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

[Hussmann54]

optimistically: a Draw.
realistically: a tactical ass-kicking and a waste of good time, resources and worst of all, lives

 

[SomethingUnrelated]

In my school, we were taught that it was a monumentally terrible war for everyone involved.

Basically, we got some background on the geo-political tensions leading to it: Cuban Missile Crisis, the moderate Red Scare that caused, success (relatively speaking) of the Korean War, ect. We're taught that the power vacuum that France left when it pulled out of Indochina freaked the U.S. brass to no end. The U.S. actively supported the democratic south while the U.S.S.R. acknowledged and supported the Communist north. The south was generally outnumbered and outfought so the U.S. kept stepping up support. Then came the Gulf of Tonkin incident. NV torpedo boats engaged a U.S. destroyer, which the brass used as an excuse to go ahead with an invasion to bolster the south.

I won't go any further unprompted but the bottom line is that I was taught that it was a war fought because of a fear of communist takeover; that war proved to do more harm than good, and due to the South's fall, was an utter failure. It is described as the war that shattered the idea of American invincibility and the first war to truly demonstrate to the U.S. the power of war weariness in a democratic society.

Ironically enough, the strategies and tactics of the Viet Cong and the NVA were rather similar to those of George Washington and the Continental Army.

How much did you do about the situation at home (public reaction), and about the ideas of Containment and the Domino Theory with regard to the war? Did the thinking behind, and reasons for entering feature much in your course?

 

[darth gditch]

How much did you do about the situation at home (public reaction), and about the ideas of Containment and the Domino Theory with regard to the war? Did the thinking behind, and reasons for entering feature much in your course?

We spent one lecture covering containment and domino theory and half a lecture on the homefront issues. We spent 3 lectures total on Vietnam and the reasons for/results of. The public reaction lecture was primarily focused on the general societal upheaval during the 60's and 70's. War weariness was only part of it. That's all we really had time for, considering the class was covering from the end of Reconstruction through September 11.


I read up on the subject some more on my own, but I still think my general history class did Vietnam justice considering it was not the focus of the class and textbooks have been filled discussing that one war.

 

[darth gditch]

EDIT: double post, sorry.

 

[SomethingUnrelated]

We spent one lecture covering containment and domino theory and half a lecture on the homefront issues. We spent 3 lectures total on Vietnam and the reasons for/results of. The public reaction lecture was primarily focused on the general societal upheaval during the 60's and 70's. War weariness was only part of it. That's all we really had time for, considering the class was covering from the end of Reconstruction through September 11.


I read up on the subject some more on my own, but I still think my general history class did Vietnam justice considering it was not the focus of the class and textbooks have been filled discussing that one war.

Sounds like a solid framework for understanding happened in Vietnam, to my knowledge, even if it wasn't the focus of your course. Thanks for answering my questions!

 

[capgun2713]

Taught? Over 12 years of public school education(graduation on saturday, woo!), I think its been mentioned all of twice. For all of 5 minutes maybe. Barely a footnote.

 

[darth gditch]

We spent one lecture covering containment and domino theory and half a lecture on the homefront issues. We spent 3 lectures total on Vietnam and the reasons for/results of. The public reaction lecture was primarily focused on the general societal upheaval during the 60's and 70's. War weariness was only part of it. That's all we really had time for, considering the class was covering from the end of Reconstruction through September 11.


I read up on the subject some more on my own, but I still think my general history class did Vietnam justice considering it was not the focus of the class and textbooks have been filled discussing that one war.

Sounds like a solid framework for understanding happened in Vietnam, to my knowledge, even if it wasn't the focus of your course. Thanks for answering my questions!

You are most welcome. I always enjoy sharing my love of history. ^_^

 

[Saint of M]

We covered part of it in high school, haven't taken the US history in college yet. Pretty much we screed up royally. We lost, we should have stayed out, this killed the image of The US being the good guys for most of America.

 

[IThinkImASofa]

Well there was that alien ghost right? that made clicky noises and skinned people and hung them from trees. Oh and then the governor of California covered himself with mud and kicked his ass/face in. Ya that's what i remember.

That should give some indication as to the state of the educational system over here.

 

[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.

Total dead: ~1,912,846-3,992,846
Overwhelmingly civilians. Other effects include the defense of one brutal authoritarian regime by the U.S. until it was overtaken by another brutal authoritarian regime from the north.

And then you have this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Agent-orange-deformities-vietnam.jpg

500,000 million children born with birth defects from the spraying of highly poisonous Agent Orange on 12% of the ENTIRE Country, and ten million hectares of agricultural land. We did to Vietnam what Rome did to Carthage.

So are you trolling, or are you going to tell me how the Holocaust had some good effects too, like all the great fiction and art inspired by it? You're damn right I'm Godwin's Lawing your ass.

Maybe I worded it extremely wrong, but I'm just trying to explain how I was taught. We were taught about what Agent Orange caused, how we burned so much jungle in Vietnam in vain, and how it was difficult to tell civilian from soldier causing so many unwarranted deaths. I didn't mean to say the war was good or anything.

 

[Instinct Blues]

As far as I remember we went over about every aspect of the war and why we entered it and what the whole point of it was. I was also taught that we did some really unscrupulous things while we were over there and we also got to watch one of my favorite movies which showed some of those acts with a little bit of hollywood fiction, Platoon. Goddamn I love that movie.

 

[GodofCider]

The Vietnam War is taught to us like any other war. We were given some examples of both sides' views, we were told about what we fucked up, what we did well, and what explanations were given for each event. We do focus a lot on what happened in the U.S. at the time but that's not to say the whole war aspect was left out.

That about sums it up for me as well. Although for my overview of the conflict, there were definite overtones of the U.S. having been on the 'more' losing side; given the odd resolution.

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

Everything I know about 'Nam I learned from Tropic Thunder, Forrest Gump, and Apocalypse Now

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

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.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santanaya, 1905

30 years from now, kids will be glossing over the war on terror...

 

[obi2012]

We had it tough in our class, actually likening it as the flip of the revolutionary war, with the superior side losing. We had a veteran come in and speak to our class who said the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was faked, he was in the special forces, we were shown documentaries, told about the Search and Destroy missions and Agent Orange, all of that, and we were even asked at the end of the unit if we thought we should have been involved or not. On the side, I was reading "The People's History of the United States" and the portion on Vietnam made me want to vomit, it was a very bad portion of our history, and we should have done many things differently.

 

[Karlaxx]

We've only just gotten to Vietnam with only a few classes left in the whole year, so thus far it has been: "Commies are in North Vietnam. We go through the usual series of phasic involvement escalation. Ground troops are sent in, people get drafted, nobody lieks that, eventually we pull out and South Vietnam falls in like three seconds."

Also, my history teacher was part of the first round of the lottery system of conscription, being 18 in 1968 after they changed from drafting. We got a fairly detailed explanation of that change and some anecdotes of what it was like having friends get drafted and die, and to go to OSU under martial law. Some of the nefarious stuff, like Agent Orange, was mentioned in passing, but the class was not a detailed list of every fucked up thing American soldiers did by a long shot.

 

[Therumancer]

Inspired by the topic asking how the War of Independence is taught in the UK.

Basically, I ask because, generally, it's held that the US entered Vietnam (amongst other countries during the Cold War, like Korea) for what can be described as less than noble reasons, and then making a bit of a mess of it. For example, at my school, we shortly studied the 'Search and Destroy' tactics, which as far as I understand, was basically US soldiers walking into Vietnam villages and wiping them clean out, regardless of whether the inhabitants were innocent or not. That's one small part of a part of the course on US foreign policy we did.

Anyhow, back to the point. What sort of stance is taken when the Vietnam war is taught to US students? Under what light do they relay the information to you? How is the Vietnam War taught in the US education system?

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

It's taught pretty accuratly, but glossed over because of all of the political issues that revolve around it. Basically The Baby Boomers are still alive, and in control of most of society, and it's hard for them to make themselves look good in any respect. You still have hard feelings between veterans of that paticular war, and the young liberals who decided to treat them like scum when they got back home, and slandered the war. That slander being where a lot of the misconceptions come from. I'm sure a lot of countries who want to put an anti-US spin on things take that very seriously.

The bottom line is that The US was involved for reasons that were actually too noble. We made a big deal about protecting democracies from communist takeovers. Veitnam's goverment decided to take us up on the offer, as they were dealing with a communist revolution and claimed to want to be a progressive democracy. We pretty much put on the white cowboy hat, saddled up the white horse, and went riding out to save the day. Unfortunatly, the guys we went in to defend were simply put a giant group of corrupt morons who had no real interest in ever becoming a progressive democracy.

Veitnam and The War On Terror are compared nowadays because largely our operations were defensive, we pretty much formed a defensive line to hold the commies off from our "progressive" allies, this is what the whole DMZ thing is about. This pretty much amounted to giving all initiative to the other side, and lead to constant attacks on American defensive emplacements and terrorist strikes deep into allied territory. We literally had these guys building tunnels under the DMZ. We also had a very familiar sounding problem of dealing with an enemy that wasn't really wearing uniforms or acting within an established military structure. As such there were all these outcries because the enemy, when it was being engaged, was in many cases indistinguisable from civilians, because it was a bloody uprising. It's sort of like if we all decided to wage a massive uprising against the US goverment, we wouldn't be wearing uniforms.

The goverment was basically put into a position of not being willing to actually quash domestic sentiment or invoke full war time powers, and thus try and run the war in a way that was acceptable to a bunch of hippies (and in this case I mean it literally) which as you know is impossible.

So basically we sat around like drooling retards, refusing to engage in any kind of major offensive action, while we let ourselves be chipped away, and the troops got to hear about how they were a group of monsters for killing all these civilians and babies and so on.

Now there *IS* some truth that we had some people in the military who weren't as moronic as others. Basically it was possible to determine where a lot of the insurgents were coming from, and as part of defensive operations various villages and such were wiped out along the DMZ. The nature of the enemy making it ambigious as to whether civilians or the enemy was being killed. Not that the hippies making the criticisms cared much, being generally anti-war, and even in some cases fairly pro-communist.

Cases with American troops slaughtering villages are out there, but all of those "War crimes" are viwed dubiously but all but the most liberal, as they were political constructions dealing with the turmoil of the time. War is ugly, and sometimes you do ugly things to stay alive, never mind win. Nobody decided "hey let's go kill a bunch of civilians for fun!" it was more "we've been tracking attacks on our patrols, and have determined that the enemy has to be basing itself here" and then heading to the appropriate village and wiping it out. Some will say it reduced enemy attacks in the region, others will say "OMG, OMG, OMG, you wiped out a village" without any other real justification. Sadly most of the trials were conducted to appease the latter camp.

Another ambigious question is of course the use of chemical weapons like "Agent Orange". The basic issue was that we had tons of insurgents hiding in the jungle and thick foilage and sending out patrols into the brush could be fairly suicidal, theirback yard and all. One thing we did do is dump tons of defoliant to wipe out the jungle, and anyone in it. These weapons however wound up having lasting effects on the people who survived, and sometimes their children, thus it's considered to have been especially cruel.

Basically this went on for a while, it was apparent the commies weren't giving up, and also that the guys we were defending were not the guys we went in to defend, and our troops came come. The troops were of course met with violence, protests, and cries of "baby killer" by rioting hippies, as opposed to any kind of thanks of welcome.

The basic situation is one where you have a line drawn between a lot of those who served in the military at the time, and a lot of the hippies who opposed the war. The hippies in paticular are in a position where they don't want to admit to being wrong, because they feel the principles and and the whole "peace at any price" mentality are more important than anything. Arguably the baby boomers pretty much tied up the US military so we haven't been able to win a war since they have had a voice, every one of them has been a moral mess, that has derailed into an unwinnable police action.

It's been a long time, so I could be remembering this wrong, but when it was handled in school for me, things were portrayed from both perspectives, defined as "the war front" and "the home front". The basic situation being one where we probably should have looked before we lept, and actually made sure a goverment held the principles we were going to defend. That said, we also pretty much shot ourselves in the foot because we went in there, took a defensive posture, and were pretty much reactive through the whole thing. Success in war comes down to offense, destroying the other side, and making them react to you.

Hippies love to act like Veitnam was some kind of defeat for the "evil US military industrial complex" but really, it wasn't. We were never defeated militarily, we simply left because there was no real goal to fight for. If we had gone on the offense for real, we could have destroyed the enemy, but politics prevented this from being done. Then again there is also the question of whether the guys we would have been propping up, really deserved that. I mean even someone who hates communism can look at that absolute travesty of humanity we were defending and question whether they were worth it. Basically, we just couldn't justify continueing the war, based on the ideals that sent us there.

Many people will of course disagree with me, and that right there is why the war is so heavily glossed over. Too many people with too many emotions involved in this one, especially seeing as the issues involved are still ongoing with the wars we're involved in now.

In general if people start bringing out all these "researched" massacres that US troops were held accountable for and conviced of in the US, chances are your dealing with someone who is more than a bit of an exteremist, because those are pretty much the definition of "political trials" and even now there are people who thing we're dealing with what were some travesties of justice, committed against guys that did the hard things that nobody else wanted to, and then were left to hang by their own goverment when they needed political scapegoats.

 

[Radical AdZ]

As a British student, neither Vietnam (nor the Cold War) played much of a part in either my GCSE or A Level History. In fact most of what I know about Vietnam comes from George Carlin's "Muhammed Ali" monologue, which includes the following telling (and in my opinion still relevant) comments:-

"And now, of course, we're leaving Vietnam... (makes explosion sound) We're leaving through Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. It's the overland route. It's the long way out. Ya gotta go through China and Russia to get out that way. What'll we tell them, man? "We'll only be here six weeks. Just looking for the Ho Chi Minh Trail!" Wow. Maybe they'll buy it, y'know. Of course, you have to remember why we're over there in the first place... (pause, then applause) Oh, yeah! It always comes to me. To free those people... So they can have industry- yeah! US industry- YEAH! Those are the middle two letters of the word 'industry' - US. And that is our job around the world: run in, free some people and whip a little industry on them. "Here's your industry. Cool it awhile, willya?" So that they can have the benefits of industry that we have come to enjoy... (coughs loudly)"

"Then you have to have to remember the sexual side of Vietnam, which a lot of people don't notice. The Hearst newspapers notice it, of course. Yes, they're into sex on anything. You check the wishing well or the sewing patterns and there's a little something in there. But they're always afraid of pulling out. That's their big problem, y'know? "Pull out? Doesn't sound manly to me, Bill. I say leave it in there and get the job done!" 'Cause that is, after all, what we're doing to that country, right?
Yeah. And we have always been good at that, you must admit. We, uh, took care of, uh, the blacks, took care of the Indians. I consider the South just another minority that was screwed by the US government. I have no prejudice against them. They got it, too."

 

[agentironman]

Mainly that you can't win an unpopular war. When the country is displeased with the death tolls and the misdeeds of soldiers comes to light the populace expresses their outrage and you have to leave the conflict or escalate things to bring it to a quick end.

This means you have to have the media spin it in the governments favor and also win over international support.

The first Iraq war was a complete success. Televised with encamped reporters told of the international forces swift movement to take back Kuwait and bring order to the region. Where the new Iraq war has dragged on with no real goals or aims other than to line the pockets of people who are already rich. So, it is unpopular.