After World War II and throughout the Cold War the attention of the United States turned to fighting a different enemy: communism. When the influence of communism extended to Vietnam a civil war began between North and South Vietnam. At France’s request the United States intervened in the battle to help the South combat the Vietcong and the communism that they represented. Also known as “America’s Longest War” the Vietnam War was ultimately a political disaster and after 9 years the United States pulled out, leaving the South Vietnamese to fight on their own. But the question remains, what went wrong? There have been many different theories for why the Vietnam War was such a failure for the United States. In Fighting in “Cold Blood”: LBJ’s
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Twenty years after the war the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote a memoir, in it he tries to explain Johnson’s motives in trying to micromanage things and keep things secret from the American people. To him, President Johnson tried to keep things obscured because he wanted focus to remain on his domestic reforms and because he feared public knowledge might lead to “hard-line pressure...for greater - and far riskier - military action that might trigger responses, especially nuclear, by China and/or the Soviet Union” (Hollitz, McNamara, 291). The nuclear arms race of the Cold War had kept many people in a constant state of fear and paranoia, so whether it was for good or ill it is easy to understand Johnson’s own reservations. The final point that Herring makes is that “the climate and terrain were singularly inhospitable” (Hollitz, Herring, 280) and that fighting in that environment was especially difficult. Of all the assertions that Herring has made, this is probably the least supported one. None of the primary sources that are provided speak of the difficult terrain, just the difficult enemy, and one marine even states that “out [in the jungle] the war was easy in a way because there was no ambiguity” (Hollitz, Muller, …show more content…
The Vietnam War happened at a very interesting period in American history. Technology and weaponry had drastically changed and the United States was still relatively new to the status of “world power.” Social changes gripped the nation and dissent between the people and the government had started to grow in the form of free information. It was a new world, and new war, and America was still learning the rules of how it all fit together. The trouble with the Vietnam War can be traced back to a variety of causes, it was the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong people. If nothing else can be said about Vietnam, it can be said that American learned from it and we continue to learn from it every time to look back to try and understand
Twenty years after the war the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara wrote a memoir, in it he tries to explain Johnson’s motives in trying to micromanage things and keep things secret from the American people. To him, President Johnson tried to keep things obscured because he wanted focus to remain on his domestic reforms and because he feared public knowledge might lead to “hard-line pressure...for greater - and far riskier - military action that might trigger responses, especially nuclear, by China and/or the Soviet Union” (Hollitz, McNamara, 291). The nuclear arms race of the Cold War had kept many people in a constant state of fear and paranoia, so whether it was for good or ill it is easy to understand Johnson’s own reservations. The final point that Herring makes is that “the climate and terrain were singularly inhospitable” (Hollitz, Herring, 280) and that fighting in that environment was especially difficult. Of all the assertions that Herring has made, this is probably the least supported one. None of the primary sources that are provided speak of the difficult terrain, just the difficult enemy, and one marine even states that “out [in the jungle] the war was easy in a way because there was no ambiguity” (Hollitz, Muller, …show more content…
The Vietnam War happened at a very interesting period in American history. Technology and weaponry had drastically changed and the United States was still relatively new to the status of “world power.” Social changes gripped the nation and dissent between the people and the government had started to grow in the form of free information. It was a new world, and new war, and America was still learning the rules of how it all fit together. The trouble with the Vietnam War can be traced back to a variety of causes, it was the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong people. If nothing else can be said about Vietnam, it can be said that American learned from it and we continue to learn from it every time to look back to try and understand