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Overall, I believe that American involvement in Vietnam was unnecessary. While dealing with the principles of human lives, rights, and freedom is a very delicate process, with often never a one-hundred percent correct answer, I feel as though many lives, and lots of time and money could have been saved. From the articles I read and the information I gathered, it seems as though the consequence of thousands of human lives being lost was not worth the fight - from the very beginning. While standing up for democracy and human freedoms is important, America inserted itself into the conflict in Vietnam when the issues were not directly affecting the U.S. The government was also unclear and untruthful about exactly why we got involved, and what was going on. We thought we were helping, and that we were going to fix the problem, but ultimately it was beyond us. As an article I read said, many people were opposed to the war because it created this false ideal that it was possible to stop communists in every country. It was not America's problem, but we made it our problem, at the expense of lives and peace.

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This blog post tells the memories of a nurse who served in Vietnam.

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Given on April 7, 1965 this speech from President Johnson attempted to answer the question of why American troops were in Vietnam. He makes some valid points about standing up for freedom, but ultimately his answer is unclear and is not backed up. He draws on American involvement in WWII, but I do not believe this helps his credibility at all, as WWII involvement was directly related to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Vietnam War had no clear, significant event or attack that he cited to compare to this. He also contrasts himself saying that "we will try and keep conflict from spreading..." when we sent U.S. troops to Vietnam that created conflict that would have otherwise been non-existent.

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Vietnam War History, Speeches, Commentary

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The war had immense repercussions in the United States. The immense amounts of military spending caused large budget deficits, at a time when the economy was already slowing. The problem was multiplied by a weak dollar. The Vietnam War did not necessarily cause these problems, but it certainly accelerated them.

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The article under the title "American Involvement in Vietnam" discusses what led America to get involved in Indochina and why it was not a good idea.

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Pages 25-27, discussed military feelings about involvement in Vietnam leading up to the war.

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Throughout the past decade, defenders of the U.S. role in Vietnam have argued that America's defeat was not the result of an illegitimate intervention or military shortcomings, but rather a failure of will because national leaders, principally Lyndon B. Johnson, forced the troops to "fight with one hand tied behind their backs." In this volume, Robert Buzzanco disproves this theory by demonstrating that political leaders, not the military brass, pressed for war; that American policymakers always understood the problems and peril of war in Indochina; and that civil-military acrimony and the political desire to defer responsibility for Vietnam helped lead the United States into the war. For the first time, these crucial issues of military dissent, interservice rivalries, and civil-military relations and politics have been tied together to provide a cogent and comprehensive analysis of the U.S. role in Vietnam.

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Throughout the past decade, defenders of the U.S. role in Vietnam have argued that America's defeat was not the result of an illegitimate intervention or military shortcomings, but rather a failure of will because national leaders, principally Lyndon B. Johnson, forced the troops to "fight with one hand tied behind their backs."

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Post-1975 Vietnam faced many challenges. Two years after the withdrawal of the last United States combat troops, North Vietnamese Army (NVA) tanks and soldiers rolled into Saigon. Within days the US-backed South Vietnamese government turned on its heels and fled, its leaders spirited out of Vietnam with American assistance. After more than a century of foreign domination and 21 years of war and division, Vietnam was finally a single, independent nation, free from external control and interference. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, in honour of the revolutionary leader, who had died six years earlier. North Vietnam's communist party, Lao Dong, merged with the People's Revolutionary Party of South Vietnam to form the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV). A new national constitution was adopted and on July 2nd 1976, North and South Vietnam were officially reunified. The new nation was formally called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a title it retains today.

The task of forging this new nation generated excitement among leaders of the CPV - but there were a number of problems and obstacles they had to overcome. The CPV's long term plan was to mould the newly reunified Vietnam into a socialist state, in the image of North Vietnam. The most significant barrier to this was political opposition. Nguyen Van Thieu's government and its American backers had left Vietnam - but they left behind millions of supporters, including former military personnel, bureaucrats, business owners and civilians. These loyalists had been subjected to American propaganda which suggested the communists would slaughter every one of them. This threat never eventuated, however the CPV wanted to neutralise the risks posed by loyalists and other political opponents. If these dissidents remained they might flourish and grow into a counter-revolutionary insurgency (as one historian put it, a "reactionary Viet Cong").

The CPV set about purging elements of the old order. Its first target was South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) officers and soldiers, who were ordered to register and report for "reform and retraining". Many were sent to the notorious reeducation camps ( trai hoc tap cai tao) where they were later joined by former civil servants, capitalists, Catholic priests and other representatives of the old order. Camp inmates were given no criminal charge, trial or sentence. According to the CPV, reeducation would continue until the state was satisfied of rehabilitation. The camps were not Nazi-style death camps; summary executions were rare and even torture was uncommon - but they did impose hard labour, brutal discipline and dire conditions, coupled with the despair of never knowing if or when freedom would come. There is significant debate and disagreement about how many Vietnamese died in the regime's reeducation camps, estimates ranging from 50,000 to 200,000. By 1982, seven years after the reunification of Vietnam, around 120,000 people were reportedly still detained. There were reports that reeducation was still continuing into the mid-1990s.

The CPV government also faced a myriad of economic challenges. The Vietnam War had taken a severe toll on Vietnamese farmland, industry and infrastructure. Much of this was the result of sustained American bombing missions. In the north, 29 of the 30 provincial capitals had sustained heavy bombing damage, one third of them almost utterly destroyed. In southern Vietnam, the local economy had been propped up with US aid and investment; consequently there had been little in the way of development, indigenous investment, new industries or infrastructure. In the post-war south at least three million civilians were unemployed, while several million took to the roads in search of food. Vietnam's half a million prostitutes, who during the war made a living servicing US and ARVN soldiers, now had no customer base.

The CPV attempted to transform southern Vietnam using similar policies and methods used in the North during the 1950s. Vietnam became a one party socialist state with a centrally directed economic system. According to historian Van Canh Nguyen, the CPV's economic program could be summarised in three points. The first was the eradication of private commerce and trade, what the party called "capitalist merchants and compradors", and their replacement by state institutions established 'from scratch'. Second was the nationalisation of industry, including French-owned coal mines and other foreign corporations in Vietnam. Third was land reform: the abolition of private ownership, the end of exploitation by landowners and the reorganisation of agricultural production along collective principles.

Land reform became the CPV's first priority - but land reform and collectivisation proved much more difficult in southern Vietnam than it had in the North. During the 1950s North Vietnam's peasants had welcomed land reform: they had little land and were kept destitute by an exploitative landlord class. Peasants in the South, in contrast, tended to be better off. Many South Vietnamese had been given land as part of US-sponsored reform projects in the 1960s, so were unwilling to give it up. They had also heard horror stories, some exaggerated and some not, about land collectivisation and famine in the North. Large areas of southern Vietnam resisted the CPV's land reform policies. The cadres sent to implement them encountered stubborn resistance, even hostility. In several southern provinces land reform took many years to achieve; in some areas it failed altogether and was eventually abandoned.

Faced with the challenges of feeding a war ravaged nation of 58 million people, the new socialist government demanded moderate increases in the production of rice, corn, vegetables and grain crops. In return for this increased productivity, the CPV promised that each citizen would receive 17 kilograms of unprocessed rice per month. Even modest targets could not be met, however. In 1978 Vietnam fell 4.5 million tons short of its rice quota, while cereal production also fell well short of expectations. Production was disrupted by peasant resistance but the country was also critically short of seed, fertiliser, pesticides, farming tools and machinery. Adverse weather events, particularly floods in the late 1970s, only worsened these problems, as did a downturn in foreign trade and imports. The US and its allies refused to trade with Hanoi, in part because of disputes over missing American servicemen Washington claimed were still imprisoned in Vietnam. By 1979 civilians in Vietnamese cities were subject to food rationing; most received a paltry two kilograms of rice and 200 grams of meat each per month.

Vietnam was granted membership of the United Nations in 1977, however for the first decade of its life it was shunned by most Western nations. China cut all aid to Vietnam in 1978 but Hanoi retained close ties with the Soviet Union. The CPV relaxed its economic grip on Vietnam in the mid 1980s, allowing the operation of small factories, businesses and service industries for profit. These reforms, broadly called doi moi ('renovation'), allowed for new development, an increase in growth and an improvement in living standards. They were not accompanied by political reforms, with Vietnam remaining a staunch one party socialist state. Since 1986 Vietnam has progressed in a similar fashion to China, its economic policies becoming increasingly capitalist and market oriented, though tempered by socialist controls. In 1989 Hanoi withdrew its troops from Cambodia, which allowed it to reenter the international fold. Since then Vietnam has sought and received foreign aid, as well as becoming a member-state of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Vietnam's relationship with the United States began to thaw in the early 1990s, with Washington eventually lifting a trade embargo (1994) and restoring diplomatic relations (1995).

"Vietnam is now at a crossroads and must decide whether short term economic growth should take precedence over the long-term struggle to broaden the horizons of human freedom."
William Duiker, historian

In recent years Vietnam has been one of the world's fastest growing economies. It has become a significant agricultural exporter, the third largest oil producer in Asia and an important manufacturer of clothing, textiles and computer components. Vietnam's population has grown rapidly and now exceeds 85 million people, more than double its population in 1965 (39 million). Vietnamese society contains considerable poverty and wide divisions in income and wealth, though this is slowly improving. In terms of government, Vietnam remains a one party socialist state. The government is nominally democratic, however the CPV exercises strict controls, with only party approved organisations and candidates permitted to nominate for election. The state also monitors and censors both the media and the Internet (which is shielded by the controversial 'bamboo firewall') while religions are also regulated by the government.

1. North Vietnam's invasion of the South in 1975 led to reunification and the formation of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in July 1976. It has since been ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV).
2. In the first years of its rule the CPV created a one party socialist state. It dealt with elements of the old order and political opponents by detaining them indefinitely in "reeducation camps".
3. The CPV also implemented a program of land reform and collectivisation in the late 1970s. This proved disastrous, encountering resistance in many areas, triggering production downturns and famine.
4. Internationally, Vietnam retained close ties with the Soviet Union but was shunned by most Western nations. This continued until economic reforms and liberalisation in the late 1980s.
5. Today Vietnam has a fast-growing mixed economy, with growing elements of capitalism, however it remains a one party socialist state and the CPV maintains a firm grip on politics and information.

© Alpha History 2015. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use.
This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation:
J. Llewellyn et al, "Post-war Vietnam", Alpha History, accessed [today's date], http://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/post-war-vietnam/.

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Post-1975 Vietnam faced many challenges. Two years after the withdrawal of the last United States combat troops, North Vietnamese Army (NVA) tanks and soldiers rolled into Saigon. Within days the US-backed South Vietnamese government turned on its heels and fled, its leaders spirited out of Vietnam with American assistance.

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American veterans - The Vietnam War and Its Impact

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Economic Policy and Theory, Elitism, Embargoes and Sanctions, Environmental Diplomacy, Exceptionalism, Extraterritoriality, Foreign Aid, Freedom of the Seas, Gender, Globalization, etc...

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Newspaper article from The San Bernardino County Sun (1968). 

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Newspaper article from The San Bernardino County Sun (1968). 

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This article is a report on the thoughts of Democratic senatorial candidate Alan Cranston.

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Newspaper Article from The Minneapolis Star (1969).

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Newspaper Article from The Minneapolis Star (1969).

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This article gives insight and statistics on American thought on anti-war protests.

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Newspaper article from the Chicago Tribune.

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Newspaper article from the Chicago Tribune.

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This article analyzes the book "Embers of War" and the factors that got many countries, especially the U.S. involved in Vietnam.

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'Embers' details critical role of U.S. policy in '50s

In the winter of 1954-55, State Department intelligence analyst Paul Kattenburg was in Saigon puzzling over the wisest course for U.S. policymakers.

France, with its army defeated at Dien Bien Phu and colonial ambitions in Asia at an end, was preparing to leave. The Eisenhower administration was stoking the ambitions of Ngo Dinh Diem to become president of an independent Republic of Vietnam in the area south of an armistice line drawn at the 17th parallel.

Kattenburg recommended that the U.S. give Ho Chi Minh's communist government in Hanoi $500 million to rebuild and forget about holding the line.

Kattenburg guessed the amount would be enough to win Ho's friendship, prying him away from China and the Soviet Union. Ho had looked for support from the U.S. starting in 1919, when he went to Paris hoping to see President Woodrow Wilson so he could argue the case for Vietnamese independence.

It was one of those moments that offered a fork in the road. They crop up many times in Fredrik Logevall's "Embers of War." Hindsight makes them tantalizing.

There are thousands of books about the Vietnam War. Many of them render harsh judgments on former Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and the military leadership they chose to lead the American war effort. Logevall offers "Embers of War" as a history of how it all began. The how takes some telling - nearly 800 pages, but it is very much worth the read, both for the story and the writing.

Logevall opens with an invitation to muse.

"Ho visited Boston and New York in 1913 and a few years later read Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. The United States, he came fervently to believe, could be the champion of his cause. (In the French nightmare, he was right.) In 1919, at the end of the Great War, with Wilson due in Paris to negotiate a peace 'to end all wars,' the unknown young nationalist set out to make his case. It's here that our story begins."

Vietnam was subordinate to concerns about peace in Europe in 1919. And in 1955, Ho Chi Minh was too bound up in communism during a global Cold War to win favor in Washington.

At first, only the French police were interested. By 1920, Ho was attending French Communist Party meetings. In Lenin's writings, he found a path for defeating colonial rule. When Germany rolled over France in 1940, Ho saw an opportunity to return home after more than 30 years abroad and begin the struggle for independence.

Ho recedes from the narrative as World War II and other global struggles inject themselves into Vietnamese affairs. President Franklin Roosevelt had no sympathy with French colonialism in Indochina. He wanted France to withdraw, as Washington vowed to do in the Philippines, once the Japanese were defeated.

Roosevelt also had little patience with Charles de Gaulle's attempts to overcome the humiliation of defeat and reclaim for France a role as a global power.

When Japan surrendered, Ho declared Vietnamese independence. De Gaulle felt that reclaiming Indochina was essential to French power. Roosevelt was dead, and Harry Truman was worried about communism in Europe. Truman offered no objection to de Gaulle's ambitions.

"It was a monumental decision by Truman in historical terms, and like so many that U.S. presidents would make in the decades to come, it had little to do with Vietnam itself - it was all about American priorities on the world stage," Logevall writes.

France fought for a decade, with more than 110,000 killed or missing. But the French came to deeply regret their early diplomatic success in Washington. While Dwight Eisenhower seemed OK with an armistice in Korea, he was not willing to support French efforts to reach a similar cease-fire in Vietnam.

A surprisingly hawkish Eisenhower came to the edge of full military intervention as France neared defeat in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. In a Cabinet argument with his treasury secretary, Eisenhower introduced the domino theory; the toppling of Vietnam to communism, he said, would lead to communist victories across Southeast Asia.

"Embers of War" has the balance and heft to hold hindsight's swift verdicts at bay. French and Vietnamese sources and accounts help inform the story, including some that describe how close Ho's forces came to defeat and how badly and cruelly they governed once they had taken over in the north.

This is an excellent, valuable book.

' Embers of War'

By Fredrik Logevall

Random House, 864 pages, $40

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'Embers' details critical role of U.S. policy in '50s In the winter of 1954-55, State Department intelligence analyst Paul Kattenburg was in Saigon puzzling over the wisest course for U.S. policymakers. France, with its army defeated at Dien Bien Phu and colonial ambitions in Asia at an end, was preparing to leave.

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This opinion piece is by a Vietnam veteran, who talks about how the war affected American culture.

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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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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.

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This memorial has been vandalized, showing how strong opposition to the war was, even after it ended. People blamed the government, but they also blamed the soldiers.

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This memorial shows the immense number of deaths that happened due to the war, honoring those who were killed while serving.

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Number of U.S. troops in Vietnam from 1959-1973.

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Vietnam veterans protesting the war, all the way in Florida, shows how widespread the opposition was.

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Signs seen advocating for no soldiers to go to Vietnam, with the popular peace sign.

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A platoon seen carrying one of their wounded men.

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Soldiers shown in the dense Vietnamese jungle.

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A soldier fighting in a Vietnam rice patty where you can see the swampy conditions.

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This was a movie produced during the Vietnam War, about the Vietnam War.

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Again calling for peace, but the American flags with "peace" written on them and the peace sign made out of the stars stood out.

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News report on U.S. action in Vietnam.

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A short segment on S. Vietnam's (failed) efforts to win the hearts & minds of the people.

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Explains how and why the U.S. got involved in Vietnam.

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The Road to War Video - Vietnam War - HISTORY.com

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Over 25 years, the Vietnam conflict escalated from an attempt to stop the spread of communism into a full-scale war.

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This cartoon displays attitudes about anti-war protests during the Vietnam War. The protesters are fighting against the violence of war, but some of them often used violence to protest. This turned many people against the protesters.

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This cartoon depicts U.S. involvement in Vietnam in a negative way. It shows how the U.S. went into Vietnam not only with intentions of stopping communism, but of forcing American culture into the country.

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"Straight Arrow" = A soldier who stayed faithful to his wife/girlfriend for his whole tour

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"Freedom Bird" = An aircraft that flew returning soldiers back to the U.S.

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"Donut Dollies" = Young women who worked for the Red Cross who were stationed in Vietnam to manage service clubs for the troops.

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"Gook" = Negative term used for the Viet Cong

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"Boondocks" or "Boonies" = Jungle/swampy areas in Vietnam

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"Big Boys" = Tanks

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Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (present day) 

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Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (present day) 