The Vietnam War: Who Is At Fault?

The documentary film, Hearts and Minds, by Peter Davis; illustrates the brutal nature and different perspectives of the people involved in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War is considered as one of the longest and horrific wars in American history. American soldiers involved in the War have diverse reactions of their experiences and encounters during the war. The Vietnamese believed that, “Americans were evil and the Vietnamese simply were fighting merely defensively”. These factors will demonstrate how the film, Hearts and Minds, helped encourage reform during and after the War.

The Vietnam War was certainly controversial. There were many protests that erupted across college campuses and throughout numerous town and cities. Many individuals viewed the war as unnecessary and unwinnable. The draft was also very widely criticized and seen as a negative point in the war. The draft was forcing young college students to go fight in dangerous territory. The most controversial aspect of the Vietnam War is certainly that it was deemed unwinnable by the US government, but they still chose to remain in Vietnam and fight. Why was the Vietnam War unwinnable though? Was it actually unwinnable or did the US government

This causes death to innocent people after the war and there were also many innocent people killed during the war which bothered America’s inner voice and for many that inner voice became an outer voice in protests. The second issue of Agent Orange also bothered the conscience of the United States. “Between 1961 and 1971 about 20 million gallons of herbicides were dropped on South Vietnam.” (Black 19) The U.S. “...had no idea of how dioxin, the lethal contaminant in Agent Orange, might blight [people’s] lives down through 3 generations.” (Black 14) This was a very inhumane tactic used in the war and many who opposed the Vietnam war “...felt that U.S. actions in Southeast Asia were crimes against humanity.” (Maxwell 439) The Vietnam war also

The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was set as an attempt to contain communism in 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This incident gave the U.S authority to join in the Vietnam war to try to seize communist aggression. Whether the United States should have been in the Vietnam war or should have stayed out is a very controversial issue. The United States however should not have been part of the Vietnam war due to political reasons.

Almost thirty years after the last troops were pulled out of what was then South Vietnam, its effects are still felt in today’s society. It is hard not to find someone who’s life has not been affected because of this war. One of the most controversial decisions made in the war was to use chemicals to fight the enemy. The most boradly used chemiucal was called Agent Orange. Some people agreed with the use of Agent Orange. They saw it as a very viable weapon that needed to be used in order to keep the Communist from taking control of South Vietnam and subverting their democratic government. Many others disapproved of its use. They knew, correctly, that it would severely devastate the landscape of Vietnam and would forever ruin the

The Vietnam War began, because of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) being conquered by the Japanese, in 1941. This led to the creation of the Vietnamese nationalist movement, formed by Ho Chi Minh to resist the Japanese. The Vietnamese national movement also known as the Vietminh, was a communist front organization. To stop the spread of communism through Asia, the United States intervened. The war lasted for 19-20 years, and involved countries such as South Vietnam, North Vietnam, United States, South Korea, Australia, Philippines, New Zealand, Thailand, Khmer Republic, Laos and the Republic of China. The war was known as a guerrilla war, which meant the use of tactics such as ambush, sabotage and petty warfare. Guerrilla warfare is a very unconventional style of warfare. It is when small groups of soldiers use stealthy tactics to inflict damage on the target. The casualties suffered by both sides were immense however, the Communists had the upper hand throughout the majority of the war. Not only was it their home turf, they also had the support of a large percentage of the civilian population. The effective use of guerrilla tactics by the Viet Cong played a very important role on the outcome of the war, and is also the primary reason why the United States lost. The following essay will outline the reasons why the guerrilla tactics used by the Viet Cong played a very important role on the outcome of the Vietnam War. The first paragraph will

Agent orange was very harmful to our troops, Vietnam’s environment and to the Vietnamese people. Between 1961 and 1972 there was a horrible spraying of a bunch of harmful chemicals joined to be called agent orange which killed off so many people and wildlife which, caused a lot of confusion to the US because they thought it was just going to cause the plants to die off instead of what it actually did. Agent orange was used during the Vietnam war as a non-harmful chemical but it turned out it was killing a lot of people and things. Agent orange started in the 60’s and the main harmful chemical was Dioxin and many more that are hard to explain.Agent orange was a very easy spray to make, and we thought ourselves that it wasn’t that bad to use so, we started to spray the jungle and it did so much more than we thought it would and even today it’s still harming things/people There are so many ways

Thinking back to the days of one’s youth, one might recall taking a family trip to the local amusement park during the warmer months of summer. Standing, walking, or even running, one can spend hours underneath the beating heat of the sun. Moving from ride to ride, families pass by tents spraying mists of cooling, refreshing water to help soothe the pain from standing out in the sun. Children run back and forth through the mist, laughing with excitement. There is hardly a care in the world when the family is having so much fun. Now replace the amusement park with the jungles of Vietnam, and the tent, now a two engine C-123 cargo plane, sprays deadly chemicals instead of harmless water on the young American soldiers stationed there. This was the situation many Vietnam veterans were placed in during the conflict in Vietnam, and they were clueless and unprepared for the aftereffects of the chemicals sprayed across the battlefields. The chemical that was being sprayed across Vietnam was a potent herbicide that came to be known as Agent Orange, named after the color band that wrapped around the canisters it was transported in. This herbicide, while extremely efficient at its job of destroying forests and crops, it also did a great job at harming humans. Since the end of the war in Vietnam, many negative health effects of Agent Orange such as cancer and birth defects have come to light. Even though these health effects were caused by the spraying in Vietnam, many

The Vietnam War also known as the second Indochina war started on November 1st 1955 ended on April 30th 1975. The war was between North and South Vietnam and occurred during the Cold War which was between two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. The U.S and other anti-communist nations supported South Vietnam and the Soviet Union and other communist nations supported North Vietnam. North Vietnam was ruled by a dictator in a communist society and North Vietnam was a democratic capitalist society like America. A war broke out when the ruler of South Vietnam wanted to unify Vietnam but South Vietnam didn’t want to become a communist state so to prevent this they stopped elections which angered North Vietnam and they went to war. But North Vietnam wouldn’t want to become unified if t hadn’t been for the French that wanted to keep part of Vietnam and split it at the 17th parallel. Both sides had aid of a superpower and the outcome of the war was North Vietnam winning and unifying with South Vietnam. So who was to blame for this war that cost so many lives of almost 60,000 American men and 2 million Vietnamese men and how it affected the world; I believe everyone was an active contributor.

Agent Orange was an innovate chemical used during the Vietnam War. It was a defoliant that helped the United States thought the war, yet it had left a permanent and devastating impact on vietnam vets and the Vietnamese people. From 1961 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed a range of herbicides across more than 4.5 million acres of Vietnam to destroy the forest cover and food crops used by enemy North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops the majority being Agent Orange. Not only did Agent Orange contaminated areas throughout Vietnam, but the areas where the herbicides were manufactured, stored or tested in the United States and elsewhere in the world are also contaminated to this day with Agent Orange.

“Why? Why was America involved in such brutal war to stop a brand new country from forming? Shouldn 't we support that because that 's what happened to us.” That was my very first question when my grandfather first told me about the most brutal and longest wars America has ever been in, the Vietnam War. America’s involvement in the conflict was to stop the evil and corrupt system of Communism. French forces were dead meat unless America teamed up with them. Unfortunately, this didn 't stop the nonmoral army under Ho Chi Minh. The United Sates did not win the Vietnam War due to strong motivation, Guerrilla warfare, and the political factors in the United States.

The Vietnam War was a long, immoderate furnished clash that hollowed the socialist administration of North Vietnam and its southern partners, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its chief associate, the United States. The war started in 1954 after the ascent to force of Ho Chi Minh and his socialist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, and proceeded against the background of an exceptional Cold War between two worldwide superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million individuals (counting 58,000 Americans) were murdered in the Vietnam War; more than half were Vietnamese regular citizens. By 1969, at the top of U.S. association in the war, more than 500,000 U.S. military work forces were included in the Vietnam struggle. Developing restriction to the war in the United States prompted astringent divisions among Americans, both previously, then after the fact President Richard Nixon requested the withdrawal of U.S. strengths in 1973. In 1975, comrade strengths seized control of Saigon, consummation the Vietnam War, and the nation was bound together as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the next year. Amid World War II, Japan attacked and possessed Vietnam, a country on the eastern edge of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia that had been under French organization since the late nineteenth century. Enlivened by Chinese and Soviet socialism, Ho Chi Minh framed the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam, to battle both

The Vietnam War was a long war that was devastating to the United States as well as Vietnam. The war was a total disaster for the South Vietnamese and was also a political and social disaster for the United States. During this time, chemicals were used during times of war and were detrimental to the people on the receiving end. One instance of this was the United States’ use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Agent Orange’s use by the United States affected Vietnam in a negative way economically, demographically, and ecologically.

America has declared war eleven times in its history as a nation. Although I personally don’t agree with war, I do feel that some wars are more justifiable than others. World War II was and still is widely accepted as a “good war” in American eyes. On the opposite end we find the Vietnam War, which over half of Americans viewed negatively. My definition of a good war is very similar to the Just War Theory.

In many ways, I enjoyed the layout of your short essay. Foremost, this article is to the point. However, I believed that the war in Vietnam was not justifiable. More than 50,000 lives were lost that affected the Vietnamese society and America’s soldiers. Moreover, the Agent Orange compounded many health problems. On the other hand, it appeared that America involved themselves in a situation that they were not sufficiently repaired to address.