TPaul Solotaroff retells the story of a Vietnam veteran, Ken Smith, in The House of Purple Hearts. Smith recalls the shock and devastation of the war that still haunted him twenty years later. “To see those kids laying there maimed and bleeding. With huge bumps all over ‘em from shrapnel entries- I knew then and there, if I didn’t already, that this war was pure, fucking evil. Human life had no meaning there, it was completely without value- and I was no better than any of ‘em.” It was because of the pressure for a high body count from the government and the orders given from high-ranking officers that the soldiers had to lose touch with their humanity and empathy. The Vietnamese had to be dehumanized in order for it to be acceptable
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The American government was starting to lose control over the American public, and this was causing the ruling class to become worried. The Civil Rights Movement was occurring, women were fighting for equality, gays and lesbians were marching for their rights, and Puerto Ricans and Chicanos were protesting against their oppression. These same groups of people were being sent to fight in the war; a war that was guaranteed to benefit their oppressor. Greg Payton, who was a marine sent to Vietnam in 1968 recalled his realization that the “gooks” and the “niggers” were one and the same. They were both groups of people who were being beleaguered by the government, oppressed by the rich, denied equality because of the principals of …show more content…
The military often flew them home in the middle of the night, when less people would be in the airport. They would put them on buses, dressed in their military fatigues and drop them off in the middle of cities, where people called them ‘baby killers’, spit on them, and pelted them with eggs and pigs blood. It was as if the government themselves were ashamed of their own soldiers, returning them to the United States at odd hours of the night and dressing them up to be obvious targets of the hatred that many civilians felt towards the war. Norma Wilkes discusses the hatred of the veterans in an article, Strangers at War. She examines the hatred that many of the veterans faced and the reasoning behind it: “Veterans became the visible symbols of this unpopular and unvictorious war. Many found their status of veteran a stigma rather than a source of
The American government was starting to lose control over the American public, and this was causing the ruling class to become worried. The Civil Rights Movement was occurring, women were fighting for equality, gays and lesbians were marching for their rights, and Puerto Ricans and Chicanos were protesting against their oppression. These same groups of people were being sent to fight in the war; a war that was guaranteed to benefit their oppressor. Greg Payton, who was a marine sent to Vietnam in 1968 recalled his realization that the “gooks” and the “niggers” were one and the same. They were both groups of people who were being beleaguered by the government, oppressed by the rich, denied equality because of the principals of …show more content…
The military often flew them home in the middle of the night, when less people would be in the airport. They would put them on buses, dressed in their military fatigues and drop them off in the middle of cities, where people called them ‘baby killers’, spit on them, and pelted them with eggs and pigs blood. It was as if the government themselves were ashamed of their own soldiers, returning them to the United States at odd hours of the night and dressing them up to be obvious targets of the hatred that many civilians felt towards the war. Norma Wilkes discusses the hatred of the veterans in an article, Strangers at War. She examines the hatred that many of the veterans faced and the reasoning behind it: “Veterans became the visible symbols of this unpopular and unvictorious war. Many found their status of veteran a stigma rather than a source of