Heroes Or Ignorant : The United States

The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.

The public was on board the war train for the first few years of the war, until they found out what it was actually like in Vietnam. Public view of the war immediately changed negatively. When the news reached the soldiers in Vietnam, reactions were mixed. While they could understand why the people didn't like the prospect of war, they were still killing-even when they didn't want to-for their country. Some soldiers didn't know how to respond. One solder wrote to his mother and told her that for one second he felt as if he was on vacation because it was so beautiful in Vietnam. Another one told his mom “not to worry, there is nothing I can't handle”. While the soldiers could handle the physical horrors happening to them, it was the mental stuff that was breaking them down.

Wars are a difficult place to be. “THE VIETNAM WAR transformed a generation” (Roberts 1). With all that happened during the war such as exposure to

The Vietnam war was an absolutely brutal time in American history. The war lasted for the majority of the 1960s and left many young men dead. The short story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam give us just a glance into the war by giving using the three themes of fear, pressures, and blame/guilt to embody the concept of war and how it absolutely changes a person. War not only destroys countries, but it destroys people.

The Vietnam War was not only fought on the battle field, but also in the cities and on the college campuses of The United States of America. The author, David Maraniss describes through the novel, in finicky detail, both the ruthless ambush of the Black Lion battalion near Lai Khe, Vietnam, in this instance sixty-one soldiers were massacred, and an antiwar protest that takes place at the University of Wisconsin. Rallying against the drafting of students on campus by company that manufactured napalm.

Vietnam was an entirely new type of war for the United States. It still remains morally and historically problematic in today’s society. The Vietnam War had a tremendous impact on American society and culture, primarily because it was the first war to be televised. The American press played a significant

The war in Vietnam was a war against communism that tore apart the US. The United States of America plunged together with its allies and played a tremendous role as far as fight against communism is concerned. A huge number of American soldiers were deployed in Vietnam a practice that coupled with much unpreparedness. The soldiers were not aware what exactly they were up to in Vietnam. Most Americans at the time were very much against the act. It was one of the most deliberating wars America plunged herself into and the only one to have been lost. Most intriguing is the amount of publicity and media buzz created by the film industry. Vietnam War was the topic of many television networks, music and Hollywood. Journalist and veterans and scholar were never left behind and went ahead to produce tones of literature on the legacies and lessons to be learnt from the war (Hochgesang, Lawyer, and Stevenson). The exploitation of the soldiers and rejection of the veterans created just as much interest as the war had created. One such commentary came from George Kennan, who depicted the war as one of the most disastrous mission The United States has ever undertaken (Westheider 155-159).. This essay will establish the effects the war had to the US soldiers.

This chapter covers the transition of Mary Anne Bell, of how she changed from being a normal, sweet teenage girl to being one of the Green Berets, filled with enthusiasm for the war and intrigued with the culture of Vietnam. This message is about how the innocence of women is consumed by the war and how once they begin to learn more about it, they are hopelessly entranced by it, far from returning to their usual selves. Rat talks about how, “Anne made you think about those girls back home, how they'll never understand any of this, not in a billion years. Try and tell them about it, they’ll just stare at you with those big round candy eyes. They won't understand zip.”(O’Brien 108), and this shows that women won’t understand what Vietnam really is like, they have to experience it themselves. Women also won’t understand the grueling mental pain that soldiers experience in the war.

Many Americans believed that the war ravaged country of Vietnam, had to be resurrected from grave. Beginning in 1964 and growing in later years, anti-war protests began forming. Outrage from civilians erupted when President Johnson issued the draft, as he felt the Americans needed to take a more aggressive action against North Vietnam. Young men refused to join the fight and protests emitted from college campuses and major cities such as Washington D.C. and New York. ((n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.texasgateway.org) and ((n.d.). Retrieved from http://avuth15.wix.com/thecoldwar are both primary sources illustrating anti-war protests, showing the outrage that America had towards the war. By 1968, the whole country had felt the war's impact. When the war finally ceased and the troops returned home, the protests, the actions by the government and the war itself, had taken a toll on the country. America's opinions were sharply turned against the war. The veterans who fought bravely in the war, returned to a nation that was bitter towards anything related to the war. Today, a Vietnam War memorial has been erected in Washington, to honor those who sacrificed their life for their country. As shown in ((n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.english.illinois.edu), the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built to honor the U.S defence members who died in service in South-East Asia. As a result, the social

In the 1960s, America found itself divided among various social matters. Conformity, civil rights, and the Vietnam war. While the older generations viewed fighting in the war as a civic duty and a true testament to what it meant to be an “American”, the counterculture did not share this belief. Regardless of how anyone felt about the war, it had escalated to epic proportions and as one citizen put it, “It was on our mind every single hour of the day” (PBS CITE). Vietnam was the first war ever to be televised, and with that came constant coverage and a growing concern from young Americans. In addition, the military draft made matters worse by forced the youth America to fight. “By 1968, the war in Vietnam had claimed over 15,000 American lives”(CITE PBS). Between the draft and the growing American casualties, greater tension in the US was created. Young Americans had to ask themselves if the war was worth fighting.

To this day the Vietnam War is still considered to be one of the most devastating wars in history and has been a topic of resentment to the American culture thirty-three years after its end. For the American public it’s marked as being the point in history where distrust in our government was at an all-time high, mainly because most of the war’s carnage was witnessed on television for the first time. For all the bloodshed American and Vietnamese soldiers suffered through, the war has left a perpetual mark not only on the United States but ultimately has left a permanent scar on the soldiers who fought and managed to survive the war. Renowned war poet, Bruce Weigl, like most young American men during the time was only nineteen when he

Hundreds of bodies littered the ground. Sounds of explosions and endless gunfire filled the air. Soldiers, with their uniforms splashed in crimson, fought viciously and ruthlessly. Their main objective, which was to win the battle, took a backseat to their newfound desperation to stay alive. After all, war is not a game, especially one such as the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and left its survivors haunted by a multitude of atrocious events. Terry Erickson’s father and George Robinson, who were two fictional characters from the short stories “Stop the Sun” and “Dear America”, respectively, were veterans of the Vietnam War. The differences and similarities between Terry’s father and George Robinson are striking, and they merit rigorous scrutiny.

The Vietnam War divided the country and led to several americans searching for not only their identity and morals, but the morals of the nation as a whole. Many people questioned what good the fighting was for and saw more and more news coverage about the horrible failures of the War leading to a mistrust in the U.S. government. In Bobbie Ann Mason’s book, In Country: The Story of an American Family, Bobbie Ann Mason tells a coming of age story about Samantha Hughes who searches for understanding and meaning in a War that has affected her family and country greatly. Using dialogue and plot construction, Mason successfully examines the changes in morality towards violence and war.

It can be hard to fully comprehend the effects the Vietnam War had on not just the veterans, but the nation as a whole. The violent battles and acts of war became all too common during the long years of the conflict. The war warped the soldiers and civilians characters and desensitized their mentalities to the cruelty seen on the battlefield. Bao Ninh and Tim O’Brien, both veterans of the war, narrate their experiences of the war and use the loss of love as a metaphor for the detrimental effects of the years of fighting.

“Teaching the Vietnam War makes one realize how the shape of a narrative determines, and is determined by, its content” (Franklin 246). The Vietnam War was one of America’s most controversial wars. Many of its aspects are still plagued with great uncertainty. Those aspects of the Vietnam War are argued and debated about, they were argued during the time of the war and the arguing has continued. The Vietnam War was indeed a time of confusion. Why did the war start? What was the United States’ real reason for getting involved? What was the objective of the war? What were the American soldiers really fighting, or in reality, dying for? How do you explain a war to someone who has not experienced firsthand, especially if you were not