Vietnam Conflict Analysis

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Vietnam: An Unnecessary Conflict “They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole…listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there…” (O’Brian 474). This line is taken from Tim O’Brian’s, The Things They Carried. It is depicting what happens when a soldier in Vietnam has to inspect a tunnel; however, I think this quote represents America’s involvement in Vietnam in general. American soldiers had no idea what was waiting for them in Vietnam, just as the soldiers in Tim O’Brian’s short story had no idea what to expect in the tunnels. The lack of knowledge of the country’s landscape, their opponents, and essentially why they were even there in the first place was arguably America’s largest downfall …show more content…

The Gulf of Tonkin incident took place in 1964. What happened was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats apparently attacked US ships. After the incident, Congress created the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which essentially gave Johnson the power to do anything he wanted to do in Vietnam, which resulted in an air raid towards North Vietnam. The result of this showed a higher approval rating for President Johnson, because he was not being soft on communism. It wasn’t until a year later that Johnson started having some backfire to his decisions made in Vietnam. In Frances Fitzgerald’s, Fire in the Lake, we learn about Johnsons meeting in Honolulu with the chief of state of the Republic of South Vietnam for this first time in a decade. This meeting was essentially a symbolic gesture but, “the gesture marked no solution to a crisis, no real change in policy.” (Fitzgerald 232). It was after this meeting when Johnson was being questioned by many organizations, one of which being the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was conducting an investigation of what was now an extremely severe war in Vietnam. This lead to Johnson’s confession that, “he could never understand why Senator Fulbright had questioned his constitutional right to commit American troops to Vietnam…” (Fitzgerald 232). Senator Fulbright was only one of many Senators that believed he should have brought a declaration of war before the senate. This is because the Vietnam War was never declared as such; technically, the Vietnam War was merely a conflict. According to Michael Hunt, This conflict lead to an estimated 1.4 million Vietnamese dead in 1965-1972, and another 300,000 dead by 1975. There was also nearly 60,000 American soldiers dead by the end of the war. Not to mention the 350 Billion dollars of United States funds lost during and after the war. Roughly 3.5

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