How is the Vietnam War taught in the U.S?

[HalfTangible]

Mostly our studies focused on the fact it was the first war that we ever saw on television, which made the horror all the more real for us. It was explained in government (history hasn't made it to that point yet) as a war started as part of a policy of containment towards communism. Otherwise, though, it's generally glossed over, which i found odd considering that junior college made Abraham Lincoln look like an idiot (essentially by saying he fired all of his commanders in the civil war because none of them could invade virginia properly)

 

[Scars Unseen]

Most schools just kinda gloss over it, they instead focus on the Home Issues at the time, and not the fact that technically the US won the Vietnam War

They won all the battles, but the North got to annex South Vietnam, which was exactly what the US was trying to prevent. So I'd say tactical victory, strategic loss.

Not only that, we were in truth entirely ineffective on a military level (partially due to the gradual escalation of the war). We killed lots of NVN forces. They sent more. We destroyed their bridges. They built more. We bombed their power plants. They brought generators. We took villages. When we left, the NVN troops came back. Nothing we did gave us a tangible advancement towards victory. We just racked up an impressive body count. Go us.

At least it shows that the US frontliners were notably better at their jobs than the NVA and VC frontliners were at theirs.

The Americans have the same problem now. Their soldiers are somewhere in the region of a fuckton better than their enemies are yet that doesn't really carry it when your enemies literally blend in and out of the land and the civilian population. Both of which are used, at least today, as a shield. The kind of shield you can't just hit to break the arm that holds it.

I'm basically saying that trying to fight guerillas isn't something uniformed front line armies are used to or particularly good at.

Which is, of course, why we're an independent nation in the first place. Sucks when the circumstances of your own origin come back and bite you in the ass.

 

[Merkavar]

would probably rather forget it.

like some others have said those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

i would think Korea And Vietnam wars would be a lot more important to teach than any other modern war.

 

[Hawk eye1466]

People hear tend to get their information on the Vietnam War more through documentaries and war films than through textbooks. Oh it's covered and all but more as just a part of Cold War than a subject in and of itself. What i heard about Vietnam in school was anecdotal, sense a number of my teachers had actually served in the war.

My high school chemistry teacher Mr. Siegel liked to tell the students a little war story at the school assembly on Veteran's Day. He did the most Hilarious Vietnamese accent you ever heard.
<spoiler= the story, if you're interested> He and his squad (he was the commander) were out on patrol when they encountered an enemy unit in the middle of field of rice paddies. No one was hit in the initial firefight, but they ended-up pinned in a ditch. I can't recall why they didn't call in air support (broken radio, danger close or something). The real problem was that the sun was setting, and NO ONE wants to be stuck waste deep in a rice paddy in the middle of enemy territory at night. In frustration one of the marines yelled out. "God dam it! Why can't you g**ks just go home!" Then they heard a voice yell back "We ARE home! When you go home?" Odd way to start a dialog going but it worked. After confirming that neither side had suffered casualties, Siegel (I forget his rank at the time) asked if the commander if he would like to continue fighting, the response was negative. Unfortunately neither side was willing to be the first to pull back, due to a mixture of distrust and pride. Mr Siegel suggested that they withdraw simultaneously one man at a time. The Vietnamese commander agreed, but then ANOTHER issue came up:
"We send him out on the count of three"
"what?"
"count of three"
"what is that?"
Apparently the Vietnamese commander had never learned to count in English. Fortunately, English is not the only language Mr. Siegel is fluent in.
"Parlez-vous Francais?"
"Oui"
"Nous allons sur le compte de trois"
"Bien"
So the first two guys made it out okay, and they just continued counting down until Mr Siegel and the enemy commander were left. They said their goodbyes and departed.

Later when Siegel was back at camp, he relayed the story to his commanding officer. He gave mr. Siegel a strange look and then said:
"Siegel, I do NOT want to see any paperwork on this."
<youtube=_d8C4AIFgUg>

You have the greatest teacher ever.

 

[ImmortalDrifter]

Korea was a U.N. operation. But Vietnam is just another piece of history. It was covered as well as WWII, at least in my classes.

A lot of the search and destroy operations you refer to, didn't go down like that. Most of the time a squad of soldiers would track groups of Vietcong to their hideouts, which sometime were civilian centers, and torch the place. We didn't slaughter them for no reason, but yea civilians died. Such is war.

In my belief we lost Vietnam the second we entered. It was a mistake made by misguided paranoia and a lack of good judgement. Stains befall every nation, and mine is no different.

 

[Zabriskie Point]

I'm in 9th grade and I haven't been taught anything about it. The only things i know I learned from media.

 

[Ilyak1986]

Most schools just kinda gloss over it, they instead focus on the Home Issues at the time, and not the fact that technically the US won the Vietnam War

They won all the battles, but the North got to annex South Vietnam, which was exactly what the US was trying to prevent. So I'd say tactical victory, strategic loss.

Not only that, we were in truth entirely ineffective on a military level (partially due to the gradual escalation of the war). We killed lots of NVN forces. They sent more. We destroyed their bridges. They built more. We bombed their power plants. They brought generators. We took villages. When we left, the NVN troops came back. Nothing we did gave us a tangible advancement towards victory. We just racked up an impressive body count. Go us.

At least it shows that the US frontliners were notably better at their jobs than the NVA and VC frontliners were at theirs.

The Americans have the same problem now. Their soldiers are somewhere in the region of a fuckton better than their enemies are yet that doesn't really carry it when your enemies literally blend in and out of the land and the civilian population. Both of which are used, at least today, as a shield. The kind of shield you can't just hit to break the arm that holds it.

I'm basically saying that trying to fight guerillas isn't something uniformed front line armies are used to or particularly good at.

Ya know, there's all this talk about "can't hit that shield to break the arm".

Genghis Khan would have said "there's an arm holding a shield. We should break that arm."

And he did.

Honestly it seems to me that in a way, the Geneva Conventions are sort of like gun laws=-they're only a hindrance to one side, because criminals will break it anyway.

 

[sir.rutthed]

For all the people quoting my last post: I completely agree with what most of you are saying. If our leaders learned from Vietnam/Korea, we'd be in a much better situation right now. It's wrong and irresponsible to do such a poor job learning from the past, but that's the way it is. I think we should learn from it and turn our shame into something positive, but I doubt that'll happen in my lifetime.

As far as High School goes, it's kinda glossed over. We cover up until WWII usually, and by then the year's over. I can tell you that a lot of us aren't proud of what we did over there and would probably rather forget it.

That sums up my experience anyhow. I really can't remember anything really pertaining to the vietnam war except for my literature class using it as an excuse to watch pearl harbor. The movie not a documentary.

Please for the love of everything tell me you're joking. Your teachers did realize Pearl Harbor was in WW2, right? And it had absolutely nothing to do with Vietnam? And it's horrible historically speaking? Or theatrically speaking for that matter? I mean jeeze, if you're just gonna watch a movie about it make it Apocalypse Now, or even Forrest Gump.

 

[Swifteye]

For all the people quoting my last post: I completely agree with what most of you are saying. If our leaders learned from Vietnam/Korea, we'd be in a much better situation right now. It's wrong and irresponsible to do such a poor job learning from the past, but that's the way it is. I think we should learn from it and turn our shame into something positive, but I doubt that'll happen in my lifetime.

As far as High School goes, it's kinda glossed over. We cover up until WWII usually, and by then the year's over. I can tell you that a lot of us aren't proud of what we did over there and would probably rather forget it.

That sums up my experience anyhow. I really can't remember anything really pertaining to the vietnam war except for my literature class using it as an excuse to watch pearl harbor. The movie not a documentary.

Please for the love of everything tell me you're joking. Your teachers did realize Pearl Harbor was in WW2, right? And it had absolutely nothing to do with Vietnam? And it's horrible historically speaking? Or theatrically speaking for that matter? I mean jeeze, if you're just gonna watch a movie about it make it Apocalypse Now, or even Forrest Gump.

I live in south carolina which has pretty much the worst educational system in the country. And I was in special classes that were even worse off. I may be getting my information wrong (you can take that as more proof if you'd like) But that's the closest I can get as to information regarding vietnam. I mean I know what happened nowadays but not because of school I just had to learn it on my own time.

 

[infohippie]

I never thought I'd say this, but I wish we'd been taught even as much as the Americans.
My school (an Australian one) didn't cover Vietnam at all. All the history I can remember doing was a bit from the Middle Ages to Enlightenment, lots and lots of really fucking boring Australian Colonial history, and a fair chunk on World War 1, concentrating on Gallipoli of course. We only touched very briefly on WW2, and didn't learn much of anything that happened after that.
Every year, it was a really nationalistic class - if it wasn't part of the lead-up to the founding of Australia, or it didn't involve Australians directly and in a fairly major way, we didn't get taught it. I ended up just barely passing any of those classes because I was so tired of hearing about nothing but sheep, ANZACs, and Aboriginals over and over again that I just stopped paying attention.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

We covered it for a decent amount of time in my World History class this year, I think. How the media greatly exaggerated how bad the war was going and barely showed any positive events, etc. I thought I got a pretty good explanation of it.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

In my History class, we were pretty much taught it was an illegal and tragic war resulting in many US csualties, where the US intervened in another nations civil war in a misuse of our military that resulted in our government passing the war powers act to keep something like that from happening again.

 

[LobsterFeng]

I remember being rushed through it really fast. I don't think it was so much of the fact that we're embarrassed to teach it, it's just part of the last unit, and teachers never have enough time to go through the whole lesson plan.

 

[Chris^^]

It was more a matter of fact thing, there were Australians.

did your book omit the troops from South Korea, The Phillipines, Thailand and New Zealand who were also roped in to fight and die for Americas war?

Nope, we were only told about the Australians. They must have been pretty impressive to get an entire sentence to their contribution to the war when it was otherwise painted as a solely American operation.

have a look at the Many Flags initiative if you want to know more, the troops from other countries did some pretty brutal fighting, especially the Koreans but they never seem to get a mention. Mind you try and find anything favourable about the South Vietnamese army, they were a lot more competent than they're given credit for, for example during the battle of Ia Drang valley (where We Were Soldiers is set) more than 4000 South Vietnamese were present...

 

[sabercrusader]

snip

Our goal was to prevent North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam. We failed to achieve our goal and so we lost the war. You can win every battle and still lose the war. For an example look at... well... Vietnam.

But the facts don't lie. When the US withdrew we had achieved out goal. We had prevented North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam. We had set up a peace treaty and that was the end of that. We withdrew and went home, having achieved our goal from a tactical standpoint. It was only after we left the North Vietnamese broke the Peace Treaty and was able to win

We still lost our objective, we were still giving aid to SV when it fell and we were still a part of the war, just on a different standpoint, even if we had pulled out when there was a peace treaty, it didn't stop the North Vietnamese to attack the South, the South fell to communisim, and we failed our goal. You can't go over it by just saying that we left when we had THOUGHT we stopped it so we won, you have to look at the fact that we were still helping them becuase we still didn't want them to be taken over and turned communist. This was our goal, at least in the public view, of the war and we failed it, pure and simple.

I'm also not saying that we lost against a "ragtag group of militia", I think that the reason we lost the Vietnam war was because of the troubles back home with the goverment lying to the already anti-war public.Militarily, we would have won, it just would have taken time, but war isn't completely about just military power,it's also about the homefront and politics. Militarily, we won the Vietnam war, politically, we lost our objective, which means that we lost the war as a whole.

 

[Canid117]

Our goal was to prevent North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam.

There was no North Vietnam and south Vietnam, most of the VC were communist fighters from the South.......

The idea that there was some kind of a battle line is a popular misunderstanding.

Oh Hai map of Vietnam from 1969! I didn't see you there!

 

[Dectomax]

Most schools just kinda gloss over it, they instead focus on the Home Issues at the time, and not the fact that technically the US won the Vietnam War

No, no you did not. You Lost. Your goal was to stop Communism, which failed. You lost, just as the French did before you. I'm Glad Britain had the sense not to enter that pointless conflict.