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Civil War And The Vietnam War

Decent Essays

During the 1960s and 1970s, America endured the Vietnam War and protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. From college campus demonstrations, to newspaper articles and radio broadcasts, antiwar sentiment blossomed through different mediums to convey how dissatisfied some citizens felt against the War’s duration. May 4, 1970 saw college students of Kent State University holding a common antiwar demonstration turn unusually fatal: four students were shot dead and nine others sustained wounds. It was the third day in a larger protest at Kent State criticizing the then recent April 1970 move of American troops into Cambodia. No one was injured during the protest’s first two days, but when students starting vandalizing buildings and throwing rocks at the Ohio National Guardsmen on campus, the soldiers retaliated with gunfire. Having students killed over opposing the War, the incident added more material into the ongoing debate of whether citizens should protest U.S. involvement and evade conscription. Antiwar protestors had saw Vietnam as a country not worth fighting in to curb Communism. Others saw the War as necessary to fight Communism. In his book Fortunate Son, returning veteran Lewis B. Puller did not know how he should react when U.S. troops murdered protestors; mixed feelings of supporting antiwar demonstrations but not callously dismissing the War-inflicted deaths and injuries his fellow soldiers and him bore clouded his opinion. The New York Times, however, backed

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