many factors contribute to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War in the eyes of the American populace, from wasting lives and resources to the moral issues and hypocrisies both in and out of the area of conflict. The events of the Vietnam War and its perception by the populace both during and after the war speaks much about the sentiments of more modern conflicts, such as the opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the negative view of the Crimean incident with Russia’s morally and politically dangerous maneuvers.