Vietnam War Counter-Culture Analysis

When examining the American army in the Vietnam War it is clear that their loss came from the lack of public support, both in Vietnam and America. The moment American soldiers set foot on Vietnam they were doomed to los. The Vietnamese people had fought for their independence and right to self-determination for decades before the American government intervened. They were a people who held the strong belief that Ho Chi Minh and Communism would lead them to self-determination and were not about to let some ‘capitalist pigs’ halt them in their path to independence. While America was fated to never succeed in Vietnam from the beginning their ultimate downfall came from the major loss of support stemming from their failed military strategies, the …show more content…
If it had not been for the failures of the American soldiers in Vietnam War the support of the war effort by the public would not have been lost. The colossal misjudgements of the Vietnamese people by the American government and army cost America not only the war, but the public support of its people as well as the Vietnamese people. From the very start of the war the American army failed to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese …show more content…
As the war movement continued it discredited the political ideologies that had been presented to the American public causing a loss of support. The people of America had been taught about McCarthyism and the red peril. Young men went to fight because it had been ingrained into their heads that communism was ‘the devil’ and it was their duty to go and fight, some not even knowing where Vietnam was. QUAGMIRE. As the war in Vietnam waged on the American public began to realise that the ideologies they had been told about were actually propaganda vehicles that American used to assert their global hegemony. The Domino Theory (first mentioned by President Eisenhower in 1954), the public slowly learned, was completely untrue and there was no actual basis for it. The theory merely came from a few scared men intent on defending the empire that was America. CONTAINMENT. As the public realised that casualties were caused by containment of communism not communism itself public support began to drop. Ideologies had failed the American public. It caused their children to be killed, both at home and abroad. Without the support of their country a government cannot hope to win a war. The use of propaganda had caused distrust among the American public eventually forcing the government to withdraw the troops from Vietnam and lose the war. It was not just the