Why The Americans Lost The Vietnam War Dbq Essay

The assertion that the Americans lost the Vietnam War because they failed to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese is incorrect. This can proven by examining other aspects of the war such as military tactics , political relationships, finances and other contributing factors.
There are, however, opposing perspectives which believe that the Vietnamese people were the core factor of the war and should have been America’s main focus as they would make their job easier as they were the ones that were in the army, at school, at home and at the voting booths deciding the future of Vietnam .
America’s success was determined by several factors of which none could be solely liable for their loss. A picture shows an American soldier burning down a hut during a search and destroy mission

(source C) which may have angered locals but this represents something much larger and that is the generic and unremarkable tactics used. “The Americans were well armed but slow and clumsy. They were elephants, especially when moving through the jungle”( Source F )
Vietnam has a unique landscape and the Americans made the fatal mistake of not adapting to it. ”US strategy never seemed to take account of this, relying instead on its superiority in military technology. In this sense the Vietnam war has been described as a tragedy for the USA in that its military policy contained the seeds of its own failure.” (Source D)
America suffered a defeat in Vietnam but the same forces were engaged in another war against a much less resilient enemy, the American people.
Former president Johnson believed that, initially, the only reason America engaged in the war was to avoid being seen as a nation that gave into threats, even though the social issues of America were more important (Source I). This shows that America’s energy was not entirely focused of winning the war but also confronting social issues. The civil rights movement was prevalent during this time period, from 1955 to 1975 which was a far more important issue for Americans ( Source H ).
Therefore, political commitment can be a contributing factor to why America lost the war, nullifying the original statement.
Americans believed that the Vietcong drew their strength from “hungry peasants “but they drew their strength from hungry peasants who all had the same thirst for independence so although feeding them may have won them over temporarily they had no genuine interest in supporting the Americans (Source E).

“The Americans had realised from an early stage that the war could only be won by winning the support of the South Vietnamese peasants” ( Source A) which as previously proven they were incapable of.
The counter however, believes that all the aspects of American success in the Vietnam war were all rooted back to the very people that inhabited it and that democracy would have spread as it became known and loved.
The US government was unable to subdue the forces of nationalism, not only through their military tactics but through social relations. In essence this dispute is not about whether or not the Americans would have succeeded if had they had the support of the Vietnamese but rather how the support of the Vietnamese would not have affected it as much because the Vietnamese struggle was for general independence and how other aspects would have still had an equally as important

role.