Vietnam War and its Effects to Americans

You lost a relay station to the fight, and you gained a friend. You compromised one principle and fulfilled another. You learned . . . that state of war is not either bad; it may not beat a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not both(prenominal)thing to urge on at (O'Brien 204).

All of these post-war cliches miss the point of the Vietnam War. Every respective(prenominal) and every realm must come up against a wall which breaks him or her and it. The individual and nation confront their limitations and learns how it was haywire in order to awaken, to be genuine, and to end its hubris, its arrogance, its belief in its infallibility and indestructibility. O'Brien's "adding things up" might apply to a " lesson" war like the war against global fascism of the 1940s, but it is simply besides glib for Vietnam. Why did O'Brien fight in war he believed morally wrong even before he was drafted? here the national and individual wickedity come together. The leaders of the nation are morally responsible for creating a situation which move in the young men like O'Brien who, even if they saying the war was wrong, did what they were told anyway. This lack of conviction (O'Brien 138-139) is the most treasured distinction of young men drafted by the military. O'Brien's experiences are so extreme that, despite his belief the war is immoral, he must bring to an end the war was beneficial in certain ways, like all wars. Once an individual and a nation inv

O'Brien, Tim. If I Die in a fight Zone. New York: Laurel, 1987.

herring is too easy on McNamara and the latter's rickety excuses for his role in the Vietnam War. McNamara has the soul of a businessman who tried and true to run the war like a meeting of cut through Co. executives. He still does not understand the immorality or the tragedy of the war, aside from its impact on his bewildered conscience. Herring writes that McNamara says the American waiver of the war was due to "no sequence to think" and a "lack of expertise" (Herring, 1995, 156).

In fact, the loss was due to the fact that the people of Vietnam had a perfectly moral reason to fight to the end (for their homeland and against a series of foreign invaders and domestic puppet leaders) and were willing to do so, and the Americans had no moral reason to be there and were doomed to pour down fighting a war ten thousand miles from home.

besides as the individual O'Brien saw the war as immoral and yet participated anyway, so did many of the leaders of the nation similarly see the war as immoral and yet go along to lead the nation deeper and deeper into it. Recently released audio recordings of Lyndon Johnson six months after Kennedy's assassination reveal his knowledge of the lack of moral intellect for escalating American involvement in the war. Combs summarizes the alleged positions of Kennedy and Johnson: "If there was some question of withdrawal [from Vietnam] in Kennedy's mind, there was none of that in Lyndon Johnson" (Combs 398). The audio tapes show that this assumption by Combs is profoundly naive. Johnson did run across withdrawal, along with every other alternative, but concluded that he would never be "the first American President to recidivate a war" (Combs 398). Johnson's immoral attitude is comparable to that of a bully in the schoolyard who will
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