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-In the Vietnam War, the United States had to make decisions about ethics  and the consequences that would follow these decisions. For example, the herbicide Agent Orange was used throughout the war even when there was knowledge that it could have dangerous effects on humans and animals. The government/military made the decision to use this herbicide and is still dealing with the consequences of the diseases associated with it. Also, due to increased media coverage of the war,  the people of the U.S. saw the bloody violence of the war, and did not like what they saw, such as U.S. soldiers burning down entire villages.
-The Vietnam War was a war different than any other in American History

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Academic Source: Seven myths about the Vietnam War: Three decades after pulling out of Southeast Asia, America remains hostage to a relentless barrage of distortion, myths, and outright lies about the Vietnam War.

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Academic Source: Seven myths about the Vietnam War: Three decades after pulling out of Southeast Asia, America remains hostage to a relentless barrage of distortion, myths, and outright lies about the Vietnam War.

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Gale Group Database

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Academic Source: Case closed: the Gulf of Tonkin incident: a recently released National Security Agency report reveals unequivocally that the alleged August 4, 1964, attack by North Vietnam on U.S. destroyers never actually happened

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Academic Source: Case closed: the Gulf of Tonkin incident: a recently released National Security Agency report reveals unequivocally that the alleged August 4, 1964, attack by North Vietnam on U.S. destroyers never actually happened

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Gale Group Database

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New York Times Article: Did Vietnam Change the Way We Welcome Veterans Home?

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New York Times Article: Did Vietnam Change the Way We Welcome Veterans Home?

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https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/did-vietnam-change-the-way-we-welcome-veterans-home/

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Coming Home: Vietnam Veterans in American Society

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Coming Home: Vietnam Veterans in American Society

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http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/coming-home-vietnam-veterans-american-society

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New York Times Article: September 18th, 1965

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New York Times Article: September 18th, 1965

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Blog: My Vietnam Experience: The Vietnam War, Through My Eyes

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Blog: My Vietnam Experience: The Vietnam War, Through My Eyes

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https://usastruck.com/

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Article: Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust

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Article: Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust

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New York Times article that discusses how the Vietnam War still affects Americans today.

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But not everything about the war was negative. As a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam, I saw how it threw together young men from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and forced them to trust one another with their lives. It was a racial crucible that played an enormous, if often unappreciated, role in moving America toward real integration.

And yet even as Vietnam continues to shape our country, its place in our national consciousness is slipping. Some 65 percent of Americans are under 45 and so unable to even remember the war. Meanwhile, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our involvement in Syria, our struggle with terrorism - these conflicts are pushing Vietnam further into the background.

All the more reason, then, for us to revisit the war and its consequences for today. This essay inaugurates a new series by The Times, Vietnam '67, that will examine how the events of 1967 and early 1968 shaped Vietnam, America and the world. Hopefully, it will generate renewed conversation around that history, now half a century past.

What readers take away from that conversation is another matter. If all we do is debate why we lost, or why we were there at all, we will miss the truly important question: What did the war do to us as Americans?

CYNICISM

Vietnam changed the way we looked at politics. We became inured to our leaders lying in the war: the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, the number of "pacified provinces" (and what did "pacified" mean, anyway?), the inflated body counts.

People talked about Johnson's "credibility gap." This was a genteel way of saying that the president was lying. Then, however, a credibility gap was considered unusual and bad. By the end of the war, it was still considered bad, but it was no longer unusual. When politicians lie today, fact checkers might point out what is true, but then everyone moves on.

We have switched from naïveté to cynicism. One could argue that they are opposites, but I think not. With naïveté you risk disillusionment, which is what happened to me and many of my generation. Cynicism, however, stops you before you start. It alienates us from "the government," a phrase that today connotes bureaucratic quagmire. It threatens democracy, because it destroys the power of the people to even want to make change.

You don't finish the world's largest highway system, build huge numbers of public schools and universities, institute the Great Society, fight a major war, and go to the moon, which we did in the 1960s - simultaneously - if you're cynical about government and politicians.

I live near Seattle, hardly Donald J. Trump territory. Most of my friends cynically deride Mr. Trump's slogan, Make America Great Again, citing all that was wrong in the olden days. Indeed, it wasn't paradise, particularly for minorities. But there's some truth to it. We were greater then. It was the war - not liberalism, not immigration, not globalization - that changed us.

RACE

In December 1968, I was on a blasted and remote jungle hilltop about a kilometer from the demilitarized zone. A chopper dropped off about three weeks of sodden mail and crumpled care packages. In that pile was a package for Ray Delgado, an 18-year-old Hispanic kid from Texas. I watched Ray tear into the aluminum foil wrapping and, smiling broadly, hold something up for me to see.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's tamales. From my mother."

"What are tamales?"

"You want to try one?" he asked.

"Sure." I looked at it, turned it over, then stuck it in my mouth and started chewing. Ray and his other Hispanic friends were barely containing themselves as I was gamely chewing away and thinking, "No wonder these Mexicans have such great teeth."

"Lieutenant," Ray finally said. "You take the corn husk off."

I was from a logging town on the Oregon coast. I'd heard of tamales, but I'd never seen one. Until I joined my company of Marines in Vietnam, I'd never even talked to a Mexican. Yes, people like me called people like Ray "Mexicans," even though they were as American as apple pie - and tamales. Racial tension where I grew up was the Swedes and Norwegians squaring off against the Finns every Saturday night in the parking lot outside the dance at the Labor Temple.

President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the military in 1948. By the time of the Vietnam War, the races were serving together. But putting everyone in the same units is very different than having them work together as a unit.

Our national memory of integration is mostly about the brave people of the civil rights movement. Imagine arming all those high school students from Birmingham, Ala. - white and black - with automatic weapons in an environment where using these weapons was as common as having lunch and they are all jacked up on testosterone. That's racial tension.

During the war there were over 200 fraggings in the American military - murders carried out by fragmentation grenades, which made it impossible to identify the killer. Almost all fraggings, at least when the perpetrator was caught, were found to be racially motivated.

And yet the more common experience in combat was cooperation and respect. If I was pinned down by enemy fire and I needed an M-79 man, I'd scream for Thompson, because he was the best. I didn't even think about what color Thompson was.

White guys had to listen to soul music and black guys had to listen to country music. We didn't fear one another. And the experience stuck with us. Hundreds of thousands of young men came home from Vietnam with different ideas about race - some for the worse, but most for the better. Racism wasn't solved in Vietnam, but I believe it was where our country finally learned that it just might be possible for us all to get along.

SERVICE

I was at a reading recently in Fayetteville, N.C., when a young couple appeared at the signing table. He was standing straight and tall in Army fatigues. She was holding a baby in one arm and hauling a toddler with the other. They both looked to be about two years out of high school. The woman started to cry. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, "My husband is shipping out again, tomorrow." I turned to him and said, "Wow, your second tour?"

"No, sir," he replied. "My seventh."

My heart sank. Is this a republic?

The Vietnam War ushered in the end of the draft, and the creation of what the Pentagon calls the "all-volunteer military." But I don't. I call it the all-recruited military. Volunteers are people who rush down to the post office to sign up after Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center gets bombed. Recruits, well, it's more complicated.

When I was growing up, almost every friend's father or uncle had served in World War II. All the women in town knew that a destroyer was smaller than a cruiser and a platoon was smaller than a company, because their husbands had all been on destroyers or in platoons. Back then it was called "the service." Today, we call it "the military."

That shift in language indicates a profound shift in the attitudes of the republic toward its armed forces. The draft was unfair. Only males got drafted. And men who could afford to go to college did not get drafted until late in the war, when the fighting had fallen off.

But getting rid of the draft did not solve unfairness.

America's elites have mostly dropped out of military service. Engraved on the walls of Woolsey Hall at Yale are the names of hundreds of Yalies who died in World Wars I and II. Thirty-five died in Vietnam, and none since.

Instead, the American working class has increasingly borne the burden of death and casualties since World War II. In a study in The University of Memphis Law Review, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen looked at the income casualty gap, the difference between the median household incomes (in constant 2000 dollars) of communities with the highest casualties (the top 25 percent) and all the other communities. Starting from almost dead-even in World War II, the casualty gap was $5,000 in the Korean War, $8,200 in the Vietnam War, and is now more than $11,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put another way, the lowest three income deciles have suffered 50 percent more casualties than the highest three.

If these inequities continue to grow, resentment will grow with it. With growing resentment, the already wide divide between the military and civilians will also widen. This is how republics fall, with armies and parts of the country more loyal to their commander than their country.

We need to return to the spirit of the military draft, and how people felt about service to their country. The military draft was viewed by most of us the same way we view income tax. I wouldn't pay my taxes if there wasn't the threat of jail. But as a responsible citizen, I also see that paying taxes is necessary to fund the government - my government.

People would still grumble. We grumble about taxes. People would still try to pull strings to get more pleasant assignments. But everyone would serve. They'd work for "the government," and maybe start to see it as "our government." It's a lot harder to be cynical about your country if you devoted two years of your life making it a better place.

Let the armed services be just one of many ways young people can serve their country. With universal service, some boy from Seattle could find himself sharing a tamale with some Hispanic girl from El Paso. Conservatives and liberals would learn to work together for a common cause. We could return to the spirit of people of different races learning to work together in combat during the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War continues to define us, even if we have forgotten how. But it's not too late to remember, and to do something about it.

Correction: January 15, 2017

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united states defense and military forces

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Opinion | Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust

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The legacy of the war still shapes America, even if most of us are too young to remember it.

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Don Hewitt Discusses How Vietnam War TV Coverage Affected Public Opinion

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Don Hewitt Discusses How Vietnam War TV Coverage Affected Public Opinion

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Don Hewitt discusses how Vietnam War TV coverage affected public opinion - EMMYTVLEGENDS.ORG

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News Article about Vietnam Today: 40 Years Later, Vietnam Still Deeply Divided Over War

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News Article about Vietnam Today: 40 Years Later, Vietnam Still Deeply Divided Over War

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/04/28/fall-of-saigon-vietnam-40-years-later/26447943/

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Lyndon B. Johnson's Speech on Vietnam-September 29th, 1969

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Lyndon B. Johnson's Speech on Vietnam-September 29th, 1969

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http://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/speeches/speech-4041
In this speech, Johnson addresses the questions about the Vietnam War and why the U.S. is involved. He explains that the United States is in Vietnam not only for the protection of freedom in South Vietnam, but also for the protection of freedom in America. He discusses the domino effect, and how he and other world leaders believe there is a strong possibility that it is possible, and all of South Asia will fall to Communism if South Vietnam does. He is not certain it will happen, but he is not willing to take chances. He also claims that the U.S has made true progress in Vietnam. He also discusses how the U.S. is willing to make peace at any moment, but North Vietnam does not want peace. Johnson believes that North Vietnam has underestimated the U.S. Last, Johnson claims that the true peacekeepers are not the people protesting the war, but the men who are fighting for freedom on the front lines of Vietnam.

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This graph shows how President Johnson sent more and more troops to Vietnam in the late 1960's
https://evolutionofamericanwar.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/change1.gif

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"What shall I put down as the reason for dying?"

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"What shall I put down as the reason for dying?"

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The title above was the caption for this political cartoon. It was created to show the magnitude of American casualties in the Vietnam War.

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This cartoon shows how the United States supported Asian countries in order to prevent the Domino Effect. The Domino Effect was the theory that if one South Asian nation fell to communism than others would follow soon after. This is why the U.S. joined the Vietnam War, in order to prevent Vietnam and the surrounding countries from becoming communist.

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Pop Culture: Robin Williams in "Good Morning Vietnam"

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Pop Culture: Robin Williams in "Good Morning Vietnam"

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Pop-Culture: Pro-U.S. military Vietnam War Movie made in 1968

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Pop-Culture: Pro-U.S. military Vietnam War Movie made in 1968

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The peace sign was a pop-culture icon during the Vietnam War

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The peace sign was a pop-culture icon during the Vietnam War

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http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/20/books/visuals-peace-650.jpg

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http://steeringlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/vietnam-war-protesters.jpg

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https://parkersjanterm.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/protest.png

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November 15, 1969: Anti-War protest in Washington D.C. More than 500,000 people were a part of the protest.

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November 15, 1969: Anti-War protest in Washington D.C. More than 500,000 people were a part of the protest.

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http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history/pictures/vietnam-anti-war-protests/view-of-moratorium-demonstrators

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Anti- Vietnam War protest in Washington D.C.

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Anti- Vietnam War protest in Washington D.C.

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A peace sign printed on the American Flag is raised during an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. Due, in part, to the strong anti-war sentiments, Nixon announced the end of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia in January 1973.

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peace-flag-at-an-antiwar-protest-4 - Vietnam: Anti-War Protests Pictures - Vietnam War - HISTORY.com

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A peace sign printed on the American Flag is raised during an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. Due, in part, to the strong anti-war sentiments, Nixon announced the end of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia in January 1973.

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This song was written in the 80's but was a protest of how Vietnam War veterans were treated when they returned to the U.S.

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SSGT Barry Sadler-The Ballad of the Green Berets

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SSGT Barry Sadler-The Ballad of the Green Berets

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This song was written in 1966 about the courage and bravery of the Green Berets.

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Ballad of the Green Berets - [HD] - - - SSGT Barry SADLER

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American Soldiers in Vietnam supporting the wounded

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American Soldiers in Vietnam supporting the wounded

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two-us-soldiers-helping-wounded-third-2 - Vietnam War Pictures - Vietnam War - HISTORY.com

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This was a song about the Vietnam War and the unfairness of the draft. It talks about how the wealthy do not have to go to the war like the less fortunate American men do.

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Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fortunate Son (Official Lyric Video)

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Bouncing Betty: a type of mine used often in Vietnam.

Grunt: an infantryman

Gook:  a negative term for an Asian
Kool-Aid: killed in action
Nam: Vietnam
Hamlet: small, rural village
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Glossary/Sixties_Term_Gloss_D_J.html

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"The Three Soldiers" Vietnam War Memorial

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"The Three Soldiers" Vietnam War Memorial

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soldiers-engaged-in-operation-byrd-2 - Vietnam War Pictures - Vietnam War - HISTORY.com

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Soldier firing a gun from a helicopter above the Mekong Delta

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Soldier firing a gun from a helicopter above the Mekong Delta

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