Analysis Of The Movie ' The Vietnam War ' By Kristen Ann Hass 's ' Making A Memory Of War

Secretary of State John Kerry once said “I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.” The Vietnam War was a conflict that lasted from 1956-1975 which the United States participated in along with the South Vietnamese who fought against the Communist North Vietnamese. Many Americans strongly disapproved of the war which caused many protests and riots. The war lasted 25 years killing many people and eventually the North Vietnamese won. The Vietnam War was important to Americans back home because it tested the citizen’s right to free speech, effected future foreign policy, and created many issues for returning veterans.

In her book The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, author Marilyn Young examines the series of political and military struggles between the United States and Vietnam, a nation that has been distinctively separated as the South and the North. Young chooses to express the daily, weekly, monthly progresses of the affairs collectively called the Vietnam Wars, focusing on the American interventions in the foreign soil. She seeks to provide an answer to a question that has haunted the world for years: What was the reason behind the United States interfering in the internal affairs of a foreign country in which it had no claims at all? Young discloses the overt as well as covert actions undertaken by the U.S. government officials regarding the foreign affairs with Vietnam and the true nature of the multifaceted objectives of each and every person that’s involved had.

The Vietnam War was a controversial conflict that plagued the United States for many years. The loss of life caused by the war was devastating. For those who came back alive, their lives were profoundly changed. The impact the war had on servicemen would affect them for the rest of their lives; each soldier may have only played one small part in the war, but the war played a huge part in their lives. They went in feeling one way, and came home feeling completely different. In the book Vietnam Perkasie, W.D. Ehrhart describes his change from a proud young American Marine to a man filled with immense confusion, anger, and guilt over the atrocities he witnessed and participated in during the war.

Regarded as one of the most controversial and polarizing military conflicts in U.S. history, the Vietnam War has left a deep and lasting impact on American culture, politics, and foreign policy. From 1964 to the present day, the Vietnam War redefined the scope of U.S. influence both at home and abroad, and caused a fundamental shift in American society that dramatically changed the way in which Americans viewed their government and the role of the United States as a world power. For an entire generation of Americans, who watched as the horrors of the war in Vietnam unfold before the spotlight of the national media, the Vietnam War directly challenged the superiority of the American way and the infallibility of U.S military dominance. In truth, the U.S government, U.S. military, and the American people as a whole struggled to accept the lessons of America’s greatest military failure and the sobering reality of the war’s consequences. To this day, the legacy of this so-called “American War” continues to resonate throughout the fabric of American society as a cautionary tale of U.S foreign intervention and blind acceptance of open-ended conflict.

A terrible conflict left a mark on American History that had never been seen before. For the first time in the countries’s history people were not proud of their governments role in a war. Protest engulfed the Nation as people were disgusted with choices made by their leaders and the subsequent actions carried out by their soldiers. When the soldiers came back home they were not greeted with the praise that prior generations had gotten. They were given little attention and in some cases hated. This conflict of course was the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War was one of the least supported wars in American History. It faced an immense and inexorable sum of social outcry that, while initially ignored, could not go completely unnoticed and unacknowledged by the government. While the majority of American citizens supported the war, they remained silent, most likely to protect themselves from the scrutiny of the minority that opposed the war. This minority of Americans were opposed to the war for moral reasons. They argued that the war was not any of the business of the united states and that it would be morally unjust to intervene because the North Vietnamese “were fighting a patriotic war to rid themselves of foreign aggressors.” that “Innocent Vietnamese peasants were being killed

The Vietnam War was seen by all as horrible and by many, senseless. War has the ability to change people, countries, and even the harmony of the planet. After the Vietnam War’s end, many Americans didn’t want to hear or speak about the war. Many of the citizens in America wanted to forget it ever occurred. The United States had lost their invincibility to their negligence; the nation believed it could do anything. They especially thought they could end the war quickly in Vietnam and stop the spread of communism. The United States had joined the Vietnam War with hopes of becoming an alliance with France. This alliance would help turn the tide easily for them on what they thought was a naïve,

The Vietnam War and Era has been a strange configuration of differing parts. So many differing parts that more often than not Historians struggle to find a way to accurately make sense of this behemoth of history. In an effort to make sense of Vietnam, it must first be segmented. Unlike previous military consumed eras, the Vietnam era has no general consensus for long. It must be fragmented by topic, antiwar, politics, soldier’s perspective, cultural changes on the home front, and military engagements. But then it must also be split based on the years in which change is not occurring.

The Vietnam War had been last for about twenty years. Sadly, the American soldiers did not defeat the communists. The U.S. troops had suffered in terrible conditions in Vietnam, such as swaps, jungles, and humid weathers. There were more than 58,000 Americans soldiers had been killed in the war. The USAF claimed that the United States spent mostly 100 billion on this war for the military aids. Therefore, the economy of the United States decreased. Majority of the veterans came back to the America didn’t get respect from the citizens because they were “anti-war”. The sacrifice of the soldiers was not important in those citizens’ minds.

When Americans are involved, there is no lack on interpretations of war; stating their opinions about politics or military is not something they are afraid of doing. Whichever way a person wants to perceive the war is entirely up to them, but the viewpoints of the soldiers’ who are fighting in said war, show perspectives that are often entirely opposite of the views of those Americans. Tim O’Brien’s The Thing They Carried offers insight on the Vietnam War as told by soldiers during that time. O’Brien blurs distinction of what the truth is and what is false when it involves the storytelling of war and how everyone else perceives it; the connection of the ‘normal’ Americans, or the average American opinion on war, versus the soldiers seems

Through my conversation with Tom Woodard, a family friend, I have been able to see a different side of himself and a different perspective when looking at the memory of the Vietnam War. Through this, it proves that each individual memory has great value, and I feel it is important to listen to our veterans to better understand the war and to further improve our nation’s collective memory of it. Being a white male from the south, it was interesting to listen to his perspective of the war and how he discussed how liberal students protested the war. Mr. Woodard reveals how different demographics can create different sets of memories. Looking at his story, it is evident that he clearly remembers it. It is a memory that greatly affected his life.

The Vietnam War was unsettling to Americans, causing a divide in the nation. Hundreds of thousands of men were drafted to fight overseas. Americans were confused as to why, after a decade of fighting, there was no victory in this lengthy and costly war. Military policy was difficult for Americans to grasp and presidents were unable to put an end to this dragged out war. As more troops were deployed to Vietnam, more Americans protested. It was a time of political and social upheaval, where Americans lost faith in their government. American soldiers were also disenchanted. One Vietnam veteran explains,

As former president Richard M. Nixon once said, “No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.” The thought of the Vietnam War being entirely brutal comes from the misreported information given by people who were not in the first tier of the war. The soldiers were the first tier, they fought firsthand and saw everything that happened, from someone being killed, to traveling nightly to their next camping grounds. The second level, includes the reporters from America. These are the people who were close to where the action happened but not nearly close enough to experience the good things that came from the war. They saw the war through a window, seeing only the

Platoon is thought of as one of the most well-known Anti-War films in the history of war films. As true as it is, it is a story of good vs evil. The war is there just to set a risky experience. No doubt, Platoon shows the Vietnam War was a big error, but being based on a false idea of Vietnam is far from its use.

Stanley Karnow describes the Vietnam War era of American history as “…a tragedy of epic dimensions…”1 and it is fair to postulate that this is no understatement. One of the more pertinent ramifications of the Vietnam War was the deconstruction of fundamental, if somewhat illusory, American conceptions and ideals. The war shattered America’s hitherto unshakeable “confidence”2 in its political hegemony, military prowess and assumed authority in world order, i.e. “…its moral exclusivity, its military invincibility and manifest destiny…”3 The war that was never officially declared is one that American society and culture would rather unofficially forget. Karnow argues: “…in human terms…the war in Vietnam was a war that nobody won - a struggle between victims…”4, moreover to augment this standpoint, I would argue that another significant and concurrent victim of the Vietnam War was, and still is, the truth.