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Essays on Vietnam War

🇻🇳 understanding the vietnam war: why write an essay.

The Vietnam War, a pivotal conflict in the 20th century, offers a rich tapestry of historical, political, and social complexities. Writing an essay about this topic is not just an academic exercise; it's an opportunity to delve into a multifaceted war with profound global implications. Exploring the Vietnam War through an essay allows us to gain insight into the human cost, political decisions, and lasting impacts of the conflict. 📚

📝 Vietnam War Essay Topics

Choosing the perfect topic for your Vietnam War essay requires careful consideration. It involves finding an aspect that piques your interest and aligns with your goals as a writer:

🗣️ Vietnam War Argumentative Essay

An argumentative essay on the Vietnam War demands a strong stance on a particular issue related to the conflict. Characteristics of this type of essay include presenting a clear position and supporting it with evidence. Here are ten engaging topics:

• The role of media in shaping public opinion during the Vietnam War.
• Was the Vietnam War justified from a moral perspective?
• The impact of the Vietnam War on American society and politics.
• Assessing the effectiveness of U.S. military strategy in Vietnam.
• The influence of anti-war protests on U.S. government decisions.
• The long-term consequences of Agent Orange and chemical warfare.
• The significance of the My Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War narrative.
• Comparing the Vietnam War to other 20th-century conflicts.
• The role of foreign powers in the Vietnam War: U.S. vs. USSR.
• The legacy of the Vietnam War in modern geopolitics.

🌍 Vietnam War Cause and Effect Essay

A cause and effect essay on the Vietnam War explores the factors that led to the conflict and its far-reaching consequences. Characteristics of this type of essay include analyzing both the causes and outcomes. Here are ten thought-provoking topics:

• The causes and effects of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
• How the Cold War rivalry between the U.S. and USSR contributed to the Vietnam War.
• The impact of the draft and conscription on American society.
• Consequences of the Vietnam War on Vietnamese civilians and their communities.
• The ecological damage caused by defoliants and chemical warfare.
• The influence of the Vietnam War on the anti-war movement.
• How the Vietnam War reshaped U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia.
• The economic aftermath of the Vietnam War for both the U.S. and Vietnam.
• Effects of post-war reconciliation and diplomacy between the U.S. and Vietnam.
• Long-term repercussions of the Vietnam War on veterans and their families.

🤷‍♂️ Vietnam War Opinion Essay

An opinion essay on the Vietnam War allows you to express your perspective on various aspects of the conflict. Characteristics of this type of essay include sharing your viewpoint and supporting it with reasoning. Here are ten intriguing topics:

• My personal stance on the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War.
• Was the Vietnam War an unwinnable conflict from the start?
• The role of media bias in shaping public perception of the Vietnam War.
• Do I believe the U.S. should have intervened in Vietnam?
• The significance of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War narrative.
• My thoughts on the impact of the Vietnam War on veterans' mental health.
• Was the Vietnam War primarily a civil conflict or part of the Cold War?
• The moral implications of using napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam.
• My perspective on the role of diplomacy in ending the Vietnam War.
• The lasting lessons we can learn from the Vietnam War experience.

📖 Vietnam War Informative Essay

An informative essay on the Vietnam War aims to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the conflict. Characteristics of this type of essay include presenting factual information and historical context. Here are ten informative topics:

• The historical background of Vietnam leading up to the war.
• Profiles of key figures and leaders in the Vietnam War.
• A chronological overview of major events during the conflict.
• The experiences of soldiers on both sides of the Vietnam War.
• The significance of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the war effort.
• The cultural and social impact of the Vietnam War on the U.S.
• The aftermath of the Vietnam War for the Vietnamese people.
• The role of the media in shaping public opinion about the war.
• The different phases and strategies of the Vietnam War.
• Comparing and contrasting U.S. and Vietnamese perspectives on the war.

✍️ Vietnam War Essay Example

📜 vietnam war thesis statement examples.

1. "The Vietnam War profoundly shaped the trajectory of the United States in the 20th century, influencing both domestic policies and international relations."

2. "The media played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and perceptions of the Vietnam War, ultimately affecting government decisions and the course of the conflict."

3. "The Vietnam War remains a complex and contested chapter in history, with diverse perspectives on its causes, consequences, and ethical implications."

4. "The experiences of Vietnam War veterans highlight the lasting psychological and emotional scars of combat, underscoring the need for comprehensive support and recognition."

5. "The Vietnam War serves as a cautionary tale of the limitations of military power and the importance of diplomacy and international cooperation in resolving conflicts."

📝 Vietnam War Essay Introduction Paragraph Examples

1. The Vietnam War stands as a pivotal moment in history, marked by complex political maneuvering, profound social change, and human sacrifice. Its significance stretches far beyond the battlegrounds, shaping the course of nations and altering the lives of countless individuals.

2. As we embark on this exploration of the Vietnam War, we find ourselves stepping into a realm of historical turmoil, moral dilemmas, and enduring legacies. The war's impact reverberates through time, demanding a closer examination of its causes, consequences, and contested narratives.

3. The Vietnam War, often referred to as the "American War" in Vietnam, occupies a unique place in global history. It is a conflict that defies easy categorization, a turbulent chapter marked by ideological clashes, geopolitical maneuvering, and the indomitable spirit of those who lived through it.

🔚 Vietnam War Essay Conclusion Paragraph Examples

1. In conclusion, the Vietnam War remains an enduring testament to the complexities of warfare and the indomitable human spirit. Its lessons remind us of the importance of critical reflection, diplomacy, and compassion in the face of adversity. The echoes of this conflict continue to shape our world today.

2. As we reflect on the Vietnam War, we are reminded that history is not a stagnant entity but a living narrative that informs our present and future. The war serves as a stark reminder of the costs of armed conflict and the imperative of seeking peaceful solutions to global challenges.

3. The Vietnam War's legacy endures, challenging us to confront its difficult truths and contemplate the enduring impact of war on individuals and nations. It is a history we must continue to study and remember, not only to honor those who lived it but to ensure that such conflicts remain lessons of the past rather than blueprints for the future.

Vietnam War Character Analysis

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Where The Domino Fell Analysis

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The Failure of The United States in Vietnam

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How Public Opinion Changed The Course of The Vietnam War

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1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975

The United States, Australia, New Zealand, Republic of (South) Korea, Thailand, the Philippines

The Vietnam War, which took place from 1955 to 1975, was a complex conflict deeply rooted in the historical context of Vietnam and the broader Cold War era. It emerged as a result of the division of Vietnam into North and South following the Geneva Accords of 1954. The historical context of the Vietnam War includes the struggle for independence from colonial rule. Vietnam had been under French colonial rule for decades, and nationalist movements, particularly the Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh, sought to liberate the country. The defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 marked a turning point, leading to the division of Vietnam and the subsequent involvement of major world powers. The conflict was also shaped by the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The United States supported the South Vietnamese government, viewing it as a bulwark against the spread of communism. Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese, backed by the Soviet Union and China, sought to reunify the country under a communist regime. The escalation of the war saw the United States deploying large numbers of troops, conducting aerial bombings, and employing controversial tactics such as defoliation with Agent Orange. The conflict was marked by guerrilla warfare, protests, and anti-war movements both domestically and internationally.

Geneva Accords (1954): The Geneva Conference resulted in the division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel. North Vietnam, under Ho Chi Minh's communist leadership, and South Vietnam, led by Ngo Dinh Diem, were established as separate entities. Gulf of Tonkin Incident (1964): Following reports of a purported assault on American naval ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, the U.S. Congress responded by approving the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, endowing President Lyndon B. Johnson with expansive powers to intensify U.S. engagement in Vietnam. Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-1968): The U.S. began sustained bombing campaigns against North Vietnam, aiming to weaken the communist forces and halt their infiltration into South Vietnam. This marked a significant escalation of U.S. military involvement. Tet Offensive (1968): The surprise attacks launched by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces during the Tet holiday resulted in widespread fighting across South Vietnam. Although a tactical defeat for the communists, the offensive had a profound impact on American public opinion, as it contradicted the belief that victory was near. My Lai Massacre (1968): The revelation of the My Lai Massacre, where U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, shocked the world and fueled anti-war sentiment. Paris Peace Accords (1973): The peace agreement aimed to end direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. It called for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of U.S. troops, and the release of prisoners of war. Fall of Saigon (1975): The North Vietnamese Army captured the capital city of Saigon, marking the end of the war. This event led to the reunification of Vietnam under communist rule.

Ho Chi Min: Ho Chi Minh was a key figure in the Vietnamese struggle for independence. He led the Viet Minh and later became the President of North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh's leadership and determination played a crucial role in rallying the Vietnamese people against foreign intervention. Lyndon B. Johnson: As the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam. His administration significantly increased American troop deployments and conducted extensive aerial bombings, seeking to prevent the spread of communism. Richard Nixon: Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson as President and implemented a policy of Vietnamization, gradually withdrawing U.S. troops while increasing the combat role of the South Vietnamese forces. Nixon pursued a strategy to negotiate a peace settlement and eventually oversaw the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. General William Westmoreland: General Westmoreland served as the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. He played a prominent role in implementing the U.S. military strategy, including the large-scale deployment of troops and the conduct of major operations. Robert McNamara: Robert McNamara served as the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. He was a key architect of U.S. policy and the escalation of military involvement. McNamara's later reflections on the war brought attention to the human and strategic costs and prompted a reassessment of U.S. actions. Jane Fonda: Jane Fonda, an American actress and activist, became highly controversial due to her opposition to the war. She visited North Vietnam in 1972 and became an outspoken critic of U.S. policies, particularly the treatment of Vietnamese civilians and prisoners of war.

Shifting U.S. Foreign Policy: The Vietnam War prompted a reassessment of U.S. foreign policy and military interventionism. The war's unpopularity and its unforeseen challenges led to a shift away from direct military interventions and a greater emphasis on diplomacy and covert operations in subsequent conflicts. Anti-War Movements and Civil Rights: The Vietnam War fueled massive anti-war movements and protests across the United States and around the world. These movements fostered greater political activism and solidarity, influencing subsequent social and political struggles, including the civil rights movement and the push for gender equality. Diplomatic and Geopolitical Ramifications: The war had significant diplomatic consequences, leading to changes in global alliances and the balance of power. It strained relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as China, and influenced the political landscape of Southeast Asia. Impact on Veterans and Society: The Vietnam War had a lasting impact on the soldiers who fought in it, as well as on their families and communities. The war's aftermath gave rise to discussions on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the treatment of veterans, and the broader societal responsibility towards those who serve in conflicts.

Public opinion on the Vietnam War was deeply divided and evolved significantly throughout the conflict. Initially, many Americans supported U.S. involvement, viewing it as a necessary measure to prevent the spread of communism. However, as the war dragged on and casualty numbers increased, public sentiment shifted dramatically. Anti-war sentiments gained momentum, fueled by televised images of the war's brutality, the draft, and the perception of an unjustifiable military intervention. Protests, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience became widespread, representing a growing segment of the population opposed to the war. Criticism of the government's handling of the war intensified, with calls for a withdrawal of troops and an end to the conflict. Opposition to the war also extended to college campuses, where students staged protests and strikes. Public opinion on the Vietnam War played a pivotal role in shaping political discourse and policy decisions. The growing anti-war sentiment ultimately influenced policymakers, contributing to a gradual de-escalation and the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces.

"Apocalypse Now" (1979): Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this film is a renowned depiction of the war's psychological impact. It explores the horrors of war and the moral dilemmas faced by soldiers in a surreal and symbolic manner. "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien: This critically acclaimed book is a collection of interconnected short stories that delve into the experiences and emotions of soldiers during the Vietnam War. It explores themes of memory, truth, and the psychological weight carried by soldiers. Vietnam War Photography: Photojournalists like Eddie Adams, Nick Ut, and Larry Burrows captured powerful images that became iconic representations of the war. Examples include the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner and the haunting image of a young girl fleeing a napalm attack. "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989): Based on the autobiography of Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic, this film directed by Oliver Stone depicts the journey of a paralyzed Vietnam War veteran who becomes an anti-war activist. "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival: This song has become synonymous with the Vietnam War era. Its lyrics critique the unequal burden of military service and the socio-political context of the time.

1. The Vietnam War lasted for approximately 19 years, from 1955 to 1975. 2. The United States spent an estimated $168 billion (equivalent to over $1 trillion today) on the Vietnam War. 3. Over 2.7 million American troops served in the Vietnam War, with approximately 9.2 million military personnel from all sides involved in the conflict. 4. U.S. Air Force pilot Colonel Floyd James Thompson holds the distinction of being the longest-held American POW in the Vietnam War, enduring captivity for nearly nine years. 5. The Tet Offensive, launched by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in 1968, involved coordinated surprise attacks on over 100 cities and military installations throughout South Vietnam. It was a turning point in the war and significantly impacted public opinion in the United States. 6. The United States military used the herbicide Agent Orange to defoliate dense vegetation in Vietnam. Unfortunately, it caused severe health problems, including cancer and birth defects, for both Vietnamese civilians and American veterans. 7. In 1968, U.S. troops massacred hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai. This event became a symbol of the war's brutality and led to widespread outrage. 8. The Vietnam War sparked massive anti-war demonstrations worldwide, with millions of people taking to the streets to express their opposition to the conflict.

The Vietnam War is an important and compelling topic to explore in an essay due to its profound historical, political, and social implications. Delving into this subject allows for a comprehensive examination of a conflict that not only shaped the course of the Cold War era but also had far-reaching consequences for global politics and societies. Studying the Vietnam War offers insights into the complexities of military interventions, the limits of power, and the ethical dilemmas faced by nations in times of war. It provides an opportunity to analyze the political decision-making processes, the role of the media, and the impact of public opinion on policy outcomes. Moreover, the war's divisive nature and the anti-war movements it sparked raise important questions about the responsibility of citizens, the power of collective action, and the long-lasting effects of trauma on individuals and communities. By exploring the Vietnam War, one can also gain a deeper understanding of the experiences and perspectives of soldiers, veterans, and civilians who were directly affected by the conflict. Their stories offer valuable lessons on resilience, sacrifice, and the consequences of armed conflicts on societies.

1. Anderson, D. L. (2017). The Vietnam War. Palgrave Macmillan. 2. Appy, C. G. (2003). Patriots: The Vietnam War remembered from all sides. Penguin Books. 3. Davidson, P. (2019). Vietnam at war: The history, 1946-1975. Oxford University Press. 4. FitzGerald, F. (2002). Fire in the lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. Back Bay Books. 5. Herring, G. C. (2014). America's longest war: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975. McGraw-Hill Education. 6. Hunt, M. H. (2009). A Vietnam War reader: A documentary history from American and Vietnamese perspectives. University of North Carolina Press. 7. Karnow, S. (1997). Vietnam: A history. Penguin Books. 8. Sheehan, N. (1989). A bright shining lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Vintage Books. 9. VanDeMark, B. (1991). Into the quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Oxford University Press. 10. Young, M. G. (2017). The Vietnam wars, 1945-1990. HarperCollins Publishers.

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80 Vietnam War Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for Vietnam war essay topics? Being the largest conflict in the US history, Vietnam war is definitely worth analyzing.

• 🔝 Top 10 Essay Topics
• 💡 Essay: How to Write
• 🏆 Best Essay Examples & Topic Ideas
• 💣 Most Interesting Topics
• 🔍 Research Topics & Questions

Why did the US lose the Vietnam war? Who won the war and how did that happen? There are many questions about the conflict that wait to be answered. Other options for your Vietnam war essay are to focus on the US involvement or talk about the lessons of the conflict.

Whether you are planning to write an argumentative essay, research paper, or thesis on the Vietnam war, this article will be helpful. Here we’ve collected top Vietnam war research questions, titles. Essay examples are also added to add to your inspiration.

🔝 Top 10 Vietnam War Essay Topics

• Vietnam war: the causes
• US involvement in the Vietnam war
• Vietnam war: the key participants
• The causes of the conflict in Vietnam
• Gulf of Tonkin incident and its role in the Vietnam war
• Why did the US lose the Vietnam war?
• War crimes in the cause of the conflict in Vietnam
• Vietnam war: the role of women
• Weapons and technology in the Vietnam war
• Vietnam war and its influence on popular culture

💡 Vietnam War Essay: How to Write

Chemical warfare, civilian peace protests, and an overwhelming number of casualties are all central circumstances of a Vietnamese-American 19-year conflict that garnered attention all over the world.

Reflecting all these topics in a Vietnam War essay is essential to writing an excellent paper, as well as other structural and informational points. In the prewriting stages:

• Research your issue. Doing so will not only help you choose among various Vietnam War essay topics but also help you start assembling a list of sources that can be of use. Compiling a bibliography early on will allow you to gauge how well covered your subject is and whether you can approach it from different viewpoints. Use various book and journal titles to give your work academic credibility.
• Write a Vietnam War essay outline. This action will help you distribute the weight of your ideas evenly between sub-themes. In turn, doing so will allow you to create a smooth flowing, interconnected narrative of whichever issue you choose.
• Compose a title for your paper. Vietnam War essay titles should be both reflective of their author’s stance and representative of the chosen methodological approach. Since your title is the first thing a potential reader sees, it should grab their attention in the best way.
• Read available sample essays to see which tools and techniques may work in your own paper. While plagiarism is punishable in the academic world, there are no repercussions for getting inspiration or pretending to grade an essay for yourself. Good examples may be just the thing you need to write an excellent paper yourself!

Now you are ready to begin writing. Layering your paper with the appropriate information is only one aspect of essay writing, as you should also:

• Begin your introduction by placing a Vietnam War essay hook in it. This catch can be a remarkable piece of information, a quote from a famous person, or an opposing viewpoint on the subject. Whichever you choose, placing a hook allows you to interest your readers and secure their interest for the duration of your paper.
• Use appropriate terminology. A war-related paper may call for an in-depth understanding of technology, while an ideology related one requires more event-related knowledge. Choose your words according to the specifics of your issue and use them to write a comprehensive and well-rounded essay.
• Understand the cause and effect war environment. Clearly define the links between events and make sure your audience understands all the intricacies of the issue. A timeline, written by you or found online, should help you trace these connections, creating an interflowing essay.
• Recognize the effect of seemingly background events. The recognition of a soldier’s civil rights and the rise of a movement that called for American citizens to return to their home continent is not battlefield-related but greatly impacted politics regarding the issue. Remember that there may be connections between seemingly unrelated problems, and finding them is your goal as an essayist.
• Stick to your Vietnam War essay prompt and the received instructions. Ignoring the specified word count in favor of drafting a more extensive coverage of the problem is not worth losing a grade on a suburb essay.

Always check the rubric that your instructor provided to receive good grades.

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🏆 Best Vietnam War Essay Examples & Topic Ideas

• Similarities and Differences Between Korean and Vietnam Wars There were also several differences such as the way of development of the conflicts where the Korean War was during three years, and the Vietnam War was the prolonged struggle, the participation of the Chinese […]
• Music as a Weapon During the Vietnam War Music to the soldiers in Vietnam acted as a tool to remind all troops of the responsibility that they had taken by being on the battlefield.
• Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War The Vietnam War caused unintended consequences for the civil rights movements of the 1960s as it awakened the African-Americans’ consciousness on the racism and despotism that they experienced in the United States.
• “The Killing Zone: My Life in the Vietnam War” by Downs At the very outset, it was clear to the soldiers that the war in Indochina was not being conducted in terms of the glory myths on which they had been raised. The second part of […]
• The Use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War The Association of American Advancement of science prompted the US government to allow investigations into the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1968.
• How the Vietnam War Polarized American Society It galvanized the enemy and opponents of the war in both Vietnam and America and led many to question the ethics of the campaigns.
• Why Did the United States Lose the Vietnam War? The Office of the Secretary of Defense had become demoralized due to the events that had taken place; hence, it was unwilling to escalate the war further due to the decline of the army troops […]
• Causes and Effects of the Vietnamese War To the U.S.the war was a loss, because the reunion of South and North Vietnamese citizens marked the end of the war, hence U.S.’s undivided support for the southern region yielded nothing, apart from numerous […]
• The Vietnam War in the “Child of Two Worlds” Therefore, in the future, he is like to live in the outside world rather than in the inside one. Therefore, Lam wants to start a new life in the US and forgets his roots, which […]
• Photos of Vietnam War The role of the media in the Vietnam War also raises issues of what the media ought to censor and report to the public.
• How Did the Media Shape Americans’ Perceptions of the Vietnam War? At the heart of this war, the media is believed to have shaped the Americans perception about the war. Technology in this moment made it possible for television to film some incidents in the war […]
• Protests and Music of the Vietnam War As the public absorbed the announcement, and the truth behind the war, they were angered by the fact that many American lives had been lost in the war, and the fact that the government was […]
• Political and Social Forces During and After the Vietnam War The political forces in the aftermath of the Vietnam War centered around balancing between the Cold War and the maintenance of public support.
• Researching and Analysis of the Vietnam War A Chinese leader inspired by the Soviet Union and the Chinese, Ho Chi Minh, formed a union to aid the resistance against the French occupiers in Vietnam and the Japanese.
• The Vietnam War and the Tet Offensive In this presentation, the discussion of the impact of Tet Offensive on the United States and the role of media in military events will be discussed.
• The Artistic Legacy of Maya Lin: A Cultural Response to the Vietnam War Major confrontations as the signs of a shift in cultural perspectives and attitudes have always defined the development of art, the Vietnam War being one of the infamous examples of the phenomenon.
• Vietnam War: History and Facts of War That Began in 1959 The Second Indochina War began in 1959, five years after the division of the country, according to the Geneva Agreement. South Vietnam’s troops failed to substitute American soldiers, and in 1974 the peace agreement was […]
• The Vietnam War: Diplomatic Mechanisms Connected With the USA The onset of the Vietnam War exposed the vagaries in the American political and administrative systems in terms of issues of diplomacy, presidency, and even in cultural and social matters.
• “The Green Berets” Film About the Vietnam War According to the plot, one American journalist named George Beckworth is to cover the topic of the military involvement of the USA in this war.
• Vietnam War: David Halberstam’s “The Making of a Quagmire” In his account, the author of the book The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era, is categorical about the dealings of the Americans in the Vietnamese affair.
• “A Time of War: The United States and Vietnam” by Robert D. Schulzinger These events relate to the activities and interests of the Americans, the French and Vietnamese which preceded the beginning and the aftermath of the war.
• Interview Report: Memories of the Vietnam War Locker about the way he happened to take part in the Vietnam War, he said that he was drafted but, anyway, at that time he thought that it was his destiny as he wanted to […]
• Ho Chi Minh’s Influence in the Vietnam War He was the leader of the Vietnam independence movement and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam which was governed by the communists.

💣 Most Interesting Vietnam War Topics

• “Vietnam War Generation Journal” by Aaron Over the years, the American people realized that the lived of the US soldiers were wasted for achieving the ambitious goals of the American leaders.
• How the Vietnam War Influenced the Iraq War? During the Vietnam era, the neo-conservatism movement expanded due to the political polarization occurring in the country between the anti-war, anti-American sentiments of the counterculture and neo-cons who championed blind patriotism.
• Impact of the Vietnam War and Results of the Cold War It galvanized the enemy and opponents of the war in both Vietnam and America and led many to question the ethics of the campaigns.
• The Vietnam War in American History Since early fifties the government of the United States began to pay special attention to Vietnam and political situation in this country, because, it was one of the most important regions in the Southeast Asia.
• How TV Showed the Vietnam War At the dawn of television media emergence, the coverage of the Vietnam War was subjective as the opinion of the public was manipulated by the government to get the desired reaction from the Americans to […]
• Vietnam War on Television Thus, the research paper will be written in accordance with the following working thesis statement: At the dawn of television media emergence, the coverage of the Vietnam War was subjective as the opinion of the […]
• Vietnam War Overview in Media Since the defeat of Saigon in April 1975, two opposing representations, the mirror theory, and the elitist opinion theory have appeared to clarify how the media impacted the results of the war.
• French Involvement in Vietnam War Even though in the overwhelming majority of cases, the author focuses attention on the history of Vietnam since the Involvement of the French troops in the nineteenth century, he also gives background information as to […]
• Vietnam War Perceptions of African American Leaders Externally, the country was embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam and internally, rejection of the ‘establishment’ typified by the ‘Counter-culture movement’ and the Black Civil rights movement was gaining momentum.
• Vietnamese Culture and Traditions: The Role in Vietnam War It was this division that left America with little understanding of how the rest of the world lives and how the country can effectively help others even in times of war.
• My Lai Massacre During Vietnam War American soldiers of Company assaulted the hamlet of My Lai part of the village of Son My in Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam on 16 March 1968.
• American Government’s Involvement in the Vietnam War According to John Kerry, although the main idea behind the decision made by the U.S.government at the time seemed legitimate given the rise in the threat of communism taking over democracy, the execution of it […]
• American History During the Vietnam War In the quest to figure out the events that took place in the history of America, I had an opportunity to interview a close family friend who was one of the African American soldiers during […]
• The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News This evidence refuting the use of attrition by the American troops indicate that the strategy was ineffective and as such, it gave their enemies a leeway to capitalize on it and intensify the combat.
• China-Vietnam Opposition or the Third Vietnam War The Korean War, numerous military operations in the Middle East, and the Vietnam War were preconditioned by the clash of ideologies and parties unwillingness to make a compromise.
• Vietnam War vs. War on Terror in the Middle East The starting point for the War on Terror is considered to be the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and other locations which led to the deaths of thousands.
• The Vietnam War and Its Effects on the Veterans Although numerous books and articles contain memories of those who lived to tell the tale, the best way to learn about the Vietnam War and to understand how war changes people is to talk to […]
• Vietnam War: The Results of Flawed Containment The neo-orthodox perspective on the war in Vietnam consisted of criticism towards United States policies in the sense that civilian and military leaders of the country were unsuccessful in developing achievable and realistic plans with […]
• Vietnam War and American Revolution Comparison Consequently, the presence of these matters explains the linkage of the United States’ war in Vietnam and the American Revolution to Mao’s stages of the insurgency.
• Vietnam War in the “Platoon” Movie by Oliver Stone In the context of the war, the confrontation between two non-commissioned officers, the cruel-hearted Barnes and the humane Elias, is depicted.
• Vietnam War in “A Path to Shine After” by James Post The author uses the contrast between a peaceful life of the veteran and his experience as a soldier to highlight the senselessness and cruelty of war.
• Vietnam War Experiences in David Vancil’s Poems For these reasons, the majority of the works devoted to the given issue tend to demonstrate the horrors of war and factors that impacted people.
• America in Vietnam War: Effects of Involvement However, the involvement of America in the war has made other countries around the world to question its principle of morality.

🔍 Vietnam War Research Topics & Questions

• African American Soldiers During Vietnam War In the 1960s and 70s, African Americans battled racial discrimination at home in the United States but also faced similar if not the same tension as a member of the Armed Forces while fighting in […]
• Contribution of Women in the Vietnam War Special emphasis will be given to nurses because without their contribution, so many soldiers would have lost their lives or suffered from deteriorating conditions in the War Some of the nurses in the Vietnam War […]
• The American Strategic Culture in Vietnam War Spector further emphasizes that the involvement of the United States in both phases of the Vietnam War was due to Harry Truman, the then president of the United States, who did not support communism, but […]
• Hanoi and Washington: The Vietnam War The Vietnam War was a conflict that was military in nature, occurred between the years 1954 and 1975, and was between the communists and the non-communists.
• America’s Failure in Promoting Its Politic in Vietnam Existing literature purports that, part of America’s agenda in Vietnam was to stop the spread of communism and in other literature excerpts, it is reported that, America was persuading North Vietnam to stop supporting the […]
• Vietnam War in the Book “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien The Irony of being at war is that Peace and conflict are both inevitable; it is the way we handle either of the two that determines our opinion of life in general both in the […]
• Anti-War Movement and American Views on the Vietnam War The fact that people started to take part in demonstrations and openly protest any drafting and involvement of the United States in the war, created even more attention towards the Vietnam Conflict.
• The Vietnam War: Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy Leadership Roles On November 1, 1995, Eisenhower’s action to give military training to the government of South Vietnam marked the official start of the U.S.involvement in the Vietnamese conflict.
• The Vietnam War Causes The aftermath of the Second World War had the South Vietnam controlled by the French and the North Vietnam controlled by Viet Minh.
• The Vietnam War: A Clash of Viewpoints With the help of the most realistic descriptions and the vivid pictures of woes that soldiers had to take in the course of the battles, the author makes the people sink into the mind of […]
• China’s Support for North Vietnam in the Vietnam War As of the time of the war, the capital city of South Vietnam was Saigon while that of the North was Hanoi.
• The Role of Women in the Vietnam War For example, women in the Navy Nurse Corps and Army Nurse Corp were sent to take part in the Vietnam War and the Korean War.
• Appy, C. and Bloom, A., Vietnam War Mythology and the Rise of Public Cynicism, 49-73 The first myth is that the intervention of the US in the Vietnam War was devoid of any political interests and colonial based ambition contrary to that of the French.
• Vietnam Women Soldiers in the Vietnam War and Life Change After the War In 1968, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong forces attacked all the major cities of South Vietnam and even the US embassy followed where the war could not stop but in the year 1973 […]
• Vietnam War: The Battle Where There Could Be No Winners Inflamed by the ideas of the patriotic behavior and the mission of protecting the interests of the native land, the American soldiers were eager to start the battle.
• The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 Is a Turning Point in Vietnam War The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that occurred in August 7, 1964, was one of the major turning points in the United States military involvement into the flow of the Vietnam War.
• The Vietnam War’s and Student’s Unrest Connection An example of such protests were held by the by the University of Washington during the national strikes that took an approximate one week as a reaction to the Kent University shootings and a culmination […]
• Vietnam War: John Kerry’s Role Kerry’s actions during the Vietnam war that eventually led to his acquisition of the Purple Heart is a as a result of his ability to stop the actions of the enemy as evident in their […]
• Views on Vietnamese War in the Revisionism School Though United States did not involve itself into the war in order to break the dominance of Soviet Union, it wanted to gain politically and economically.
• Stories From the Vietnam War In the dissonance of opinions on the Vietnam War, it appears reasonable to turn to the first-hand experiences of the veterans and to draw real-life information from their stories.
• Concepts of the Vietnam War The fear to go to Vietnam and participate in a war that many believed America will inevitably lose, continued to engulf their life even more.
• Analysis of the Vietnam War Timeline 1961-64 In essence, the analysis of JWPs in this war would entail critical exploration of the jus in bello, with the aim of determining the combatants and non-combatants, and this is important in the sense that […]
• Politics in the 1960s: Vietnam War, Bay of Pigs Invasion, Berlin Wall However, in recent years following the collapse of the Soviet Union between1980 1990 and the opening of Vietnam to the outside world in the same period it is possible to understand the motives of both […]
• The Vietnam War Outcomes The Vietnam War was and is still considered the longest deployment of the U. In conclusion, both the U.S.and the Vietnam governments have a lot to ponder regarding the outcome of the Vietnam War.
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, March 1). 80 Vietnam War Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/vietnam-war-essay-examples/

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IvyPanda . "80 Vietnam War Essay Topics & Examples." March 1, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/vietnam-war-essay-examples/.

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Vietnam War

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009

The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. 

Opposition to the war in the United States bitterly divided Americans, even after President Richard Nixon signed the  Paris Peace Accords  and ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in 1973. Communist forces ended the war by seizing control of South Vietnam in 1975, and the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the following year.

Roots of the Vietnam War

Vietnam, a nation in Southeast Asia on the eastern edge of the Indochinese peninsula, had been under French colonial rule since the 19th century.

During World War II , Japanese forces invaded Vietnam. To fight off both Japanese occupiers and the French colonial administration, political leader Ho Chi Minh —inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism —formed the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam.

Following its 1945 defeat in World War II, Japan withdrew its forces from Vietnam, leaving the French-educated Emperor Bao Dai in control. Seeing an opportunity to seize control, Ho’s Viet Minh forces immediately rose up, taking over the northern city of Hanoi and declaring a Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) with Ho as president.

Seeking to regain control of the region, France backed Emperor Bao and set up the state of Vietnam in July 1949, with the city of Saigon as its capital.

Both sides wanted the same thing: a unified Vietnam. But while Ho and his supporters wanted a nation modeled after other communist countries, Bao and many others wanted a Vietnam with close economic and cultural ties to the West.

Did you know? According to a survey by the Veterans Administration, some 500,000 of the 3 million troops who served in Vietnam suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and rates of divorce, suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction were markedly higher among veterans.

HISTORY Vault: Vietnam in HD

See the Vietnam War unfold through the gripping firsthand accounts of 13 brave men and women forever changed by their experiences.

When Did the Vietnam War Start?

The Vietnam War and active U.S. involvement in the war began in 1954, though ongoing conflict in the region had stretched back several decades.

After Ho’s communist forces took power in the north, armed conflict between northern and southern armies continued until the northern Viet Minh’s decisive victory in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. The French loss at the battle ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina.

The subsequent treaty signed in July 1954 at a Geneva conference split Vietnam along the latitude known as the 17th Parallel (17 degrees north latitude), with Ho in control in the North and Bao in the South. The treaty also called for nationwide elections for reunification to be held in 1956.

In 1955, however, the strongly anti-communist politician Ngo Dinh Diem pushed Emperor Bao aside to become president of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN), often referred to during that era as South Vietnam.

The Viet Cong

With the Cold War intensifying worldwide, the United States hardened its policies against any allies of the Soviet Union , and by 1955 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had pledged his firm support to Diem and South Vietnam.

With training and equipment from American military and the CIA , Diem’s security forces cracked down on Viet Minh sympathizers in the south, whom he derisively called Viet Cong (or Vietnamese Communist), arresting some 100,000 people, many of whom were brutally tortured and executed.

By 1957, the Viet Cong and other opponents of Diem’s repressive regime began fighting back with attacks on government officials and other targets, and by 1959 they had begun engaging the South Vietnamese army in firefights.

In December 1960, Diem’s many opponents within South Vietnam—both communist and non-communist—formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) to organize resistance to the regime. Though the NLF claimed to be autonomous and that most of its members were not communists, many in Washington assumed it was a puppet of Hanoi.

Domino Theory

A team sent by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to report on conditions in South Vietnam advised a build-up of American military, economic and technical aid in order to help Diem confront the Viet Cong threat.

Working under the “ domino theory ,” which held that if one Southeast Asian country fell to communism, many other countries would follow, Kennedy increased U.S. aid, though he stopped short of committing to a large-scale military intervention.

By 1962, the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam had reached some 9,000 troops, compared with fewer than 800 during the 1950s.

Gulf of Tonkin

A coup by some of his own generals succeeded in toppling and killing Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, in November 1963, three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas .

The ensuing political instability in South Vietnam persuaded Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson , and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to further increase U.S. military and economic support.

In August of 1964, after DRV torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson ordered the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution , which gave Johnson broad war-making powers, and U.S. planes began regular bombing raids, codenamed Operation Rolling Thunder , the following year.

The bombing was not limited to Vietnam; from 1964-1973, the United States covertly dropped two million tons of bombs on neighboring, neutral Laos during the CIA-led “Secret War” in Laos . The bombing campaign was meant to disrupt the flow of supplies across the Ho Chi Minh trail into Vietnam and to prevent the rise of the Pathet Lao, or Lao communist forces. The U.S. bombings made Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world.

In March 1965, Johnson made the decision—with solid support from the American public—to send U.S. combat forces into battle in Vietnam. By June, 82,000 combat troops were stationed in Vietnam, and military leaders were calling for 175,000 more by the end of 1965 to shore up the struggling South Vietnamese army.

Despite the concerns of some of his advisers about this escalation, and about the entire war effort amid a growing anti-war movement , Johnson authorized the immediate dispatch of 100,000 troops at the end of July 1965 and another 100,000 in 1966. In addition to the United States, South Korea , Thailand, Australia and New Zealand also committed troops to fight in South Vietnam (albeit on a much smaller scale).

William Westmoreland

In contrast to the air attacks on North Vietnam, the U.S.-South Vietnamese war effort in the south was fought primarily on the ground, largely under the command of General William Westmoreland , in coordination with the government of General Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon.

Westmoreland pursued a policy of attrition, aiming to kill as many enemy troops as possible rather than trying to secure territory. By 1966, large areas of South Vietnam had been designated as “free-fire zones,” from which all innocent civilians were supposed to have evacuated and only enemy remained. Heavy bombing by B-52 aircraft or shelling made these zones uninhabitable, as refugees poured into camps in designated safe areas near Saigon and other cities.

Even as the enemy body count (at times exaggerated by U.S. and South Vietnamese authorities) mounted steadily, DRV and Viet Cong troops refused to stop fighting, encouraged by the fact that they could easily reoccupy lost territory with manpower and supplies delivered via the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Cambodia and Laos. Additionally, supported by aid from China and the Soviet Union, North Vietnam strengthened its air defenses.

Vietnam War Protests

By November 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. As the war stretched on, some soldiers came to mistrust the government’s reasons for keeping them there, as well as Washington’s repeated claims that the war was being won.

The later years of the war saw increased physical and psychological deterioration among American soldiers—both volunteers and draftees—including drug use , post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ), mutinies and attacks by soldiers against officers and noncommissioned officers.

Between July 1966 and December 1973, more than 503,000 U.S. military personnel deserted, and a robust anti-war movement among American forces spawned violent protests, killings and mass incarcerations of personnel stationed in Vietnam as well as within the United States.

Bombarded by horrific images of the war on their televisions, Americans on the home front turned against the war as well: In October 1967, some 35,000 demonstrators staged a massive Vietnam War protest outside the Pentagon . Opponents of the war argued that civilians, not enemy combatants, were the primary victims and that the United States was supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon.

Tet Offensive

By the end of 1967, Hanoi’s communist leadership was growing impatient as well, and sought to strike a decisive blow aimed at forcing the better-supplied United States to give up hopes of success.

On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 DRV forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam.

Taken by surprise, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces nonetheless managed to strike back quickly, and the communists were unable to hold any of the targets for more than a day or two.

Reports of the Tet Offensive stunned the U.S. public, however, especially after news broke that Westmoreland had requested an additional 200,000 troops, despite repeated assurances that victory in the Vietnam War was imminent. With his approval ratings dropping in an election year, Johnson called a halt to bombing in much of North Vietnam (though bombings continued in the south) and promised to dedicate the rest of his term to seeking peace rather than reelection.

Johnson’s new tack, laid out in a March 1968 speech, met with a positive response from Hanoi, and peace talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam opened in Paris that May. Despite the later inclusion of the South Vietnamese and the NLF, the dialogue soon reached an impasse, and after a bitter 1968 election season marred by violence, Republican Richard M. Nixon won the presidency.

Vietnamization

Nixon sought to deflate the anti-war movement by appealing to a “silent majority” of Americans who he believed supported the war effort. In an attempt to limit the volume of American casualties, he announced a program called Vietnamization : withdrawing U.S. troops, increasing aerial and artillery bombardment and giving the South Vietnamese the training and weapons needed to effectively control the ground war.

In addition to this Vietnamization policy, Nixon continued public peace talks in Paris, adding higher-level secret talks conducted by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger beginning in the spring of 1968.

The North Vietnamese continued to insist on complete and unconditional U.S. withdrawal—plus the ouster of U.S.-backed General Nguyen Van Thieu—as conditions of peace, however, and as a result the peace talks stalled.

My Lai Massacre

The next few years would bring even more carnage, including the horrifying revelation that U.S. soldiers had mercilessly slaughtered more than 400 unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai in March 1968.

After the My Lai Massacre , anti-war protests continued to build as the conflict wore on. In 1968 and 1969, there were hundreds of protest marches and gatherings throughout the country.

On November 15, 1969, the largest anti-war demonstration in American history took place in Washington, D.C. , as over 250,000 Americans gathered peacefully, calling for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.

The anti-war movement, which was particularly strong on college campuses, divided Americans bitterly. For some young people, the war symbolized a form of unchecked authority they had come to resent. For other Americans, opposing the government was considered unpatriotic and treasonous.

As the first U.S. troops were withdrawn, those who remained became increasingly angry and frustrated, exacerbating problems with morale and leadership. Tens of thousands of soldiers received dishonorable discharges for desertion, and about 500,000 American men from 1965-73 became “draft dodgers,” with many fleeing to Canada to evade conscription . Nixon ended draft calls in 1972, and instituted an all-volunteer army the following year.

Kent State Shooting

In 1970, a joint U.S-South Vietnamese operation invaded Cambodia, hoping to wipe out DRV supply bases there. The South Vietnamese then led their own invasion of Laos, which was pushed back by North Vietnam.

The invasion of these countries, in violation of international law, sparked a new wave of protests on college campuses across America. During one, on May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio , National Guardsmen shot and killed four students. At another protest 10 days later, two students at Jackson State University in Mississippi were killed by police.

By the end of June 1972, however, after a failed offensive into South Vietnam, Hanoi was finally willing to compromise. Kissinger and North Vietnamese representatives drafted a peace agreement by early fall, but leaders in Saigon rejected it, and in December Nixon authorized a number of bombing raids against targets in Hanoi and Haiphong. Known as the Christmas Bombings, the raids drew international condemnation.

The Pentagon Papers

A top-secret Department of Defense study of U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967 was published in the New York Times in 1971—shedding light on how the Nixon administration ramped up conflict in Vietnam. The report, leaked to the Times by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, further eroded support for keeping U.S. forces in Vietnam. 

When Did the Vietnam War End?

In January 1973, the United States and North Vietnam concluded a final peace agreement, ending open hostilities between the two nations. War between North and South Vietnam continued, however, until April 30, 1975, when DRV forces captured Saigon, renaming it Ho Chi Minh City (Ho himself died in 1969).

More than two decades of violent conflict had inflicted a devastating toll on Vietnam’s population: After years of warfare, an estimated 2 million Vietnamese were killed, while 3 million were wounded and another 12 million became refugees. Warfare had demolished the country’s infrastructure and economy, and reconstruction proceeded slowly.

In 1976, Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia. Under a broad free market policy put in place in 1986, the economy began to improve, boosted by oil export revenues and an influx of foreign capital. Trade and diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. resumed in the 1990s.

In the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War would linger long after the last troops returned home in 1973. The nation spent more than $120 billion on the conflict in Vietnam from 1965-73; this massive spending led to widespread inflation, exacerbated by a worldwide oil crisis in 1973 and skyrocketing fuel prices.

Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper. The war had pierced the myth of American invincibility and had bitterly divided the nation. Many returning veterans faced negative reactions from both opponents of the war (who viewed them as having killed innocent civilians) and its supporters (who saw them as having lost the war), along with physical damage including the effects of exposure to the toxic herbicide Agent Orange , millions of gallons of which had been dumped by U.S. planes on the dense forests of Vietnam.

In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington, D.C. On it were inscribed the names of 57,939 American men and women killed or missing in the war; later additions brought that total to 58,200.

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Studying the Vietnam War

How the scholarship has changed..

Two American soldiers in Pleiku, South Vietnam, home to an American airbase in May 1967.

—Everett Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

These are boom times for historians of the Vietnam War. One reason is resurgent public interest in a topic that had lost some of its salience in American life during the 1990s. At that time, the end of the Cold War and surging confidence about U.S. power seemed to diminish the relevance of long ago controversies and the need to draw lessons from America’s lost war. But then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: grueling conflicts that, in key respects, resembled the war in Southeast Asia three decades earlier. Critics complained that George W. Bush had mired the nation in “another Vietnam,” and military strategists focused anew on the earlier war for clues about fighting insurgents in distant, inhospitable places. For their part, historians seized the opportunity to reinterpret Vietnam for a younger generation and especially to compare and contrast the Vietnam conflict with America’s new embroilments.

Soldiers of The Army of the Republic of Vietnam in 1968.

—Gado Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Marine D. R. Howe treats PFC. D. A. Crum's wounds during the battle for Hue on June 2, 1968.

—US Marines Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

More recently, intense public interest in the war has been sustained by fiftieth anniversaries of the war’s most harrowing years for the United States. Publishers have used these occasions to release high-profile histories, including Mark Bowden’s widely reviewed  Hue 1968 , a sprawling account of the largest battle between U.S. and Communist forces during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The media are taking part as well. During 2017 and early 2018, the  New York Times  is publishing an online series of approximately 130 op-eds focused on the events of 1967. The biggest moment of all is due in late September: the premiere of the much anticipated 18-hour documentary on the war from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, an event certain to inspire new waves of commentary about Vietnam and to rekindle debate in living rooms across the nation.

But there is another, less noticed reason for renewed attention to the Vietnam War: Spectacular new source material has transformed the possibilities for writing about the subject. Some of this new documentation has emerged from U.S. archives as a result of declassification in the last decade or so. Records from the Nixon and Ford presidencies (1969–1977), especially, are making it possible for historians to write with more confidence and in greater detail about the final stages of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, long a relatively neglected era of the war.

Indeed, the last phase of U.S. military operations has recently spawned an especially contentious debate on one of the most fundamental controversies about Vietnam: Could the United States and its South Vietnamese allies have won the war if the American public had not turned against it? Provocative new works by Lewis Sorley and Gregory Daddis lead the way in arguing for and against, respectively, the notion that the U.S. military could have secured overall victory, if not for crumbling political support within the United States.

Meanwhile, writing about every phase of American decision-making has been enhanced by the release of audio recordings that U.S. presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon made of important meetings, telephone conversations, or both. Because these often convey the mood and emotions of senior policymakers, they are invaluable in helping historians gain a richer understanding of the motives that underlay decision-making about the war. It is now possible, for example, to hear Lyndon Johnson’s anguish about escalating the U.S. role in 1964 and 1965. LBJ’s doubts, along with his obvious awareness of the problems that would beset U.S. forces if he escalated the war in Vietnam, have led many historians to scrap the once dominant idea that leaders in Washington, ignorant of Vietnamese politics and blinded by Cold War assumptions about the dangers of communism, walked step-by-step into a “quagmire” that no one had anticipated. The old question—How could Americans have been so ignorant?—has been replaced by a new one: Why did U.S. leaders commit the nation to war despite abundant doubts and accurate knowledge of the obstacles they would confront?

The most impressive new source material, however, has emerged from countries other than the United States. As recently as 30 years ago, historians were limited to U.S. and West European sources, making it impossible to write with authority about Vietnam itself or decision-making by North Vietnam’s allies, China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern European nations. Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. East European nations went furthest in opening their archives to researchers. For its part, the Russian government opened some Soviet-era records, most notably the records of the Communist party. China and Vietnam, where the end of the Cold War did not produce dramatic political change, lagged behind, yet even those governments gradually permitted access to some records from the Cold War years. Most strikingly, the Vietnamese government opened troves of material amassed by the defunct regime in Saigon that ruled below the seventeenth parallel during the heyday of U.S. involvement.

The result has been a large and growing body of new work by ambitious and linguistically skilled scholars eager to explore fresh dimensions of the war. Historians Mark Philip Bradley, Robert K. Brigham, William J. Duiker, Christopher Goscha, David S. Marr, and Sophie Quinn-Judge led the way in examining Vietnam’s experience, drawing on newly available Vietnamese sources to produce pathbreaking studies around the turn of the century. A younger generation of scholars, most of whom wrote dissertations rooted in extensive research in Vietnam, has built on those accomplishments and even, for the first time, begun delving into decision-making by the Communist government in Hanoi. Meanwhile, historians of Soviet and Chinese foreign policy, most notably Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai, have used new documentation to examine the complex relationships between the Vietnamese Communists and their superpower patrons.

Unquestionably, archival openings in Russia and China, just as in Vietnam, remain partial and selective, leaving studies rooted in newly accessible material—stunning as it may be—highly susceptible to debate and revision as more documentation becomes available. Yet, measured against the near impossibility of doing this kind of work just three decades ago, historians have made remarkable progress toward rethinking the Vietnam War as an episode not just in U.S. history but also in Vietnamese and world history. Historians, in short, increasingly appreciate the war for what it was at the time: a multisided conflict involving numerous Vietnamese and international actors and driven by extraordinarily complicated and shifting motives. 

What precisely has this new research in non-U.S. sources revealed thus far? Three examples point to the variety and significance of the new discoveries. First, studies of Chinese foreign policy have revealed details of North Vietnam’s dependence on its mighty neighbor to the north in the years before the Cultural Revolution, which greatly diminished China’s ambitions abroad. Despite historical tensions between Vietnam and China, newly available sources show definitively that Chinese military helped train and advise Vietnamese Communist forces from as early as 1950 and played an especially pivotal role in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese victory that ended French colonialism and dealt a major blow to the West in the Cold War.

More strikingly, new documents clarify the vast amounts of equipment and even manpower that China provided to North Vietnam during the later fighting that involved U.S. combat forces. According to historian Qiang Zhai, China sent everything from military gear and weapons to table tennis balls, playing cards, sewing needles, and vegetable seed under a series of agreements with North Vietnam. At the same time, Qiang Zhai asserts, a total of 320,000 Chinese soldiers served in North Vietnam between June 1965 and March 1968, peaking at 170,000 during 1967. To be sure, Chinese forces were not assigned combat roles. But Zhai observes that they enabled North Vietnam to send more of its own forces to southern battlefields by performing valuable functions such as repairing bridges and rail lines, building and relocating factories, and manning antiaircraft guns. Such tasks could, of course, be hazardous, not least because of U.S. bombing of some parts of North Vietnam. According to Zhai’s sources, 1,100 Chinese soldiers died in North Vietnam and another 4,200 were wounded.

President Lyndon B. Johnson visits with U.S. troops on his trip to Vietnam in October 1966.

—LBJ Library

Second, new sources from Vietnam are exposing the complexity of decision-making among Communist leaders in Hanoi. For many years, historians assumed that North Vietnamese leaders marched in lockstep and permitted no dissent. This view was sustained in part by the belief that the regime in Hanoi was totalitarian to its core and utterly subservient to its most powerful leaders, above all Ho Chi Minh. Recent discoveries have, however, called all of this into question. For one thing, historians Lien-Hang Nguyen and Pierre Asselin have revealed that Ho Chi Minh—long assumed to have been the preeminent North Vietnamese leader all the way to his death in 1969—in fact, lost a great deal of influence around 1960.

The pivotal figure thereafter was Le Duan, a Southern-born revolutionary who remained relatively obscure to Western historians until recent years. Thanks to recent publications, though, it’s clear that Le Duan, a firebrand eager to throw enormous blood and resources into the effort to reunify his country under Communist leadership, dominated decision-making in Hanoi during the peak years of American involvement. Understanding the importance of Le Duan and the hawks who surrounded him helps enormously to appreciate the escalatory pressures that operated on the Vietnamese side, even as Lyndon Johnson and his aides stepped up the American commitment in the mid 1960s. We can now see that leaders on both sides rejected diplomacy and banked on military victory, a tragic convergence of hawkishness that fueled escalation.

The dominance of the hawks in Hanoi does not mean, though, that there were no contrary voices once they were in the driver’s seat. Scholars working with Vietnamese sources have discovered evidence of substantial factionalism within the Hanoi regime throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Broadly speaking, some high-ranking North Vietnamese leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, prioritized consolidation of Communist rule above the seventeenth parallel and were wary of major expenditures of lives and treasure to bring about reunification. Others, including Le Duan, strongly favored reunification—even at the cost of a major war likely to draw in the United States—over all other North Vietnamese priorities. New studies of the war show that North Vietnamese policy flowed from the interplay of these two points of view. During the late 1950s, the moderate faction held sway, and the result was a period of relative peace in Vietnam. With the triumph of the hawks, however, Hanoi embraced a new war and transformed North Vietnam into a full-fledged police state in order to keep the skeptics at bay.

Third, the new scholarship has shed valuable new light on the nature of the South Vietnamese state that endured from its beginning in 1954 to its collapse in 1975. Was South Vietnam merely a puppet of the United States, an artificial creation doomed to fall apart whenever Washington withdrew its economic and military assistance? Or was it a viable nation with a legitimate government that, absent the onslaught by northern Communists, could have endured as a stable, pro-Western entity into the indefinite future? For many years, the debate was more a matter of polemics than historical inquiry. Opponents of the war argued that the United States hitched itself to a hopeless Potemkin experiment led by venal, authoritarian leaders, while supporters saw South Vietnam as a beleaguered young nation that, for all its faults, was doing its best to resist Communist aggression.

Unsurprisingly, much of the new scholarship rooted in Vietnamese sources has argued for a gray area between these two extremes. Historians such as Edward Miller and Jessica Chapman focus especially on the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting that the South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem possessed a degree of legitimacy and popular support unrecognized by Diem’s critics at the time or since. To be sure, they also point out the government’s inability to expand its base further among the South Vietnamese population. But they show that the South Vietnamese state possessed a remarkable amount of agency that its leaders might have exercised differently. All in all, these historians have helped restore the Vietnamese to the center of their own history.

What do all these revelations mean for how we should understand the Vietnam War in its totality? Clearly, the new work in non-American sources holds implications for primordial questions about the U.S. role in Vietnam. Was the U.S. commitment to Vietnam justified by any genuine security interests in the region? Why did the United States fail to achieve its objectives despite monumental effort? Might different decisions by American leaders have led to a different outcome? Knowing more about the international and Vietnamese contexts makes it far more possible than ever before to form authoritative opinions about questions that cannot logically be answered fully on the basis of U.S. sources alone. But the new work also underscores the possibility of addressing questions that transcend the American experience and viewing the Vietnam War within the context of, for example, decolonization, the international Communist movement, and the Sino-Soviet split. The good news is that, given the range of new and still-to-be-released source material and robust interest in the war four decades after it ended, historians are sure to move forward energetically on both tracks. The boom times may stick around for a while.

Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. He is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History .

Funding information

In addition to a  $1 million production grant  to GWETA for  The Vietnam War , NEH has supported, with a  $300,000 grant , public discussions nationwide of this difficult subject and the epic documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. NEH has also funded numerous projects on the Vietnam War as a subject of ongoing scholarship, including the work of two scholars mentioned in this article: Edward Miller, a professor at Dartmouth who received a  summer stipend  supporting research and writing based on field work conducted in Vietnam, and Lien-Hang Nguyen, who received a  Public Scholar grant  to support work on a book for a general audience about the Tet Offensive of 1968. As major anniversaries of the Vietnam War appear on the calendar, NEH has also supported a number of projects documenting oral histories of the Vietnam War, including a project at the  Catawba County Library  in North Carolina interviewing Hmong immigrants who were refugees from Laos during the Vietnam War and a project with the Maryland Humanities Council working with students who learn to take oral histories from Maryland veterans of the Vietnam War. “LBJ’s War,” a series of podcasts from Public Radio International that has been praised recently in the media, was supported by a  $150,000 grant .

Republication statement

This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as 'Studying the Vietnam War: How the Scholarship Has Changed' in the Fall 2017 issue of  Humanities  magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.”  Please email us  if you are republishing it or have any questions.

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The Vietnam War was the longest lasting war in the United States history before the Afghanistan War. This example of a critical essay explores the history of that violent and divisive event. The United States’ presence and involvement in the Vietnam War were something that many people felt very strongly about, whether they be American citizens, Vietnamese citizens, or global citizens.

Known as ‘the only war American ever lost’, the Vietnam War ended two years after the United States withdrew their forces in 1973 and the communist party seized Saigon two years later. This sample essay provides an example of the features and benefits that come from working with Ultius.

Causes of the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War refers to the Second Indochina War, lasting from 1954 until 1973, in which the United States (and other members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) fought alongside the Republic of South Vietnam. South Vietnam was contesting the communist forces comprised of the Viet Cong, a group of South Vietnamese guerillas, and the North Vietnamese Army (Vietnam War).

The war was a byproduct of the First Indochina War (lasting between 1946 and 1948), in which France tried to claim Vietnam as a colony and was met with strong opposition from Vietnamese communist forces.

But the deep-rooted issues surrounding the cause of the Vietnam War dated back to World War II, during which Japan invaded and occupied Vietnam (Vietnam War History). The country had already been under French rule since the late 1800s, and the Japanese presence caused a man named Ho Chi Minh, inspired by communism of China and the Soviet Union, to form the Viet Minh, or the League for the Independence of Vietnam.

World War II as a catalyst to the Vietnam War

The Viet Minh’s main purpose was to fight both the Japanese and French administration and to make Vietnam a Communist nation. They were successful in forcing Japan to withdraw its forces in 1945. With only the French to worry about, the Viet Minh quickly rose up, gained control of the northern city of Hanoi, and declared Ho as the president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam War Facts).

This meant France had to take the lead in Vietnam. France sought to regain control in 1949 when they set up the state of Vietnam, also known as South Vietnam, and declared Saigon to be its capital. The two groups, the French and the Viet Minh, struggled for power until 1954, when a battle at Dien Bien Phu ended in defeat for France. This led to the Geneva Agreements , made a few months later, which granted independence to Cambodia and Laos, who had also been under French rule.

However, Vietnam was still divided into North Vietnam, or the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Republic of South Vietnam (Vietnam War). There was to be an election to determine the country’s fate, but the south resisted, spurring a cascade of guerilla warfare from the north. In July of 1959, North Vietnam called for a socialist revolution in all of Vietnam as a whole.

United States belated involvement in Vietnam

As the battles became more ferocious, President Kennedy watched from the United States and sent a team to report on the conditions of South Vietnam. In 1961, it was suggested that the president sent American troops to produce economic and technical aid in the fight against the Viet Cong. Fearing the effects of the ‘domino theory’, which stated that if one Southeast Asian nation fell under communist rule, so would many others, President Kennedy increased the number of troops in South Vietnam to nine thousand, compared to less than eight hundred during the previous decade (Vietnam War History).

After the assassination of President Kennedy, it was decided by both his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that more soldiers would be used in the war . On August 2, 1964, two North Vietnamese torpedoes attacked United States destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. In response, the United States Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, making the president’s war-making powers much broader (Vietnam War History).

America's military policy during the war

By the year’s end, twenty-three thousand American troops occupied South Vietnam and the United States began regular bombing raids the following February. Both the American military and the North Vietnamese forces came to the same conclusion; a steady escalation of the war would ensure victory. The U.S. believed that quickly increasing force and gaining control was the way to end the war; meanwhile, North Vietnam believed that enough American casualties would decrease support for U.S. involvement, forcing the withdrawal of the military (Vietnam War).

By June of 1965, eighty-two thousand United States troops were stationed in Vietnam. One month later, one hundred thousand more were dispatched, followed by another one hundred thousand in 1966 (Vietnam War History). By the end of 1967, there were almost five hundred thousand American military members stationed in Vietnam, and the death toll had surpassed fifteen thousand.

Soon, the physical and psychological deterioration of American soldiers became apparent. Maintaining military discipline was difficult. Drug use, mutiny, and cases of soldiers attacking officers became regular occurrences for United States troops. Popularity and support of the America’s part in the war decreased dramatically all over the world.

Americans' lack of support for the Vietnam War

On the last day of January in 1968, North Vietnam launched a series of merciless attacks on more than one hundred South Vietnamese cities. Despite the surprise, the United States and South Vietnam forces were able to strike back, making the communist fighters unable to maintain their hold on any of their targets.

Upon hearing reports of the attacks, and that there had been a request for two hundred thousand more troops, the United States’ support for the war plummeted, causing President Johnson to call a stop to the bombing of North Vietnam and vow to dedicate the rest of his term to achieving peace (Vietnam War History).

This promise by Johnson was met with talks of peace between the United States and North Vietnam. When Nixon was elected to take Johnson’s place, he sought to serve the ‘silent majority’, whom he believed supported the war effort.

Attempting to limit American casualties, Nixon launched a program to withdraw troops, increase artillery and aerial attacks, and give control over ground operations to South Vietnam (Vietnam War History). Peace negotiations were not moving smoothly, as North Vietnam continued to demand the United States’ complete withdrawal as a condition of peace.

In the years that followed, carnage and bloodshed were abundant. Meanwhile, in America, the anti-war movement was growing stronger as countless of thousands of Americans gathered at hundreds of protests around the country to contest the United States’ continued involvement in the war, marching in person and writing essays to share their opinions. In 1972, Nixon finally decided to end draft calls, as the numbers of soldiers discharged for desertion or ‘draft-dodging’ rapidly increased.

By the end of that year, North Vietnam was finally ready to compromise; however, they rejected the original peace agreement, causing Nixon to authorize bombings of North Vietnamese cities (Vietnam War History). U.S. troops were finally withdrawn in 1973, though war continued to rage between North and South Vietnam forces until the country was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975.

By the end of the war, the number of Americans killed reached over fifty-eight thousand, while the number of slaughtered Vietnamese numbered over two and a half million (Vietnam War History). From this point forward, the Vietnam War would be known as America's bloodiest war since the Civil War more than a hundred years' earlier.

The Vietnam War's military tactics

Military leaders once thought Germany's military policies during WWII were the most deceitful until the Viet Cong started employing their tactics. One of the most prominent types of warfare during the Vietnam War was guerilla warfare. This tactic consists of stealthy, surprise attacks aimed to eliminate opponents (Guerilla Warfare and Attrition Warfare).

Widely used by the Viet Cong, this enabled them to sneak up on unwary enemies, kill them, and escape before causing alarm. In addition, Viet Cong fighters often disguised themselves as farmers or civilians before attacking when least expected.

Viet Cong's deceitful disguises and innocent lives lost

This led to the accidental killing thousands of innocent Vietnamese citizens. By 1965, the Viet Cong had gained access to machine guns, which they mainly used to shoot American helicopters down from the sky. They would also utilize American land mines, which they sometimes found undetonated and would steal for their own use (Battlefield: Vietnam).

In a single year, enemy forces obtained almost twenty thousand tons of explosives from dud American bombs. Though United States troops originally aimed to use more traditional forms of warfare, meaning the ‘winner’ would be the one who had claimed more land, it was decided that the only way to truly win the war was to eliminate as many enemy troops as possible, called attrition warfare (Guerilla Warfare and Attrition Warfare).

Domestic response to the Vietnam War

The official position of the United States government on their involvement in the Vietnam War was that they were there at the request of South Vietnam to repel communist forces that were growing during the Cold War (Reaction to the War In the United States).

Before long, however, Americans grew dissatisfied with America’s continued presence in Southeast Asia. While some citizens believed that maximum force was necessary to quickly squash the opposition, others believed that the conflict in Vietnam was a civil one, making our involvement inappropriate.

Upon the revelation that American troops had massacred an entire village of civilians, anti-war demonstrations sprang up all around the country (Reactions to the War in the United States). While most demonstrations were peaceful, that was not the case for all. Many protests escalated to violence, as draft boards were raided and destroyed, production facilities were targets for attack and sabotage, and brutal altercations between civilians and police grew in frequency (Barringer).

Americans were analyzing the war through the lens of justice and morality, in addition to growing a strong distrust for the country’s military (War in Vietnam). Civil rights leaders and the American Civil Liberties Union called for the withdrawal of United States forces from Vietnam. By the time Nixon recalled American troops in 1973, the antiwar sentiment had become overwhelming as dissent for the government reigned (Barringer). Never before had the American public showed such disdain and dissatisfaction with the country’s involvement in warfare.

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While the Vietnam War had some support among American citizens, the overall feelings towards the war were negative. It was widely believed that veterans were the true victims of the Vietnam War, as thousands of Americans were drafted involuntarily to fight in a war they did not believe in and millions of Vietnamese became nothing more than cast-aside casualties of war.

The United States originally aimed to squash the growth of Communism in Asia but ended up participating in the longest, bloodiest war in American history. Regardless of the justification for their involvement, the United States continues to hold the Vietnam War as a lesson and an example for how we, as a country, should conduct ourselves during times of conflict. The memories and aftereffects of the Vietnam War will continue to serve as a reminder for generations to come. If you have strong feelings about this bit of history, for or against, order your own essay from Ultius.

Works Cited

Barringer, Mark. University of Illinois: The Anti-War Movement in the United States. Oxford UP, 1999. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/antiwar.html.

“Battlefield: Vietnam”. PBS.org. PBS. Web. 2, Dec. 2014.

“Guerilla Warfare and Attrition Warfare”. The Vietnam War. Weebly, 2014. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://vietnamawbb.weebly.com/guerrilla-warfare-and-war-of-attrition.html.

“Vietnam War”. HistoryNet.com. Weider History Network, 2014. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.historynet.com/vietnam-war.

“Vietnam War History”. History.com. A&E Television Network, 2009. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-history.

“The Vietnam War”. U.S. History. Independence Hall Association. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.ushistory.org/us/55.asp.

“War in Vietnam”. History Learning Site. HistoryLearningSite.co.uk, 2014. Web. 2, Dec. 2014. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/war_vietnam.htm.

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Course: US history   >   Unit 8

• John F. Kennedy as president
• Bay of Pigs Invasion
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• The Cuban Missile Crisis
• Lyndon Johnson as president
• Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

• The student movement and the antiwar movement
• Second-wave feminism
• The election of 1968
• 1960s America
• The Vietnam War was a prolonged military conflict that started as an anticolonial war against the French and evolved into a Cold War confrontation between international communism and free-market democracy.
• The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist countries, while the United States and its anticommunist allies backed the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) in the south.
• President Lyndon Johnson dramatically escalated US involvement in the conflict, authorizing a series of intense bombing campaigns and committing hundreds of thousands of US ground troops to the fight.
• After the United States withdrew from the conflict, North Vietnam invaded the South and united the country under a communist government.

Origins of the war in Vietnam

Lyndon johnson and the war in vietnam, richard nixon and vietnam, what do you think.

• For more on the origins of US involvement, see Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) and Mark Atwood Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
• See William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Concise Political and Military History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); Lawrence, The Vietnam War , 71-73.
• The exact circumstances of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the extent to which US officials may have misrepresented the incident, remain in dispute. Tonkin Gulf Resolution; Public Law 88-408, 88th Congress, August 7, 1964; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives.
• For more on Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, see Michael H. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).
• Paul S. Boyer, Promises to Keep: The United States since World War II (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 283-284.
• Lawrence, The Vietnam War , 143.

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Vietnam War: Background, Summary Of Events, and Conclusion

The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians.

For more articles about the Vietnam War, go to the category archive .

The Vietnam War: Table of Contents

• Summary of The Vietnam War

When was the Vietnam War?

The m-16 and the vietnam war, #70: a vietnam pow’s story of 6 years in the hanoi hilton — amy shively hawk.

• Aircraft: Evolution in Flight

End of the Vietnam War

The vietnam war: background and overview.

(See Main Article: The Vietnam War: Background and Overview )

During the late fifties, Vietnam was divided into a communist North and anti-communist South. Because of the Cold War  anxiety of the time, the general feeling was that, should the North Vietnamese communists win, the remainder of Southeast Asia would also fall to communism. When President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he swore that he would not let that happen.

The more conventionally trained army of South Vietnam was clearly no match for the guerrilla tactics of the North, so in February 1965 America decided to get involved with Operation Rolling Thunder. North Vietnam was supported by China, the Soviet Union, and other communist countries, and the Viet Cong, a South Vietnamese communist group.

The struggle for control of Vietnam, which had been a French colony since 1887, lasted for three decades. The first part of the war was between the French and the Vietminh, the Vietnamese nationalists led by the communist Ho Chi Minh, and continued from 1946 until 1954. The second part was between the United States and South Vietnam on one hand and North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front on the other, ending with the victory of the latter in 1975. The communist side, strongly backed by the Soviet Union and mainland China, sought to increase the number of those who lived behind the Bamboo Curtain.

Both the United States and the Soviet Union regarded the conflict not as a civil war between North and South Vietnam but as a consequential engagement of the Cold War in a strategic region. American leaders endorsed the domino theory, first enunciated by President Eisenhower, that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, other nations in the region such as Laos and Cambodia would also fall.

Vietnam War Summary—Overview of the Conflict

(See Main Article: Vietnam War Summary—Overview of the Conflict )

Five American presidents sought to prevent a communist Vietnam and possibly a communist Southeast Asia. Truman and Eisenhower provided mostly funds and equipment. When Kennedy became president there were fewer than one thousand U.S. advisers in Vietnam. By the time of his death in November 1963, there were sixteen thousand American troops in Vietnam. The Americanization of the war had begun.

Kennedy chose not to listen to the French president, Charles de Gaulle, who in May 1961 urged him to disengage from Vietnam, warning, “I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire.”

A debate continues as to what Kennedy would have done in Vietnam if he had served two terms—widen America’s role or begin a slow but steady withdrawal. We do know that throughout his presidency, Kennedy talked passionately about the need to defend “frontiers of freedom” everywhere. In September 1963, he said “what happens in Europe or Latin America or Africa directly affects the security of the people who live in this city.” Speaking in Fort Worth, Texas, on the morning of November 22, the day he was assassinated, Kennedy said bluntly that “without the United States, South Viet-Nam would collapse overnight. . . . We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom.”

Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, was an ambitious, experienced politician who had served in both the House and the Senate as a Democrat from Texas, and his persona was as large as his home state. He idolized FDR for winning World War II and initiating the New Deal and sought to emulate him as president. Like the three presidents who had preceded him, he saw action in time of war, serving as a naval aide in the Pacific during World War II, and like them he was a Christian, joining the Disciples of Christ Church in part for its focus on good works. Drawing on his political experience, Johnson thought that Ho Chi Minh was just another politician with whom he could bargain—offering a carrot or wielding a stick—just as he had done as the Senate majority leader. Ho Chi Minh, however, was not a backroom pol from Chicago or Austin but a communist revolutionary prepared to fight a protracted conflict and to accept enormous losses until he achieved victory.

(See Main Article: When was the Vietnam War? )

Although the history of Vietnam has been dominated by war for 30 years of the 20th century, the conflict escalated during the sixties. When we talk about the “ Vietnam War ” (which the Vietnamese refer to as the “American War”), we talk about the military intervention by the U.S. that happened between 1965 and 1973.

For the first time, Americans saw a war playing out on their TV screens and witnessed a lot of the horrors that it brought and the citizens started to turn against the war. Throughout America, people started to hold large anti-war protests against the U.S. involvement in the war of Vietnam.

In January, 1973, peace talks finally seemed to have been successful and the Paris Peace Accords finally ended direct military involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam. Unfortunately the treaty did not stop the fighting, as both sides of Vietnam kept fighting to gain as much territory as possible. The communists managed to seize Saigon in 1975 and gained control over the whole country.

According to U.S. estimates, between 200 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed during this period and 58,200 U.S. soldiers were dead or missing in action.

(See Main Article: The M-16 And The Vietnam War )

In 1959, America chose the M-14 to be our main battle rifle.  It would prove to be the shortest-lived rifle to ever serve in that role.  Heavy and uncontrollable when fired on full auto, compared to the Soviet’s AK-47, the M-14 was obsolete at birth.  America needed a rifle to match her Space Age dreams.  Not surprisingly it was a subsidiary of an aerospace company that delivered that dream.  Armalite’s business was developing small arms that could then be sold to manufacturers.  Armalite employee,  Eugene Stoner  was given the canvas to create a masterpiece, and from his fertile mind came the rifle of the future.

The advantages of the M-16 over every other rifle on paper were stunning.  The magnitude of the change encompassed by Stoner’s design was the perfect complement to “Space Age” technology.  This gun was light, accurate, and had virtually no recoil.  Any soldier with a little training could put every round into a suitcase at 100 yards in under 2 seconds.   The ammo was lighter, cheaper, and deadly.   Early reports of wounds on enemy soldiers were so gruesome that they remained classified until the 80s.  Bullets would enter the body and pinball around inside doing horrific damage.  So impressed by the M-16s issued to the ARVN troops, Green Berets demanded to be issued the weapons in 1962.  The jump from the M-14 to the M-16 was equivalent to switching from prop planes to jets.  The design was sold to Colt and adopted by the US Military in 1964.  Optimism surrounding the gun was very high.  That should have been the first warning sign.

(See Main Article: #70: A Vietnam POW’s Story of 6 Years in the Hanoi Hilton — Amy Shively Hawk )

When consider major historical events that involved millions of people— World War 2, the Great Depression, the Cold War—it’s easy to forget that real people with their own stories were part of those events.

Today we’re zeroing in on one story. And that’s the story of James Shively, an Air Force Pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and spent six years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW camp. To talk with us is Amy Shively Hawk, Jim’s stepdaughter and author of the new book Six Years in the Hanoi Hilton: An Extraordinary Story of Courage and Survival in Vietnam.

After being shot down, Shively endured brutal treatment at the hands of the enemy in Hanoi prison camps. But despite unimaginable horrors in prison, the contemplation of suicide, and his beloved girlfriend moving on back home, he somehow found hope escaping prison and eventually reuniting with his long-lost love – proving, in his words, that “Life is only what you make of it.”

In this interview we discuss:

• How Capt. Shively was shot down, what happened when he was captured, and his fate at the hands of Vietnamese villagers
• What kept Captain Shively hopeful during his six years as a prisoner of war
• What happened to the whole prison when two fellow inmates escaped but were captured the next day
• How prisoners built a full prison communications system using Morse code, toilet paper, and hidden messages even though cell blocks were forbidden from speaking to each other under threat of torture

 Aircraft: Evolution in Flight

(See Main Article: Vietnam War Aircraft: Evolution in Flight )

“The Many Ways To Die While Building an Aircraft Carrier”

For the full  “History Unplugged” podcast, click  here !

At the start of 1962, the U.S. had 16,000 military advisors training the South Vietnamese army in its fight against the Viet Cong and the Communist government based in Hanoi. In early February, the Pentagon set up a permanent U.S. military presence in Saigon—the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam (MACV). The U.S. military presence in a country that most Americans knew very little about would only grow from that point on.

In April, Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay went to Vietnam for an inspection tour and met with the head of MACV, General Paul Harkins, as well as the President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. While MACV was concentrating its efforts in the South, LeMay saw that the real problem was clearly coming from the North. LeMay made the same recommendation he made twelve years earlier, for Korea—if the U.S. intended to stop this infiltration, a massive bombing campaign of the North would do the trick. LeMay zeroed in on the port facility in Haiphong, where the weapons and supplies were coming in from the Soviet Union, and proposed bombing it. He believed this would put a halt to the guerrilla war in the South, but the plan was much too bold for the tentative steps that the Kennedy Administration was making in Vietnam in 1962.

 Aircraft: A Focus on Bombers

Ten years and 59,000 American lives later, the U.S. did exactly what LeMay had suggested. From December 19 to 29, 1972, the Air Force and Navy conducted Linebacker II, the largest concentrated bombing since World War II. The bombing of the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, and the port of Haiphong was conducted by such Vietnam War aircraft as tactical fighters, along with 741 B-52 sorties. Ten B-52s were shot down, five crash-landed in Laos and Thailand, thirty-three B-52 crewmen were killed, thirty-three were captured, and twenty-six were rescued. After years of stops and starts, the massive bombing of Vietnam War aircraft finally pushed the North Vietnamese to hammer out a negotiated settlement that gave the U.S. a way to extricate itself from its tortured involvement.

Decades later, the political debate over this conflict remains unresolved. Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen strongly disagreed with the suggestion that the conflict may have ended sooner had LeMay’s plan been followed ten years earlier, “I don’t know how you can say this so many years after the fact, especially when you consider that the Vietnamese had been fighting for their independence since forever and the idea that some bombs in Hanoi or Haiphong would have brought them to the table is ludicrous.”

But former Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, countered Sorensen’s view. “That’s ridiculous, the myth that it was a civil war. What destroyed Vietnam was that 18 divisions came down from the North in 1975. There was nationalism in Hanoi but not in the South and it was the North imposing its view on the South.”   Schlesinger also points out that had the strikes taken place earlier when LeMay suggested them, the Soviet surface-to-air missiles would not have been in place, saving the U.S. planes and crews that were shot down a decade later.

Vietnam highlighted the greatest difference between LeMay’s philosophy of war and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s. The Defense Secretary pushed for what he called flexible response from the very start of the U.S. involvement in the conflict: namely, offering the enemy a way out; however, if they show aggression, match the aggression, but only proportionately. Consequently, the full weight of the growing American military was never brought to bear on the North. Ground would be fought over in the South and then abandoned only to be fought over again and again, always with more casualties. The North would be bombed and then the bombing would be halted. It was a completely different strategy than the one the U.S. used in World War II.

LeMay thought flexible response was counterintuitive; it ran completely against his doctrine of war. If a war is not worth winning, LeMay’s answer was simple: do not get involved in the first place. Consequently, as LeMay watched the troop levels expand along with U.S. casualties, he grew more and more angry. The focal point of that anger was McNamara. As the conflict dragged on, he also grew furious with Lyndon Johnson because he believed McNamara and LBJ lied to the American people about the war. While the Vietnam War deeply divided the country, it would create major fissures within the government as well.

(See Main Article: End of the Vietnam War )

Beset at home and abroad, in 1968 Lyndon Johnson decided against running for re-election. In March he banned bombing north of the twentieth parallel, leaving most of North Vietnam a sanctuary. He was succeeded by Republican Richard M. Nixon, who largely limited offensive air operations over the North for nearly four years. One example will suffice: from 1965 through 1968 Navy aircrews downed thirty-three enemy aircraft, but over the next three years, tailhookers splashed only one. Meanwhile, “peace talks” trickled out in Paris. The end of the Vietnam War was in sight.

“After Watergate, Richard Nixon Created the Career Path for All Ex-Presidents”

Then, on March 30, 1972, Hanoi launched a full-scale conventional attack against South Vietnam, shattering the dead-end Paris “peace talks.” American airpower responded massively.

Leading  Constellation ’s   Air Wing Nine was Commander Lowell “Gus” Eggert, a cheerful aviator who enjoyed partying with his aircrews. Eggert’s keen intuition told him the 1971–72 cruise might be different from the previous three years. He began training his squadrons for large “Alpha” strikes in addition to the usual close air support in South Vietnam and Laos.

“Connie” completed her six-month deployment, and on April 1 she was in Japan preparing to return to California when the North Vietnamese spring offensive rolled south. Sailors and aircrews hastily offloaded their new purchases—notably motorcycles—and began loading ordnance. The ship was back in the Tonkin Gulf five days later, joining Hancock ,  Coral Sea , and  Kitty Hawk . By then the communists had beefed up their air defenses, and on one mission over South Vietnam, an Intruder pilot had to abort his attack because a cloud of tracers obscured the reticle of his bombsight.

After further delay, Nixon finally loosed the airmen in order to quicken the end of the Vietnam War. A Phantom pilot recalled, “We had reports of 168 SAMs on the first night after Nixon got serious in May. But that was coordinated with massive B-52 raids supported by three carrier air wings.”

On May 9 a handful of aircraft demonstrated the carrier’s potential for strategic effects with extreme economy of force. While  Kitty Hawk  provided a diversionary strike,  Coral Sea launched nine jets that turned the Vietnam war around in two minutes: six Navy A-7Es and three Marine A-6As laid three dozen mines in Haiphong Harbor. The weapons were time-delayed to allow ships to leave North Vietnam’s major port. During the next three days, thousands more mines were sown in Hanoi’s coastal waters, effectively blockading the communists from seaborne replenishment. Commander Roger Sheets’s Air Wing Fifteen, on its seventh Vietnam deployment, shut down Haiphong for almost a year—well beyond the impending “peace” treaty.

The mines were frequently replenished, eventually totaling more than eleven thousand weapons. Sometimes the “reseeding” involved unconventional tactics, as when  Saratoga ’s   Air Wing Three employed Phantoms flying formation on Intruders and Corsairs in what one F-4 pilot called “a one-potato, two-potato” drop sequence, based on when the attack jets released.

Finally, Phantom crews could ply their trade again. From January 1972 through January 1973, carrier-based F-4s claimed twenty-five aerial kills—nearly as many as the Navy total in the first six years of the Vietnam war. The tailhookers’ best day was May 10. That morning a two-plane VF-92 section off Constellation  trolled Kep Airfield and caught two MiG-21s taking off. The high-speed, low-level chase ended with one MiG destroyed which, with the Air Force bombing the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi, sparked an exceptional response.

That afternoon “Connie” launched thirty-two planes against Hai Duong logistics, producing one of the biggest combats of the war with Phantoms, Corsairs, and MiGs embroiled in a “furball” of maneuvering jets. When it was over, two F-4s fell to flak and SAMs while VF-96 claimed six kills, producing the Navy’s only ace crew of the Vietnam war. In all, the Navy and Air Force downed a dozen MiGs, which remains an unsurpassed one-day total more than forty years later.

During Operation Linebacker—the final air campaign over North Vietnam, signally the end of the Vietnam War—American aircrews claimed seventy-two aerial kills versus twenty-eight known losses to MiGs, an overall exchange ratio of 2.5–1. However, the Navy’s intensive fighter training program from 1969 onward produced exceptional results. “Topgun” graduates and doctrine yielded twenty-four MiGs against four carrier planes lost, including a lone Vigilante escorted by fighters. In contrast to the Navy’s 6–1 kill ratio, the Air Force figure was closer to 2–1, approaching parity in some months.

The disparity between the two services was dramatically illustrated in August 1972, when four F-8E Crusaders from  Hancock  deployed to Udorn, Thailand, to update Air Force Phantom crews on air combat maneuvering. The senior Navy pilot was already a MiG killer, Commander John Nichols, who noted, “My biggest challenge was keeping my guys from lording it over the blue suiters.”

Throughout the war and up to the end of the Vietnam War, naval aviators shot down sixty enemy aircraft—all by carrier pilots. It was a stark contrast to Korea when barely a dozen communist planes were credited to tailhookers among fifty-four total by Navy and Marine pilots.

In fact, the reason for carrier-based fighters was to establish air superiority so the attack planes could perform their vital mission. Skyraiders, Skyhawks, Intruders, and Corsairs seldom worried about enemy aircraft while placing ordnance on target the length and breadth of Indochina. Few aircrews and probably few admirals realized how far carrier aviation had come since the start of World War II. Long gone was the era when airpower theorists insisted that sea-based aircraft could not compete with land-based planes. If nothing else, Vietnam confirmed that naval aviation was a world-class organization.

On two days in October 1972, Commander Donald Sumner led USS  America  (CVA-66) A-7 Corsairs against Thanh Hoa Bridge, a vital communist transportation target. One of his pilots, Lieutenant Commander Leighton Smith, had first bombed the bridge as a  Coral Sea  A-4 pilot in 1966. The Air Force had badly damaged “The Dragon’s Jaw,” but spans remained intact. With a combination of two thousand-pound TV-guided weapons and conventional one-ton bombs, the naval aviators finally slew the long-lived dragon, more than seven years after the first U.S. efforts.

During the eleven-day “Christmas War” of 1972, carrier aircraft again supported B-52s in bombing an intransigent Hanoi back to the bargaining table. By then Hanoi was nearly out of SA-2 missiles.

The Paris accords among Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi took effect on January 27, 1973. They were the diplomatic efforts that signaled the end of the Vietnam War. On that day Commander Harley Hall, a former Blue Angel leader and the commander of an Enterprise  F-4 squadron, became the last naval aviator shot down in the long war. His Phantom fell north of the Demilitarized Zone, and though his back-seater survived captivity, Hall did not. Long thereafter his widow learned that he had probably lived two or more years in captivity, abandoned by his government with unknown numbers of other men.

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Exploring the vietnam war: a teacher’s resource essay.

He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined . . . to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” ––Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955) 1

The purpose of this essay is to provide classroom instructors and other interested parties with a review of a range of readings, films, and documentaries about the Vietnam War. The eight areas presented explore the conflict in its complexity, from background to culture to the legacy for US foreign policy. The areas can be shaped into instructional units, with readings and films chosen with a secondary school or college audience in mind.

       Vietnam’s French Colonial Background

Before the American war came the French colonial experience, establishing Indochina as a far-flung colonial outpost, enriching the mother country while brutally suppressing resistance. From the 1870s to the 1950s, the French regime raised generations of Vietnamese civil servants, who developed cultural and intellectual ties with their occupiers. A class of Western-educated nationalists emerged in the twentieth century who denounced the foreign occupation and called for self-determination. Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, was in the forefront. Much of Ho’s popular appeal can be read and dissected in Bernard Fall’s edited volume, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–1966 (1967). These primary sources offer an idea of the hope Ho offered to so many Vietnamese who chafed and suffered under French domination. The best biography on Ho is William J. Duker’s Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000). Graham Greene’s graceful novel, The Quiet American (1955), captures the mood of the French under siege, while foreshadowing the American experience. The French were defeated in 1954 by the communist Viet Minh.

A familiarity with the French colonial experience in Vietnam is important for Americans’ study, as the Americans ignored or misread the lessons from the French failure. The French war was also America’s initial entry, as the US funded 80 percent of the war by 1954, as a Cold War fight against communism. The first chapter of George C. Herring’s excellent work, America’s Longest War (1979), “A Dead-End Alley: The United States, France and the First Indochina War, 1950–1954,” is a fine introduction to France’s defeat and America’s entry onto the scene. Indeed, Herring’s book is well worth reading in its entirety, for both high school and college classes. In addition, for this first unit on the war I strongly recommend the 1983 PBS “American Experience” series, V ietnam: A Television History, beginning with Episode I: “Roots of a War (1945–1953).”

US Objectives in Cold War Context, the Case for the War and Reasons Lost

The rationale that led America into Vietnam must be placed firmly into the Cold War mindset. In the years after World War II, US policymakers perceived communism as a near-monolithic entity. Thus, the communist and anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam played upon US fears of communist global expansion: Russia, 1917; Eastern Europe and Poland, post-1945; China and North Korea, 1949; Tibet, 1951; North Vietnam, 1954; and Cuba, 1959. As Herring writes, although Indochina was considered by the Americans to be “important for its raw materials, rice, and naval bases . . . it was deemed far more significant for the presumed effect its loss would have on other areas,” otherwise known as “the domino theory.” 2 If South Vietnam fell, then “Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Malaya (and then, successively, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia) would ‘fall to the Communists’ in their proper order.” 3

The answer was the “containment doctrine,” established during the Truman administration, and pursued, with variations, on through the 1980s. Students would benefit from reading George Kennan’s 1946 “Long Telegram” sent from the US Embassy in Moscow to Washington, DC, in which Kennan argued that Soviet encroachments be contained at every opportunity, meeting force with force. Kennan’s telegram is a seminal document in Cold War history. 4 Although the threat of communist expansion was the primary concern in Vietnam for Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, additional motives included US credibility and domestic political concerns, with administrations fearful of seeming to appease totalitarian aggression.

For a counterbalance to more mainstream histories, I also find useful Howard Zinn’s chapter, “The Impossible Victory: Vietnam,” in his classic polemic, A People’s History of the United States (1980). Zinn presents a critical leftist perspective, stressing US economic motives behind the nation’s overseas ventures. Focusing on the disconnect between official democratic principles and cynical self-interest, his work can be counted on to provoke lively class discussions.

For documentaries, I strongly recommend Errol Morris’ The Fog of War , which won an Academy Award in 2003. The film presents a series of interview clips with Robert McNamara, Kennedy and Johnson’s Secretary of Defense and a key architect of the war. An eighty-five-year-old McNamara reflects on Vietnam, the danger of too much power, Cold War presumptions, and mistakes that were made, interspersed with combat footage.

While the antiwar movement opposed the basic tenets of why the US should involve itself in Vietnam, plenty of bipartisan foreign policy experts were firmly convinced that America was both morally and strategically justified in seeking to contain North Vietnam. Richard Nixon asserted in No More Vietnams (1985) that the conflict was no civil war, but rather, “the Vietnam War was the Korean war with jungles,” in which a hostile communist force “camouflaged its invasion to look like a civil war,” while undertaking a stream of ceaseless border crossings while supporting the Viet Cong. 5 The American media and antiwar movement are both singled out by Nixon, but also the failure of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to explain “what we were fighting for,” thus failing to secure enduring public support. 6 Nixon also blamed the US Congress for allowing Saigon to fall in the two years following America’s withdrawal.

Nixon’s polemical book is useful in providing an alternate perspective to the antiwar critique, whether in explaining the US justification or in de-romanticizing Ho Chi Minh, whose 1950s agrarian policies sparked “major peasant revolts,” resulting in the deaths of 50,000 North Vietnamese. 7 Additional arguments for support of the war are to be found in Robert F. Kennedy’s oral interviews in Robert Kennedy: In His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (1991), edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, and in Lyndon Johnson’s memoir, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963–1969 (1971).

As arguments are studied for the war’s justification, so should debates be reviewed on why the war was lost. The issue of whether the American media helped lose the war and the theory of an “oppositional” media are discussed by Melvin Small in Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves . 8 In Nixon Reconsidered (1994), a largely positive reevaluation, Joan Hoff reviews flaws in the 1973 peace agreement, which was essentially forced upon South Vietnam’s President Thieu, with Nixon threatening an “immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance” if Thieu did not sign the document. 9

In We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young , Retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore in his final chapter, “Reflections and Perceptions,” singles out flaws in US military and political policy as to why America failed in Vietnam, including one-year tours of duty and frequent officer rotations. Failure also resulted from losing the hearts and minds of the populace by bombing heavily populated areas. “None of us,” Moore wrote, “had joined the Army to hurt children and frighten peaceful farm families.” 10 Nor would the American people condone the ongoing losses as the years passed, despite superior firepower. Even with a “kill ratio of 10–1 or even 20–1” against the enemy, eventually Americans would demand that the troops come home, mission accomplished or not. 11

The Face of War

As historian John Dower once wrote, “atrocities follow war as the jackal follows a wounded beast.” 12 Vietnam was no different, and, like Dower’s own area of expertise on the Pacific War, the war in Vietnam was carried out between peoples of different races, languages, and cultures; cruelty, racism, and dehumanization followed in its wake. Certainly, atrocities occurred on both sides, from the 1968 massacre by US soldiers in the village of My Lai, to the mass executions by communist forces in the city of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive. For students to form an accurate perception of the face of the Vietnam War, works that present the American soldier’s experience should also include a feel for the camaraderie, the stultifying dullness, the struggles against heat, loneliness, brutality, loss, and fear.

Mark Baker’s Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women who Fought There (1981) is a collection of veterans’ oral histories, at times starkly graphic, and cannot fail to hold students’ attention. “You can’t tell who’s your enemy,” one veteran recalled. “You got to shoot kids, you got to shoot women. You don’t want to. You may be sorry that you did. But you might be sorrier if you didn’t.” 13 Other veteran accounts include Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us (1983), with accounts gathered by reporters Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller; Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977); Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1985), edited by Bernard Edelman; and Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk (1983), a fascinating account by a US helicopter pilot who flew more than one thousand combat missions in Vietnam. Of these works, Baker’s Nam is the most graphic, in terms of violence, language, and brutality, and thus should be read carefully by the teacher before the book is assigned, since the material is disturbing. For a popular fictional treatment, many fine examples exist, but perhaps the best remains Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990).

On the other side, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War (1991) is a novel by a North Vietnamese Army veteran. One of 500 soldiers who served in the North’s 27th Youth Brigade, and one of only ten who survived, Ninh was seventeen when he joined the war and twenty-three when it ended. His novel has become a literary classic. Nor did the decade following Hanoi’s victory bring the longed-for reconciliation for which many had hoped, as Truong Nhu Tang makes clear in A Viet Cong Memoir (1985), written with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. A former guerrilla who served as Minister of Justice after the war, Tang’s bitter disillusionment with postwar Vietnam eventually forced him into exile. For an excellent visual, the National Geographic documentary, Vietnam’s Unseen War: Pictures from the Other Side (2002), offers a series of interviews and photographs by North Vietnamese photographers, giving more of a face to “the faceless enemy” in the jungle.

For American POWs, the war included the nightmare of internment. A useful account of one American POW’s experience in Hanoi’s notorious French-built Hoa Lo Prison is Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr.’s When Hell Was in Session (1976). Lionel Chetwynd’s dramatic film, Hanoi Hilton (1987), offers stark images for viewers unused to seeing American POWs at the mercy of others. The documentary Return with Honor (2001), directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders, depicts the POWs’ plight and their return to America.

The Antiwar Movement

Much has been written on the anti-Vietnam War movement, and abundant films and documentaries are readily available. Two comprehensive tomes are Tom Wells’s The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (1994), and Terry H. Anderson’s The Movement and the Sixties (1995). Born on the Fourth of July (1976) by Ron Kovic is an excellent choice for high school audiences, presenting Kovic’s journey from an all-American high school athlete who comes home from the war in a wheelchair and becomes a spokesman for the antiwar movement. The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (1984), edited by Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, is an excellent compendium of primary sources that cover six main areas, from the cultural to the political and from the moderate to the extreme.

Although the dominant popular perception of the sixties generation depicts a “politically and socially rebellious” youth, a 1989 Gallup poll found otherwise. Among those surveyed who came of political age during the sixties, “large majorities . . . say they did not get involved in anti-war or civil rights movements, did not smoke marijuana on a regular basis or experiment with psychedelic drugs, and did not ‘dress like a hippie.’” 14 Paul Lyons’ work, Class of ’66 , is a wonderful corrective in this area. Indeed, as Godfrey Hodgson wrote in America in Our Time (1976), the 1968 “swing of public opinion against the war did not mean that the peace movement had succeeded in achieving its dream of mass conversion.” 15 While a growing majority conceded that the war had become “a mess,” that did not mean they were ready to mount the barricades—far from it. Instead, the curious situation arose in which “most of those who disliked the war, disliked the peace movement even more.” 16

The collection Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties is a useful resource containing reflections by three dozen former activists. A common theme in the section “Second Thoughts on Vietnam” is how, after 1975 and the ensuing communist repression in both Vietnam and Cambodia, many New Leftists who had cheered communist-driven wars of national liberation later ignored or sought to discredit reports that reflected poorly on the new communist regimes. As one writer stated, “such methods of imposing the Party’s power over a newly ‘liberated’ society have been a part of every Communist victory since 1917.” 17 Another writer spoke of the inherent danger of romanticizing “the other side,” a pitfall experienced not only by the New Leftists but also by “old leftists” who glorified Stalin in the 1930s. 18 A fine study on the evils that befell Cambodia and the danger of romanticizing guerrillas of any stripe is William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), which indicts the Nixon administration for destabilizing fragile, neutral Cambodia, leading to the Khmer Rouge’s seizure of power and the genocidal slaughter of over a million Cambodians.

Perhaps the best documentary of the protest movement is Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), directed by Mark Kitchell. In the previously-mentioned Vietnam: A Television History series, the antiwar movement is portrayed in the episode “Homefront USA.” For a look at the most radical and violent protest group that arose from the sixties, The Weather Underground (2003), directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, shows the radicalization of a small band of revolutionaries who sought to bring down the US government, with their reflections thirty years later. Together these documentaries provide a fine cross-section of the protest movement, from those who advocated peace to those who sought to end the war and change society through far more violent means.

Culture Clash: America and Vietnam

The great cultural, linguistic, political, and historical differences that separated the Americans from the Vietnamese contributed to the war’s tragedy, fueled by the frustration that arose between mutually uncomprehending people. “America was involved in Vietnam for thirty years, but never understood the Vietnamese,” wrote Loren Baritz in his work Backfire (1985). 19 Vietnamese men, for example, had the custom of holding hands in public with their friends. For American youths raised on John Wayne films, this practice repelled many GIs who felt that their Asian allies were either effeminate or cowards, prompting them to wonder “why Americans had to die in defense of perverts.” 20 Baritz’s first chapter, “God’s Country and American Know-How,” is particularly informative as to the clash of cultures, though the entire book offers much insight.

Another excellent place to start for exploring cultural differences is Frances Fitzgerald’s landmark work, Fire in the Lake (1972), in which each culture’s view of the historical process differed, which affected their view of revolution. Traditional Vietnamese view history as cyclical, in keeping with their life as an agrarian-based people, while Westerners view history as a path of progression, with humanity emerging from a state of chaos to eventual order and stability. Thus, whereas Westerners tend to perceive revolution as “an abrupt reversal in the order of society, a violent break in history,” Vietnamese view it as “the cleansing fire to burn away the rot of the old order.” 21 In Vietnam, Americans were in the unenviable position of supporting the old order, a pro-Western series of anti-communist governments, which the French had left in their wake. As for documentaries, Peter Davis‘s classic work Hearts and Minds (1974) presents tragic and starkly contrasting images of cultural differences and the Americans’ involvement in Vietnam. The film should be viewed in advance by the instructor due to images of violence and, more rarely, nudity.

The War and America’s Cinematic Memory: Reality, Fantasy, and Remorse

Far from the more “patriotic” films arising from the World War II and Korean War eras, such as Back to Bataan (1945), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), and Pork Chop Hill (1959), the Vietnam-era films, with the exception of John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), are marked by a suspicion of authority in general––particularly military and political. This was the generation of writers and directors who learned of official lies during the war by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Nixon’s own conduct of the war, including prolonged secret bombings of Cambodia by US warplanes, and capped off by the Watergate scandals, resulted in many Americans en masse experiencing a deep distrust of their government.

Beyond the political perspective of many of these films, Hollywood—and US citizens—were coming to terms with the kind of damage America had wrought on Vietnam, and the kind of harm inflicted on US soldiers, their families, and survivors. Out of a rich tapestry of films, part fantasy, part reality, and much soul-searching, many are worth noting, but I shall mention only a few. Francis Ford Coppola’s fanciful Apocalpyse Now (1979) offers an image of the American war effort’s descent into chaos, though it is likely to raise more questions than it answers. A harrowing depiction is Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), the director himself a Vietnam vet. The scene in which an entire Vietnamese village is nearly wiped out by tense, frustrated, and angry US soldiers recalls the My Lai massacre. Hamburger Hill (1987), directed by Jon Irvin, deals with a specific battle and is brutal in its realism. Coming Home (1978), directed by Hal Ashby, focuses on the hardship experienced by returning veterans and their families. At the end of the film a paraplegic vet, played by Jon Voight, delivers a speech to a high school audience that is particularly moving, in which he expresses remorse for actions taken while “killing for one’s country.”

Lessons learned (or not): “No more Vietnams”

The anguish that the war inflicted upon the American psyche left a legacy that continues to impact US foreign policy, providing a ripe and relevant area for student research. In the thirty years since 1975, with each new military foray, cries are issued on the danger of the US finding itself once more in “another quagmire.” In his account of the Reagan presidency, as Reagan’s former Secretary of State, George Shultz bemoaned the “Vietnam syndrome.” “The Vietnam War had left one indisputable legacy,” Schultz wrote: “massive press, public, and congressional anxiety that the United States—at all costs—avoid getting mired in ‘another Vietnam.’” 22 In 1991, after America and its allies succeeded in pushing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush publicly declared, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” 23 Yet, amid the Serbian and Croatian acts of genocide in the Balkans, Bush “was slow to act” due to “the ghosts of Vietnam” and “the great fear of being sucked into a Balkan quagmire.” 24

Former antiwar protester Bill Clinton would himself face the Vietnam legacy in determining US foreign policy. Clinton pulled out the troops after eighteen US servicemen died in civil-war-torn Somalia. He experienced the same fears of over-engagement when he ordered limited air strikes on Serbia during the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, though he emerged successful and limited US objectives were achieved.

His successor, George W. Bush, went deeper. By December 2005, towards the end of the third year of Bush’s war in Iraq, with roughly 2,200 US soldiers dead, many politicians began calling for an exit strategy. “We are locked into a bogged-down problem not . . . dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” stated Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, himself a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. “We should start figuring out how we get out of there.” 25 Former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright struck a middle ground, stating, “The American military [in Iraq] is both the problem and the solution. They are a magnet [for insurgents] but they’re also helping with security.” 26 Democratic politicians attacked each other for fear of seeming weak. 27 For his part, President Bush maintained that US forces in Iraq would emerge victorious, promising “complete victory,” in which US forces would eventually withdraw as Iraqi forces increased their level of readiness against the insurgency. 28 As with Vietnam, politicians of both parties were increasingly caught between their record of past support, public discontent, perceived US interests, political vulnerability, and a faith in America’s potential for good amidst a sea of troubles.

Disputing Vietnam comparisons, military historian Victor Davis Hanson emphasizes that the number of US war dead in Iraq after two and a half years of war in no way approximated the far higher losses in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Since the 1970s, American expectations as to its own capabilities have increased. In a war that seeks to defeat guerrillas and where victories are not measured by ground taken, “our growing intolerance of any battlefield losses” will only meet with frustration when US wars are fought without quick and easy victories. 29

Vietnam Today

As the communist forces neared Saigon in the spring of 1975, the US military’s Stars and Stripes predicted in a bold headline that “AT LEAST A MILLION VIETNAMESE WILL BE SLAUGHTERED.” 30 The anticipated bloodbath did not come, though severe hardship and repression did. For an excellent firsthand account of the prisons and re-education camps under post-1975 communist rule in Vietnam, see The Vietnamese Gulag (1986), by Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff. What followed was an eventual “exodus of boat people, a transformative flotilla that would carry one million South Vietnamese—about five percent of the South’s population,” to lands overseas. 31 It would take years before the country established a sense of normalcy.

I thus recommend closing the unit on the Vietnam War with a glimpse of Vietnam today, thirty years after the country’s reunification and the fall of Saigon. In addition to my own teaching and research over the years, my knowledge was greatly enhanced by a summer 2004 trip to Vietnam with Pacific Village Institute, led by John Eastman. I was most impressed by the sheer energy of the Vietnamese, their friendliness, optimism, and eagerness embracing newfound opportunities currently available through the government’s policy of increased economic liberalism and the encouragement of small private enterprise.

Whatever the instructor’s political views, whether judging Vietnam’s current economic trend as a cause for “free world” celebration or one of leftist utopian mourning, the fact remains that the Vietnamese standard of living and per capita income are both on the rise, after decades of economic mismanagement and stringent government control. 32 Although censorship of the press and restricted civil liberties are as one would expect in a one-party state, a look at Vietnam at the dawn of the twenty-first century provides a positive area for students to discuss and an upbeat note to end on, in a unit that focuses on the grim reality of war. As veteran war reporter David Lamb stated in his excellent work Vietnam Now (2002), the cautious moves by the Vietnamese government have resulted in a country that “remains closer to impoverished Laos than it does to developing Thailand. Yet,” Lamb adds, “the Vietnamese have always had staying power and been good at capitalizing on opportunity; their country brims with potential.” 33 This potential, which the country is in the process of realizing, is reason enough for an in-depth study of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese people, and the nation they are becoming.

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1. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 18.

2. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 , 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 14.

3. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 33.

4. David M. Kennedy and Thomas A. Bailey, The American Spirit, Vol. II: Since 1865 , 10th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002), 410.

5. Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 47.

6. Nixon, 15.

7. Nixon, 43.

8. See Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 231–33.

9. Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 235. See the section “How Not to End a War,” 231–37.

10. Lt. Gen Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang: The Battle that Changed the War in Vietnam (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 403–04.

11. Moore and Galloway, 406.

12. John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 12.

13. Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women who Fought There (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981), 171.

14. Paul Lyons, Class of ’66: Living in Suburban Middle America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 103.

15. Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 392.

16. Hodgson, 393.

17. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, eds., Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties (Lanham, Md.: Madison, 1989), 78–79.

18 Collier and Horowitz, eds., 90.

19. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), 3.

20. Baritz, 6–7.

21. Fitzgerald, 30–31.

22. George Schultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 294.

23. George C. Herring, “America and Vietnam: The Unending War,” Foreign Affairs , Winter 1991/92, www.foreignaffairs.org/19911201faessay6116/georgec herring/america-and-vietnam-the-unending-war.html.

24. David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32.

25. Josh Meyer, “Republican Senator Says U.S. Needs Iraq Exit Strategy Now,” Los Angeles Times , August 22, 2005, A4.

26. Robin Wright, “Democrats Find Iraq Alternative Is Elusive,” Washington Post , December 5, 2005, A1.

27. Jim VandeHei and Shalaigh Murray, “Democrats Fear Backlash at Polls for Antiwar Remarks,” Washington Post , December 7, 2005, A1.

28. Paul Richter, “Bush Promises a U.S. Exit Linked to Iraqi Readiness,” Los Angeles Times , December 1, 2005, A1.

29. Victor Davis Hanson, “2,000 Dead, in Context,” New York Times , October 27, 2005, A31.

30. David Lamb, Vietnam Now: A Reporter Returns (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 74.

31. Lamb, 78.

32. See, for example: Tracy Dahlby, “The New Saigon,” National Geographic , Vol. 187, No. 4, April 1995, 60–86; Mason Florence and Virginia Jealous, Vietnam (Victoria, Australia: Lonely Planet, 2004); Amy Kazmin, “Vietnam Gets in the Swing,” Los Angeles Times , August 8, 2005, C4; and Lamb, 70.

33. Lamb, 268.

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Vietnam War: 6 personal essays describe the sting of a tragic conflict

The Vietnam War touched millions of lives. Within these personal essays from people who took part in the filming of The Vietnam War , are lessons about what happened, what it meant then and what we can learn from it now.

Long ago and far away, we fought a war in which more than 58,000 Americans died and hundreds of thousands of others were wounded. The war meant death for an estimated 3 million Vietnamese, North and South. The fighting dragged on for almost a decade, polarizing the American people, dividing the country and creating distrust of our government that remains with us today.

In one way or another, Vietnam has overshadowed every national security decision since.

We were told that our mission was to prevent South Vietnam from falling to communism. Very lofty. But the men I led as a young infantry platoon leader and later as a company commander weren’t fighting for that mission. Mostly draftees, they were terrific soldiers. They were fighting, I realized, for each other — to simply survive their year in-country and go home.

I had grown up as an “Army brat.” To me, the Army was like a second family. In Vietnam, the radio code word for our division’s infantry companies was family . A “rucksack outfit,” my company would disappear into the jungle, moving quietly, staying in the field for weeks. We all ate the same rations and endured the same heat, humidity, mosquitoes, leeches, skin rashes, jungle itch. We were like pack animals, carrying upwards of 60 pounds of gear, water, ammunition — and even more for the radio operators and machine gunners. I was impressed by how the men endured it all, especially the draftees who had answered the call to service.

I learned much about leadership. I was once counseled by a senior officer “not to be too worried about your men.” Incredible. I was concerned about my men’s safety at all times. Even though my company lost very few, I remember each of those deaths vividly. They were all good men, in a war very few understood.

On both of my combat tours, in 1968 at Huê´ during the Tet Offensive and in 1969-70 in the triple-canopy rainforests along the Cambodian border, we fought soldiers of the North Vietnamese army. They were good light infantry; I had respect for their determination and abilities. But they were the enemy; our job was to kill or capture them.

Though we were conducting a war of attrition, we were actually fighting the enemy’s birth rate. He was prepared and determined to keep fighting as long as he had the manpower to send south.

In terms of strategy, it seemed a war out of “Alice in Wonderland.” The Ho Chi Minh Trail, the enemy’s major supply line and infiltration route, ran through Cambodia and Laos. Yet until May 1970, both of those countries were off limits to U.S. ground forces. We bombed the trail incessantly, but the enemy’s ability to move troops and equipment south never seemed to slack. We never invaded North Vietnam. As demonstrated during Tet in ’68, the enemy could control the tempo of the war when he wished. We, on the other hand, would use unilaterally declared “truce” periods and would halt bombing to signal something never clearly defined — a willingness to talk, I imagined, which the enemy ignored.

Looking back, if our strategy was intended to force the enemy to say “enough,” resulting in a stalemate situation like that at the end of the Korean War, would the South Vietnamese have been able to defend themselves, independently? Unlikely.

Would the U.S. have been willing to commit and maintain American forces in South Vietnam indefinitely? Also unlikely.

Did we learn anything from that experience, which left such an indelible mark on our national psyche? History is a harsh teacher; there are still no easy answers.

Phil Gioia entered the Army after graduating from Virginia Military Institute in 1967. He left the military in 1977 and later was mayor in Corte Madera, Calif., and worked in venture capital and the technology industry. He lives in Marin County, Calif.

Hal Kushner

When I deployed to Vietnam in August 1967, I was a young Army doctor, married five years, with a 3-year-old daughter, just potty trained, and another child due the following April. When I returned from Vietnam in late March 1973, I saw my 5-year-old son for the first time, and my daughter was in the fifth grade. In the interim, we had landed on the moon; there was women’s lib, Nixon had gone to China; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated.

I was the only doctor captured in the 10-year Vietnam War. I was back from the dead.

We prisoners endured unspeakable horror, brutality and deprivation, and we saw and experienced things no human should ever witness. Our mortality rate was almost 50% — higher even than at the brutal Civil War prisons at Andersonville or Elmira a century earlier. I cradled 10 dying men in my arms as they breathed their last and spoke of home and family; then we buried them in crude graves, marked with stones and bamboo, and eulogized them with words of sunshine and hope, country and family. The eulogies were for the survivors, of course; they always are.

On the Fourth of July in five successive years, we sang patriotic songs, but very softly, so our captors couldn’t hear the forbidden words, and we cried. One of us had a missal issued by the Marine Corps, our only book, but our captors had torn out the pages with the American flag and The Star-Spangled Banner .

At my release in Hanoi, I was shocked by the hair and dress of the reporters there. Once home, I saw television and movies with frank profanity and sex. When I left, Lucy and Desi slept in twin beds. I left Ozzie and Harriett and returned to Taxi Driver . What had happened to my country? Why did we suffer and sacrifice?

When my aircraft crashed on Nov. 30, 1967, I collided with one planet and returned to another. The Vietnam War, which had about one-fifth of the casualties of World War II but had lasted three times as long, had changed the country as much as the greatest cataclysm in world history. It had changed forever the way we think of our government and ourselves. The country had lost its innocence — and, for a time, its confidence.

This war, which had such a great impact on my life, is a dim memory today. There are 58,000 names on that wall, and it rates but a few pages in a high school history book.

I am dismayed by how little our young people know about Vietnam, and how misunderstood it is by others. The Vietnam War is as remote to them as the War of 1812 or the War of Jenkins’ Ear. Now, 40 years later, we must try to understand.

Hal  Kushner joined the Army and served as a flight surgeon in Vietnam. In 1967, he was captured by the Viet Cong after surviving a helicopter crash. He spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war. He lives in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Mai Elliott

Having lived through war and seen what it did to my family and to millions of Vietnamese, I feel grateful for the peace and stability I now enjoy in the United States.

In Vietnam, my family and I experienced what it was like to be caught in bombing and fighting, and what it was like to flee our home and survive as refugees.

During World War II, in my childhood, we huddled in shelters as Allied planes targeting Japanese positions bombed the town in the North where we lived.

In 1946, when French troops returned to try to take Vietnam back from Ho Chi Minh’s government, French soldiers attacking the village where we were taking refuge almost executed my father (who had earlier worked for the French colonial authorities).

In 1954, fearing reprisals from the communists about to enter Hanoi, we fled to Saigon with only the clothes on our backs.

In 1955, we fled again when we found ourselves caught in the fighting between the army of President Ngo Dinh Diem and the armed group he was trying to eliminate, leaving behind our home, which was about to burn to the ground in the onslaught.

In April 1975, American helicopters plucked my family out of Saigon at the last minute as communist rockets exploded nearby.

The fear we felt paled in comparison to the terror that Vietnamese in the countryside of South Vietnam experienced when bombs and artillery shells landed in their villages, or when American and South Vietnamese soldiers swept through their hamlets; or the terror my relatives in North Vietnam felt when American B-52s carpet bombed in December 1972. Yet, our brushes with war were terrifying enough.

As refugees, we could find shelter and support from middle-class friends and relatives, while destitute peasants had to move to squalid camps and depend on meager handouts and help from the government in Saigon. But we did find out, as they did, that losing everything was psychologically wrenching, and that surviving and rebuilding took fortitude of spirit.

Only those who have known war can truly appreciate peace. I am one of those people.

Mai Elliott was born in Vietnam and spent her childhood in Hanoi, where her father was a high-ranking official under the French colonial regime. Her family became divided when her older sister joined the Viet Minh resistance against French rule. In 1954, her family fled to Saigon, where Mai later did research on the Viet Cong insurgency for the RAND Corp. during the Vietnam War. She is married to American political scientist David Elliott. They live in Southern California.

Bill Zimmerman

I graduated from high school in 1958, thinking myself a patriot and aspiring to be a military pilot. Thirteen years later, I sat in a jail cell in Washington, D.C., after protesting what military pilots were doing in the skies over Vietnam.

My patriotism wilted in the South in 1963, after a short stint with the civil rights movement. Simultaneously, as the U.S. slid into war in Vietnam, skepticism nurtured in Mississippi led me to discover that we were stumbling into a quagmire.

The war escalated in 1965, and I became an ardent protester over the next six years. I was fired from two university teaching positions. But my sacrifices were trivial compared with those of young Americans forced into war, or Vietnamese civilians dying under bombs and napalm. With other antiwar activists, I anguished over them all, and seethed with rage at our inability to stop the killing. In our fury, we became more forceful, committing widespread civil disobedience.

That’s how I landed in jail in 1971, trying unsuccessfully to block traffic to shut down the federal government. But our failure that day became a turning point. Antiwar leaders realized that while we had finally convinced a majority of Americans to oppose the war, our militant tactics kept them from joining us.

We changed course. Large demonstrations ended. New organizations sprang up to educate the public and lobby Congress. The work was confrontational but did not ask participants to risk arrest. Millions took part. Richard Nixon escalated the war, but he also felt the heat from a much broader antiwar coalition. In January 1973, his administration signed the Paris Peace Accords, and over the next two years, our intense lobbying persuaded Congress to cut funding for the corrupt South Vietnamese government, leading to its collapse in 1975.

We learned that in matters of war and peace, presidents regularly lie to the American people. Every president from Truman to Ford lied about Vietnam. We learned that two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, cared more about their own political survival than the lives of the men under their command. Both sent thousands of Americans to die in a war they already knew could not be won.

We learned that our government committed crimes against humanity. Agent Orange and other chemicals were sprayed on millions of acres, leaving a legacy of cancer and birth defects.

Most important, Vietnam taught us to reject blind loyalty and to fight back. In doing so, we meet our obligation as citizens … and become patriots.

Bill Zimmerman is a Los Angeles political consultant and the author of Troublemaker: A Memoir from the Front Lines of the Sixties (Anchor Books, 2012).

Roger Harris

When I think about the Vietnam War, I am torn by personal emotions that range from anger and sadness to hope. The Vietnam War experience scarred me but also shaped and molded my perspective on life.

As a 19-year-old African American from the Roxbury section of Boston, I voluntarily joined the U.S. Marine Corps, willing to fight and die for my country. I had experienced the tough neighborhood turf battles too often prevalent in the inner city. I had a gladiator’s heart and no fear. My father, all of my uncles, including a grand-uncle who rode with Teddy Roosevelt, all served in the military. I believed that it was now my turn, and if I were to die, my mom would receive a $10,000 death benefit and be able to purchase a house. I saw the war in Vietnam as a win-win situation.

In Vietnam, I served with G Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment of the 3rd Marine Division. We were called the “Hell in a Helmet” Marines. We operated in I Corps, Quang Tri Province, mainly north of Dong Ha at the Demilitarized Zone, in hot spots called Con Thien, Gio Linh, Camp Carroll and Cam Lo. I vividly remember trembling with fear from the incoming shells in the mud-filled holes at Con Thien, wishing the shelling would stop and we could fight hand-to-hand. I remember those feelings like it was yesterday.

I, along with others, witnessed deaths unimaginable. We picked up the pieces of Marine bodies obliterated by direct hits. We stacked green body bags. I often wondered why others died and I lived.

I become angry when I think about the very young lives that were lost in Vietnam and the Gold Star families who have suffered. I am saddened by the sacrifices of true heroes and the disrespect that was shown to those who were fortunate enough to come home.

When I returned from Vietnam it was March 1968 in the midst of the civil rights movement. I landed at Boston’s Logan Airport in my Marine Corps Alpha Green uniform, with the medals and ribbons I had earned proudly displayed. I approached the sidewalk to catch a taxi, hoping that I wasn’t dreaming and would not awaken back at Camp Carroll to another bombardment.

Six taxicabs passed me by and drove off. I didn’t realize what was happening until the state trooper stepped in and told the next driver, “You have got to take this soldier.” The driver, who was white, looked up at us through the passenger side window and said, “I don’t want to go to Roxbury.”

That was my initial welcome home.

I now have an appreciation for the gift of life. Since returning home and completing college, I have devoted 42 years working in Boston schools. I see it as a tribute to my fellow Marines who paid the ultimate sacrifice.

I am very proud to have served my country as a United States Marine.

I am also very proud of the young men and women who continue to volunteer to join the armed services of our country.

Roger  Harris enlisted in the Marines and served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Afterward, he worked in the Boston public school system for more than 40 years. He lives in New York and Boston.

Eva Jefferson Paterson

This summer, I attended the 50th reunion of my high school class in Mascoutah, Ill., across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. My dad was a career Air Force man and was stationed at Scott Air Force Base nearby in 1960.

During dinner, before we rocked out to the Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder, a group of us talked about the war in Vietnam. The men remembered the draft system that required all young men to register to serve in the military. While I was in college at Northwestern from 1967 to 1971, a draft lottery was established. Numbers were drawn out of a big bin — similar to the one used for weekly state lotteries — corresponding to the days of the year. If your birthday corresponded to the first number drawn, your draft number was 1, and you were virtually certain to be drafted and sent to war. Most men from that period remember their number.

Some at our reunion had felt that it was their patriotic duty to serve; others were just delighted that their lottery numbers were above 300 and they were unlikely to be drafted. Few of us were anti-war at that time; I fully supported the war. My dad was sent to Cam Rahn Bay and Tan Son Nhut air force bases in Vietnam in 1966, my senior year in high school.

I remember being a freshman in college and actually saying to classmates who opposed to the war, “We have to support the war because the president says the war is good, and we must support the president.” Yikes! I changed my views as I got the facts.

Much of the fervor of the anti-war movement was fueled by the slogan “Hell no, we won’t go!” There was righteous indignation about the war, but fear was a strong motivator.

Now the burden of serving in wars falls on a very small percentage of the population, one that likely mirrors the patterns in the Vietnam era, with predominantly poor white, black and Latino men and women along with those who come from military backgrounds. It would be great to have a national discussion about this, but I fear our country is quite comfortable letting poor men and women and people of color and their families bear the burden of war.

Eva  Jefferson  Paterson grew up on air force bases and enrolled in Northwestern University in 1967, where she became student body president and politically active against the war. A civil rights attorney, she now runs the Equal Justice Society in Northern California.

U.S. general on Vietnam War: ‘This was some enemy’

Vietnam War: A timeline of U.S. entanglement

Subscriber Only Resources

Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to The New York TImes Upfront  magazine.

LESSON PLAN

The vietnam war.

Pairing a Primary & Secondary Source

Read the Article

Fifty years ago, the U.S. ended direct military involvement in a war that tore the nation apart and fueled distrust in government.

Before reading.

1. Set Focus Pose these essential questions: Why do countries go to war? How do wars affect countries?

2. List Vocabulary Share some of the challenging vocabulary words in the article (see below) . Encourage students to use context to infer meanings as they read.

• protracted (p. 18)
• ideologies (p. 18)
• disillusioned (p. 19)
• conscripted (p. 20)
• stalemate (p. 20)
• reconciliation (p. 21)

3. Engage Have students examine the map on page 18. Ask: What did the demilitarized zone divide? Why do you think Vietnam divided into North and South Vietnam? Why do you think the two Vietnams reunified? Why do you think what used to be called Saigon is now called Ho Chi Minh City? Explain that the article answers these questions.

Analyze the Article

4. Read and Discuss Ask students to read the Upfront article about the Vietnam War. Review why the article is a secondary source. (It was written by someone who didn’t personally experience or witness the events.) Then pose these critical-thinking questions and ask students to cite text evidence when answering them:

• Which central ideas does the author introduce in the first section? Which of these ideas is developed in the first few paragraphs of the next section, “Fighting Communism”? (In the first section, the author introduces the ideas that the U.S. had been involved in Vietnam for nearly 20 years, that the involvement had turned into a war, that both North Vietnam and the U.S. were looking to end the war, and that the war had become very unpopular with Americans. The next section explains how U.S. involvement in Vietnam began.)
• What is the connection between the Cold War and the Vietnam War? (The Cold War was a conflict between the democracies of the West and the Communist nations led by the Soviet Union to spread their ideologies. President Dwight D. Eisenhower feared that if South Vietnam fell to Communist North Vietnam, then there would be a domino effect of Communist regimes taking control of the Asian continent. So he sent U.S. advisory troops to support South Vietnamese soldiers. Later presidents increased involvement.)
• What does the section header “The War at Home” indicate the section will be about? What caused the war at home? What effects did it have? (The section header indicates that the section will discuss some sort of conflict back in the U.S. related to the Vietnam War. The conflict was that more and more people were becoming critical of the war. Effects include protests against the war and a youth movement.)
• The last section explains that in Vietnam, the conflict is called the American War. Why do you think this is? (Responses will vary, but students should support their ideas with evidence, such as the text details about millions of U.S. soldiers being sent to fight in Vietnam, the anger Le Duc Tho expressed at the Paris Peace Accords, and North Vietnamese forces quickly overrunning the South after the cease-fire.)

5. Use the Primary Sources Use the Primary Source: Project, distribute, or assign in Google Classroom the PDF A Vietnam Veteran Remembers , which features excerpts from a personal essay published in 2017 by Phil Gioia about his experiences fighting in Vietnam. Discuss what makes the essay a primary source. (It provides firsthand evidence concerning the topic.) Have students read the excerpts and answer the questions below (which appear on the PDF without answers).

• How would you describe the tone and purpose of these excerpts from Gioia’s personal essay? (The tone can be described as reflective and straightforward as well as critical in certain parts. The purpose is to describe what it was like to fight during the Vietnam War and to provide a perspective on the effectiveness of U.S. efforts in Vietnam.)
• In the first paragraph, Gioia says “Very lofty.” What does he mean? What was the reality he encountered? (By “very lofty,” Gioia means that the goal of preventing South Vietnam from falling to Communism was noble but difficult to achieve. The reality he encountered was that most soldiers were fighting to simply survive and return home.)
• What is Gioia’s assessment of the North Vietnamese army? Which details help show why he thinks this? (Gioia saw the North Vietnamese army as the enemy because that was his job, but he also respected their skill and determination. His descriptions of them as being “good light infantry” and having an ability to “control the tempo of the war” shows that he recognized their skill. His commentary that their “ability to move troops and equipment south never seemed to slack” and that they ignored truce periods to strategic advantage shows he viewed them as determined.)
• What ideas does Gioia convey through the three questions he asks and answers at the end of his essay? (Through his three questions and responses, Gioia conveys the idea that it was very unlikely that the U.S. would have succeeded—no matter what it tried—in preventing South Vietnam from being defeated by North Vietnam and falling to Communism. He also conveys the idea that the war was so complex that even today it’s hard to recognize what lessons we should have learned from it.) 
• Based on the Upfront article and the excerpts from Gioia’s personal essay, why do you think there were so many student protests against the war in the late 1960s and early 1970s? (Students’ responses will vary but should be supported by evidence from both texts.)

Extend & Assess

6. Writing Prompt Read “Escape From Cuba” in the previous issue of Upfront . Based on that article and this one, why do you think one embargo on a Communist country was lifted but not the other one? Explain in a brief essay. 

7. Quiz Use the quiz to assess comprehension.

8. Classroom Debate Should the U.S. reinstate the military draft?

9. Speaking With Meaning Display a photo of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Ask: Why do you think the design for the memorial was originally criticized? Then have students research the memorial and Maya Lin’s vision for it. Bring the class together to discuss why today the memorial is seen as a powerful tribute to those who died in the war.

Download a PDF of this Lesson Plan

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Vietnam War: Conclusion

After evaluating these three different aspects, one obtains a deeper understanding of the complex and controversial nature surrounding the Vietnam War. Through the personal narratives, one learns of the many shared experiences of the war; however, the way in which individuals interpret these experiences differ. Finally, the public’s perspective of the Vietnam War differs from that of the veterans’ as the United States government has censored what perspectives were represented and circulated throughout the media.

Barry Romo, Vietnam veteran who then fought against the war, dies at 76

Barry Romo, a former Army officer in the Vietnam War who became a leading antiwar organizer and bore witness to devastating U.S. bombing runs on Hanoi during a 1972 visit to North Vietnam with activists including folk singer Joan Baez, died May 1 in Chicago. He was 76.

His death was announced by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group for which Mr. Romo served as a national coordinator for more than four decades. A spokesman, Roberto Clack, said Mr. Romo had a heart attack at home and was taken to a hospital, where he was declared dead.

During the height of the antiwar movement, Mr. Romo was a prominent voice among former military members who challenged Pentagon and White House narratives of a conflict that was winnable and necessary. Mr. Romo and other veterans — often wearing their old uniforms and fatigues — also added powerful symbolism to the wider protests by students, draft resisters, religious groups and others.

In April 1971, Mr. Romo organized convoys to bring thousands of veterans to Washington for an antiwar encampment known as Operation Dewey Canyon III, named after two U.S. military operations seeking to strike North Vietnamese bases. The veterans, camped on the National Mall, attended Senate hearings and staged rallies at Arlington National Cemetery and outside the Supreme Court and Pentagon.

On April 23, Mr. Romo joined hundreds of the veterans who lobbed their medals, discharge papers and war mementos onto the Capitol steps. Mr. Romo, who fought during the 1968 Tet Offensive launched by North Vietnamese forces, hurled his Bronze Star Medal and Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

Standing near Mr. Romo was former Navy lieutenant John F. Kerry, also a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “I am not doing this for any violent reasons but for peace and justice, and to try to make this country wake up once and for all,” said Kerry , who later was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, U.S. secretary of state and the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate.

After Mr. Romo and many of the veterans had left Washington, massive antiwar marches paralyzed many parts of the city on May 1. More than 7,000 people were arrested in what became one of the largest street confrontations of Vietnam era.

Yet the sight of the veterans’ medals clanking on the Capitol’s marble steps became one of the defining scenes from the weeks of protest — at a time when public opinion was increasingly questioning how long the war could drag on and at what cost. Four years later, the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), fell to the North Vietnamese.

In an essay in 1988, Mr. Romo looked back on the protest at the Capitol — “painful and angry thoughts filled our minds” — and recounted the death of nephew Bob Romo, who was killed by a North Vietnamese sniper in May 1968. “He drowned in his own blood,” Mr. Romo wrote.

He often retold the story of his nephew. For Mr. Romo, it was a key moment in his evolution from an eager Army enlistee to an antiwar leader. Mr. Romo signed up in 1966 as a supporter of the war. “I bought all the lines,” he recalled. His nephew was later drafted and put in an infantry brigade under Mr. Romo, who rose to become a first lieutenant.

“[My nephew] begged me to help him get out of the field,” Mr. Romo told NPR’s “Morning Edition.” “But I couldn’t help him.”

When his nephew was killed on patrol, the body couldn’t be recovered for 48 hours because of North Vietnamese fire. Already, Mr. Romo said his view of the war had changed, seeing the destruction of villages and the growing enmity toward the U.S. military even among South Vietnamese. The death of his nephew was a tipping point.

“My mind started to change when I could see the people didn’t give a damn, our allies didn’t want to fight and senior officers flew around in helicopters while we ran around the jungle with barely enough water to drink,” Mr. Romo told the Chicago Tribune in 1996. “My nephew’s death made me face the reality I was killing people for all the wrong reasons.”

After leaving the battlefield, Mr. Romo oversaw a training company at Fort Ord in California and was honorably discharged in January 1969. He soon became active in antiwar marches and veterans’ actions, and he was among more than 100 former military personnel at an event in Detroit in early 1971 to offer accounts of alleged military abuses and atrocities by U.S. forces.

The gathering, known as the Winter Soldier hearings, was also among the first forums to discuss the extent of psychological scars, including post-traumatic stress disorder, on veterans.

“Our slogan was ‘honor the warrior, not the war,’” said Mr. Romo, who began work in the national office of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1972. “It was important to overcome those kinds of differences.”

Mr. Romo returned to Southeast Asia in December 1972, traveling to the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, with Baez; Michael Allen, an associate dean at Yale Divinity School; and former Army Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor , a chief prosecutor at the post-World War II Nuremberg trials who became a staunch critic of the Vietnam War. Mr. Romo carried Christmas presents and letters for more than 500 U.S. prisoners of war.

During the two-week stay, the United States opened an intensive bombing campaign on the city even as peace talks were underway in Paris. The airstrikes were “worse than anything I was under in London during the blitz,” Taylor said.

The group said the bombing damaged civilian sites, including a 950-bed hospital. At one point, Mr. Romo and the others saw a woman digging in the rubble of the building in a residential area of Hanoi, shouting, “My son, my son, where are you?”

Much of Baez’s 1973 album “Where Are You Now, My Son?” was based on what the group experienced in Hanoi.

Barry Louis Romo was born in San Bernardino, Calif., on July 24, 1947. His father, a World War II veteran, worked as a meat cutter. His mother, who was born in England, was a homemaker. The couple met during the war.

Mr. Romo enlisted in the Army after graduating from high school and was sent to Vietnam in 1967 as a second lieutenant.

After the war, Mr. Romo helped guide Vietnam Veterans Against the War into other roles, including pressing for greater health-care coverage for people exposed to the military defoliant known as Agent Orange .

Later, Mr. Romo helped efforts in 2006 to establish an allied group, Iraq Veterans Against the War. He worked for the U.S. Postal Service, including as a local union leader, and retired in 2009.

His marriage to Alynne Kilpatrick ended in divorce. Survivors include two children.

In Mr. Romo’s apartment in Chicago, the walls had posters from antiwar events during the Vietnam years. There were also newspaper clippings and printouts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It would be nice to move on,” he once said. “But history keeps repeating itself.”

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In Berkeley Public Schools, a War Gives Rise to Unusual Tensions

Accusations of antisemitism in K-12 schools have fractured a city long known for its progressive ideals and inclusiveness.

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By Kurt Streeter

Kurt Streeter reported from Berkeley, Calif.

The controversy began with a walkout.

On Oct. 18, hundreds of Berkeley High School students, with the blessing of some of their teachers, left their classrooms in the middle of the day and gathered at a nearby park.

“Free Palestine!” they chanted. “Stop bombing Gaza!”

“ From the river to the sea !”

One of their teachers, Becky Villagran, thanked the crowd of roughly 150, telling them not to forget that the toll of the victims of the war in Gaza was more than a number.

Just as on the nearby campus of the University of California — famed since the 1960s for its marches, sit-ins and progressive ideals — students at Berkeley High have a long history of hitting the streets in dissent. In the 1960s, they walked out to oppose the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, they pushed to create ethnic studies courses. More recently, they have shown up in droves to advocate for Black Lives Matter, immigration reform, reproductive rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

But this walkout reverberated in unexpected ways through the Berkeley public school system and the city’s ordinarily tight-knit community.

Some Jewish students, and their self-described Zionist parents, felt frightened by what they saw and heard, including a vulgar shout about Zionism — a claim vigorously denied by demonstrators.

Reflecting the complexity surrounding this dispute — where symbols, slogans and flags have different meanings to supporters of both sides — some Israel-backing parents saw the march and others that followed at Berkeley public schools as hateful.

“Students were chanting, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’” said Stacey Zolt Hara, a Berkeley High parent who has helped organize families to fight against what they believe is a virulent strain of Jewish hatred in the Berkeley Unified School District.

“That chant is a call to wipe out Israel!”

This week, the division bursts onto the national stage. The Berkeley schools superintendent, Enikia Ford Morthel, is set to appear before a congressional committee in the most recent round of Republican-led inquiries into campus antisemitism. Similar hearings led last year to the high-profile resignations of the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania presidents and, more recently , to withering criticism aimed at Columbia’s president.

Berkeley’s public school system, home to roughly 9,000 students, is remarkably diverse. Arabic is the third most spoken language. The city’s sizable Jewish population is reflected in its schools, and students who have strong ties to Israel are not uncommon.

Despite the demographic variation, this is Berkeley, largely uniform in a particular way: It remains the rock-solid bastion of liberal thought that helped birth the 1960s protest movement. In this city of roughly 118,000 — smack in the middle of the tech-fueled Bay Area metropolis but still imbued with a good bit of funky, college town feel — families, teachers and even school administrators usually operate in lock step on matters of political and social significance.

The shock of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and the resulting bombardment of Gaza has changed the equation.

“There’s a definite fracture,” said one parent, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal — a common sentiment these days — while speaking outside a tense school board meeting on a recent night. “People who were just marching together for Black lives are now at each other’s throats.”

Ms. Ford Morthel was summoned to appear after the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a federal complaint buttressed by information put together by Berkeley residents who back Israel. The 41-page complaint has accused Berkeley’s public schools of allowing “severe and persistent” discrimination against Jewish students, including teachers’ being permitted to indoctrinate “students with antisemitic tropes and false information.”

The leaders of public schools in New York City and Montgomery County, Md., are also expected to appear before the committee, the first time K-12 districts have taken stage in House hearings zeroing in on the response by schools to student protests after the Oct. 7 attacks.

Ms. Ford Morthel has been tight-lipped about the request to testify. She released a statement delivered by the district’s chief spokesman: “Berkeley Unified celebrates our diversity and stands against all forms of hate and othering, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Much of the complaint focuses on the actions of several teachers within the district. One, an art teacher who allegedly showed controversial imagery to his class, including a fist with a Palestinian flag pounding through a Star of David, has been put on administrative leave.

Another teacher is Becky Villagran, a 41-year-old who has worked at Berkeley High for a dozen years and currently leads the history department in the school’s international baccalaureate program.

The complaint claims Ms. Villagran “expresses antisemitic stereotypes and defamations in class.” As an example of biased teaching, the complaint says that shortly after Oct. 7, Ms. Villagran required students to respond to the following question: “To what extent should Israel be considered an apartheid state?”

Ms. Villagran denies the assertions, calling them half-truths and lies.

She believes Israel was founded as a settler colonial state. She wears a Free Palestine pin to work. She is also adamant that she teaches the highly charged issues surrounding conflict involving Israel and its neighbors with fairness and through varied perspectives.

The notion that she is antisemitic?

“I’m Jewish, my mom is Jewish, I grew up Jewish,” Ms. Villagran says. “I’m not antisemitic. That makes no sense.”

Yes, she admits, she taught a lesson guided by the question about Israel and apartheid. “But we had just been studying apartheid for three months,” she counters. “The timing was just right.”

Ms. Villagran also allows that she showed a film that critiqued Israel, as noted in the complaint. For balance, however, she says she gave the students articles showcasing counterarguments. The result, she says, was a classroom buzzing with debate.

“Some kids said it’s not helpful to call Israel an apartheid state, that it’s more about human rights violations,” she said. “Some kids said there are apartheid-like aspects, but the reason is because of security. The lesson was meant to provide both arguments and let the kids decide.”

Ms. Villagran’s case is but one example of how Berkeley’s school system is now saddled by claims and counterclaims stemming from the Israel-Hamas war.

After the initial protest, more walkouts took place, and public school board meetings turned heated and sometimes ugly.

These days, people on both sides tell stories of being called vile names or fearing for their safety.

There are activist students who stand up for a cease-fire and push the district to teach them more about Palestine.

There are Jewish students who have taken to hiding their Star of David pendants or their Jewish summer camp T-shirts, and who back the idea that antisemitism in their schools is a severe problem.

There are students, even some from proudly Zionist families, who chalk up taunts about their religion as only a mild bother, the stuff of youthful, misguided teasing — sometimes coming from close friends.

There’s a group calling itself Berkeley Unified School District Jewish Parents for Collective Liberation, backing the Palestinian cause and arguing that Jewish students are thriving in their K-12 system.

Opposing them: Berkeley Jews in School, a faction of parents and families formed to press their belief that antisemitism is pervasive on school grounds and at protests.

Ilana Pearlman is one of the parents involved with Berkeley Jews in School. Her son, a freshman at Berkeley High, is mixed — part white, part Black and Jewish — and she moved to Berkeley because of its reputation for open-minded liberalism. If any city would embrace all aspects of her child’s identity, she believed, Berkeley would be the one.

But her son was in the art class when the teacher showed students the image of the Star of David being punched through with a fist. He heard another teacher speak at a school board meeting, calling Israel a settler colony.

Later, she was crestfallen to find that her son seemed to be keeping his Jewish identity under wraps at school. When she saw the ancestry project he was working on for an ethnic studies class, she was surprised to find he had only included his Black heritage.

“What about your Jewish side?” she recalls asking.

“Mom, it’s not the right climate for that,” he told her.

Kurt Streeter writes about identity in America — racial, political, religious, gender and more. He is based on the West Coast. More about Kurt Streeter