Safety During Battle: Vietnam War
Andy Nguyen
Junior Division
Individual Paper
Fire, ash, cinders, and smoke. A loud noise comes from overhead. People are screaming and running in terror. A bomb has went off. This sequence of events happened multiple times during the Vietnam War. Many soldiers died, and even more citizens died. In the past, there may have not been many laws/regulations that protect citizens to prevent casualties, but everyone learns from their past. Apparently the world hasnt learned. Recent and on-going wars still have citizens, even if they are fighting, are dying.The Vietnam War was devastating, but citizens didn 't deserve to die; it should be a right to be safe during the time of a war, and is should be the
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In the end though, North Vietnam won by their strategy and wit, and Vietnam became a communist country.
Vietnam has beautiful sceneary. The trees are green, the outdoors smell great, and the beaches are breath taking, but was it always like this? The answer is no, the green jungle, the lovely smell, the beautiful beaches used to be a hidden base headquarters, the smell of gunpowder, and the beaches used to be battlefields. But, what made this particular war stand out was the number of innocent casualties. This number was at and astounding 4,000,000, making up more than half of the war’s deaths. The Vietnam War was devastating, but citizens didn 't deserve to die; it should be a right to be safe during the time of a war, and is should be the government 's responsibility to keep citizens safe.
Vietnam when it was first found was dominated by China. But when China went through turmoil, Vietnam rebelled and declared independence. But it was after all of the years under the ruling of China, the culture of Vietnam were very similar to China. Even the way of the politics was related. “The new Vietnamese state, ruled by an emperor, retained Chinese political institutions and values"(Authentic History Center). Many entertainment purposes made from the Vietnam War were subtly reflecting off of the crisis raised by Vietnam during the time.
The Vietnam War was one of the most deadliest wars in America, many were killed and even more injured. The war began because of America’s efforts to stop the spread of communism. The Vietcong may of won the war but America showed that we will not let communism spread, the domino theory come into effect, and America’s faults in our war program and way to attack the Vietcong. The war was lost but from a overview of the war America learned from their lose.
On March 16, 1968, over 300 unarmed civilians were killed in South Vietnam during an indiscriminate, mass murder event known as the My Lai Massacre. Conducted by a unit of the United States Army, the My Lai Massacre ranked one of most appalling atrocities carried out by US forces in an already savage and violent war. All victims involved were unarmed civilians, many of which were women, children, and the elderly. Victims were raped, tortured and beaten, even mutilated before being killed. The massacre was forever seared into the hearts and minds of the American people as the day “the American spirit died.”
“War does not determine who is right - only who is left.” ~ Bertrand Russell. The famous quote from Bertrand Russell describes the reality of war. War only lets the powerful and the wealthy side win and not the righteous side. On an average 378,000 people die each year at war while 1,450,000 people died in the Vietnam war. The Vietnam war started on 1 November 1955 and lasted until 30 April 1975. The war was fought between the North Vietnamese Communist government and the South Vietnamese Communist rebels known as the Viet Cong against the non-Communist South Vietnamese government and their ally U.S.A. The war destroyed the life of both, the North and South Vietnamese along with the other nations that took part in it. More than 1 million people were killed including civilians and over 3 million injured. Thousand were wives were left widows and hundreds of kids orphans. After consistent protests by the Americans, U.S.A withdrew from the later stages of war. The Vietnam War is a depiction that wars are murky and filthy and should be circumvented as they bring agony and desolation to the people. To show this I used three different mediums which are - Political Cartoon “Name a
After WWII Vietnam gained its independence, France still controlled Vietnam until Ho Chi Mihn took over in 1954 and turned Vietnam into a Communist Country.
It wasn’t until fifteen years of innocent bloodshed and expensive failed military operations that the US decided to pull out of the Vietnam War. For the US military 58,236 soldiers were KIA, 153, 452 wounded, 1,711 MIA. Vietnam casualties exceeded 3,000,000. The war also cost the US about a total of 133 billion dollars. Some say we succeeded in stopping the spread of communism and that the war was necessary to accomplish it. At first I too believed we did the right thing, but now after seeing the cost and how we
War is often seen as a sensitive and debatable topic and one of the most controversial wars to have ever been fought was the Vietnam War. In Lyndon B, Johnson’s “Speech on Vietnam (September 29.1967)” and Martin Luther King’s speech, “Why I am opposed to the War in Vietnam” we are offered two different perspectives on this matter. While Johnson provides reasoning on why we should fight the war, it is King’s speech that shows a more compassionate side to Vietnam that I agree with.
1. STATEMENT OF RESEARCH QUESTION Throughout the years, the Vietnam War has lived up its name as “one of the most obscure episodes and, at the same time, one of the most serious conflicts not only of the Cold war period but also of the whole modern history” (Hodboďová, 2008). It was apparently the most long-lasting conflict in American history and most disfavored war that broke out after World War II and ended in 1975. The peculiarity of this war lies not only in its prolonged duration but also in an overriding number of war casualties, or in other words, the death and destruction to the country’s people. Averagely in the struggle, more than one million Vietnamese soldiers and over 58,000 Americans were killed, not to mention the massacre
Although war comes with risk, leaders often find it inevitable when it comes to assuring the safety of their citizens. The Vietnam War was a significant movement in history that extended from 1965 – 1973 through the political years of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. The antiwar movement caused division within the administration as to the deciding factors of the United States involvement in Vietnam. Their decisions caused the most traumatizing event of the 20th Century. More than two decades ago the longest war ended, yet questions remain unanswered: what was the motivation of President Kennedy and his administration (Nolting, Lodge, Rusk and McNamara) to get involved in the Vietnam War, the role of Diem and the escalation of
Fighting in Vietnam started well before the actual “Vietnam War”. The Vietnamese people had been under French rule for several decades until Japan invaded in 1940. In 1941, when Ho Chi Minh came back from his travels there were two foreign powers occupying the Vietnam territory, the French and Japanese. Ho Chi Minh established the Viet Minh in hopes to rid Vietnam of these two powers. On September 2, 1945 the Viet Minh established the Democratic Republic of China after getting support in northern Vietnam. This action spawned the French to fight back to keep control of their colony. Ho Chi Minh wanted support from the United States against the French; he went as far as to supply the United States with information about the Japanese during WWII. The United States kept with their Cold War foreign policy of containment as to prevent the spread of Communism, fearing the “Domino Theory” that said “if one country in Asia fell to Communism then surrounding countries would soon fall”.
Forty six years have passed since the United States officially stopped their involvement in Vietnam. Not since the Civil war had the country been so torn. Every American family was impacted, losing husbands, sons, and daughters. Over fifty thousand Americans were killed and many more still suffer deep physical and emotional scars . Veterans took their own lives, were treated as social outcasts, or ended up on the streets with the homeless. The Vietnam conflict was a war that many did not understand and that left a nation questioning the government they had always trusted.
According to the staff of History.com, Vietnam, a small Southeastern Asian nation, was controlled under French colonial rule since the 19th century. Following Japan’s defeat by the Viet Minh in World War II, there was a split in Vietnamese ideas. The nation as a whole wanted Vietnam to come together as a unified populace, but different regions had different ideas for how they wished to be governed. The northern region believed that the best idea for government would be that of one modeled after communism, but the southern region believed the exact
The Vietnam War, lasting almost twenty years and deploying 2.7 million troops to the front lines, was one of the largest wars in United States history. Beginning August 2nd, 1964, the war killed 58,000 American soldiers and disabled twice that number. The war brought humiliation to our great nation, and created very overwhelming tensions, in a quote by President Nixon, “Let us be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that” (Doc G). These tensions grew immensely over the course of the war. In terms of political tensions, the trust and credibility of the war and government began to seem very questionable. Socially, the public began to acknowledge
The Vietnam War was a bloody dispute that lasted 20 years, from 1955 to 1975. After winning its own independence from France in 1954, the country itself split into two parts, North and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was led by Ho Chi Minh, a communist leader who lead his country into its revolution against the French. The North had a communist style government styled off of the successful Communist revolution in Russia. The South on the other hand, was backed up by the United States and had an anti-communist government led by Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem was a very repressive leader though, and soon enough a guerilla force made up of communists now called the ‘Viet Cong’ started to attack and kill Southern Vietnamese government officials. The Viet Cong
The Vietnam War was a tragic part of the United States’ history that to this day holds a great deal of mystery and a lack of information. It was an unpopular war, taking place from 1955 to 1975, with surmountable losses on each side. Forty years later, the consequences of the Vietnam War are still prevalent in the side effects of Agent Orange, post-traumatic stress disorder of soldiers, and the national debt. Though those are significant problems, the biggest influence of the Vietnam War that impacted Americans was the staggering number of soldiers killed in action, missing in action, or taken as prisoners of war. Vietnam was a danger zone where no life was guaranteed, bodies were hard to recover dead
Vietnam makes up a major part of Indochina, a region whose religions, philosophies, art, and political organizations were dominated by India and China for two millennia (Buttinger 1968). The region of Indochina retained its identity, despite the ideology of China that led to continual interference in the region (Luttwak 2012). Indeed, different Chinese dynasties had made continual efforts to invade and assimilate Vietnam for around a thousand years before the first central feudal government was formed in Vietnam in the early 11th century. Even after this period, Vietnam had to continuously guard against the invasion of Chinese and Mongolian dynasties until the Tay Son Kingdom defeated the invasion forces of the Qing dynasty in the late 18th