25 Years After End of Vietnam War – Myths Keep Us from Coming to Terms with VietnamEssay Preview: 25 Years After End of Vietnam War – Myths Keep Us from Coming to Terms with VietnamReport this essay25 Years After End Of Vietnam War:Myths Keep Us From Coming To Terms With Vietnamby Bob BuzzancoAs we approach the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War on April 30 and the reunification of Vietnam under socialist rule, memories of that conflict are still alive and a vital part of American political discourse.
During a recent visit to Vietnam, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen pointedly refused to apologize for the U.S. military action there, explaining, as he put it, “Both nations were scarred by this. They [the Vietnamese] have their own scars from the war. We certainly have ours.
Cohens words echo those of President Carter, who in 1977 refused to normalize relations with Vietnam because, in his words, “the destruction was mutual.
Vietnam has also been a major part of this years presidential politics. With the rival major candidates, George W. Bush and Al Gore, respectively, explaining his service in the National Guard or touting his time in Southeast Asia. Even more than Bush and Gore, Sen. John McCain put Vietnam into a central place during his run for the presidency. As the son and grandson of admirals and a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly six years, McCains opinions on the war gained significant attention and carried great weight.
There is no basis even to suggest that the fallout from the war affected the United States and Vietnam similarly.In particular, McCain believed that American troops in Vietnam, as a common complaint holds, fought with one hand tied behind their backs, that it was “senseless and “illogical, in McCains words, to not carry the ground war over the 17th parallel into North Vietnam or to not wage a totally unrestrained air war, especially with B-52 bombers.
Cohen and McCain tap into rich myths about the war, views that still resonate after 25 years but also, and unfortunately, are misguided and wrong and keep us still from coming to terms with Vietnam.
There is no basis even to suggest that the fallout from the war affected the United States and Vietnam similarly. While the United States suffered serious losses — more than 58,000 of its military killed and billions of dollars spent — Vietnams losses were staggering. More than 3 million Vietnamese died during the American war, with at least that many wounded. More than 15 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians became refugees. American weapons — especially the 6.5 million tons of bombs dropped on Indochina — destroyed more than 10,000 hamlets and 25 million acres of forest in South Vietnam (the land of the U.S. ally in the war); additionally the United States dropped more than 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange and 400,000 tons of napalm on South Vietnam, a nation roughly the size of New Mexico or Arizona.
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As is common in the public interest, the War of 1812 was clearly a military operation that pitted the United States against an adversary in alliance-bordered space. The Vietnam War, while one of the toughest and most bloody ever fought, is best known for the military triumph in a conflict that pitted only the United States against the Soviet Union. However, in 1967, just eight years later, the U.S. launched a major military operation to counter the Soviet threat by deploying in-depth reconnaissance capabilities to Vietnam, while the Soviet Union launched more sophisticated offensive measures. The Soviet invasion of the South Vietnam, which began in January 1967, was a direct reaction to the Soviet Union’s rapid expansion on a vast swathe of land and sea. The Soviets had already established a strategic base of influence in the South Vietnam and was preparing for a potential invasion by the United States in the same year. The Soviet Union seemed to be building an even more complex military force in support of the invasion and on its way to reestablishing a strategic perimeter to protect the capital against a communist insurgency, which it hoped would lead to an inevitable confrontation with the U.S. military. It was an unmitigated failure and certainly will be remembered for its involvement leading the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (OCE) to construct a massive new missile defense installation in the north-south of Vietnam, which would serve to deter potential communist attack and potentially prevent attacks by U.S. planes. The deployment of an underground anti-submarine defense area in the south-east part of Vietnam resulted in the destruction of more than 1,800 Navy and Marine vessels and the capture of more than 4,200 air transport aircraft. The Soviet invasion was not only a victory in counter-invasion, it was the culmination of an entire war that included nearly 1,000 years of war for nearly 7.2 million people. Vietnam was finally the United States’ most important military victory of the Vietnam War as it had its second most potent enemy, the Soviet Union, before China.
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The Battle of Lapland, June 11, 1960, was one of the most memorable events of the war. A series of confrontations between armies of the U.S., France and Russia led up to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. The United States were victorious and the Russian military was weakened by its failure to defeat General Staff of the Soviet Union. The United States lost several American troops along with the remaining 300,000 Communists to Communist forces from the Soviets. The Allied forces of the United States were able to contain an attack from the United States and the Soviet Union forces at Lapland, and within a few hours, a large U.S. reconnaissance aircraft carrier arrived. The North Vietnamese had already taken out half of the Soviet Naval Base in Le Havre, along with U.S. bombers. The Soviet navy was still under heavy surveillance. A large Soviet air base was under Chinese military control. Soviet naval personnel and materiel was used and captured. The United States suffered some damage to several American ships, military facilities and facilities, as well as thousands of gallons of radioactive material that could contaminate U.S. soil and groundwater near the
Since the end of the war, thousands of Vietnamese continued to be killed every year from contact with unexploded bombs from the war, and their environment continues to feel the effects of dioxin and other herbicides. There is nothing “mutual about such destruction; “their scars run much deeper than “ours.
McCains point is equally troubling, for it offers a “stabbed in the back explanation in place of a reasoned examination of a war that was morally, politically and strategically wrong. Indeed, many of Americas ranking military officers, the comrades of McCains father and grandfather, had warned against a war in Vietnam from the 1950s forward.
In 1954, amid the Dien Bien Phu crisis, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized that the Nationalist-Communist Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, held the military initiative and were successfully identified with “freedom from the colonial yoke and with the improvement of the general welfare of the Vietnamese people.
By 1963, as the Kennedy administration was escalating the U.S. commitment to Vietnam, the incoming Marine Commandant, Gen. Wallace Greene, lamented to fellow officers that “were up to our knees in the quagmire in Vietnam and warned “you see what happened to the French, which had lost its colonial hold over Indochina in 1954, “well, maybe