Chris Appy’s s American Reckoning is a book-length essay on the Vietnam War and how it changed the way Americans think of ourselves and our foreign policy. This is required reading for anyone interested in foreign policy and America’s place in the world, showing how events influence attitudes, which turn to influence events. Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam Appy’s book is valuable to its readers in showing how Vietnam became the template for every American war since, from novelties like the invasion of Grenada to the seemingly never-ending conflicts post-9/11. But before all that, there was Vietnam, and, larger lessons aside, Appy’s book is a fascinating, insightful, infuriating and thought-provoking study of that conflict, from its earliest days …show more content…
Presented as fact, the book was wholly a lie, painting a picture of Vietnam as a struggling Catholic nation under attack by Communists, with only America as a possible Saviour. Despite Dooley’s garbage selling millions of copies in its day, few have ever heard of it since. It did however establish a forward-leaning pattern of lies to engage and enrage the American public in support of pointless wars. The Dooley line runs through the faux Gulf of Tonkin Incident to fake stories from Gulf War 1.0 of Iraqi troops throwing infants from their incubators to Gulf War 2.0’s non-existent WMDs to Gulf War 3.0’s “Save the Yazidi’s” rationale for America re-entering a war already lost twice. “Saving” things was a common sub-theme, just as Vietnam was to be saved from Communism. It was no surprise that one of the last American acts of the Vietnam War was “Operation Babylift,” where thousands of children were flown to the U.S. to “save” them. Vietnam as a …show more content…
Never before had such a broad range of Americans come to doubt their government. The faith most citizens had in their leaders coming out of WWII was so near complete that the realization that they had been lied to about Vietnam represents the most significant change in the relationship between a people and their leaders America, perhaps much of history, has ever seen. The aftermath — No More Vietnams — is well-covered in Appy’s work. The No More Vietnam mantra is usually presented as avoiding quagmires, focusing on quick, sharp wins. Instead, Appy shows politicians have manipulated No More Vietnams into meaning greater secrecy (think Central America in the 1980’s), more over-the-top justifications (“You don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) and an emphasis on keeping American deaths inside the acceptable limits of the day to tamp down any public anti-war sentiment. Throw in increasingly clever manipulation of the media (“Pat Tillman was a hero,” “Malaki/Karzai is a democratic leader with wide support”) and indeed there will be no more Vietnams per se, even as conflicts that bear all the hallmarks continue unabated. Americans may have developed an intolerance for Vietnam-like wars, but failed to become intolerant of
The Vietnam War: A Concise International History is a strong book that portrays a vivid picture of both sides of the war. By getting access to new information and using valid sources, Lawrence’s study deserves credibility. After reading this book, a new light and understanding of the Vietnam war exists.
The years 1961 to 1972 saw the American involvement in Vietnam. For a little over ten years, America sent its sons off to fight for an unknown cause in a country they knew little about. When the United States finally pulled out of Southeast Asia, many were left scratching their heads. Over 58,000 young men died without really knowing why. Although it is a work of fiction, Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato expresses the views of those who spent their lives in the jungles of Vietnam.
The Vietnam War has become a focal point of the Sixties. Known as the first televised war, American citizens quickly became consumed with every aspect of the war. In a sense, they could not simply “turn off” the war. A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo is a firsthand account of this horrific war that tore our nation apart. Throughout this autobiography, there were several sections that grabbed my attention. I found Caputo’s use of stark comparisons and vivid imagery, particularly captivating in that, those scenes forced me to reflect on my own feelings about the war. These scenes also caused me to look at the Vietnam War from the perspective of a soldier, which is not a perspective I had previously considered. In particular, Caputo’s account of
E-History (2012, N.d.). Retrieved March 25, 2012, from http://ehistory.osu.edu/vietnam/essays/battlecommand/index.cfm.
The aim of this book by Bui Diem with David Chanoff is to present the Vietnam War told from a South Vietnamese perspective. The large-scale scope of the work concerns the fighting between North and South Vietnam over which party would run the country and wanting to become an independent state free from the Western powers. Diem's memoir contains in-depth details about his life and politics in Vietnam in 1940-1975. The book serves as a primary source in documenting the events in Vietnam during the war and as an autobiography of Diem's life. The purpose of this book is to give insight of the war through Diem's eyes and how it affected his life.
This unfortunate legacy of failure in Vietnam carried far past the end of his service as Secretary of Defense. For years after, there have been ongoing debates as to what factors led the outcome of the Vietnam War. It wasn’t until 1995 that Robert McNamara contributed his own viewpoint on where the responsibility for the result of the war fell. McNamara’s memoir, “In Retrospect”, chronicles his perspective on the role he played as Secretary of Defense. It is apparent in his memoir that the public image associated with McNamara is vastly different from the McNamara he presents. Ironically, this infamous war he was so commonly know for may have been a war that privately he did not support.[1] This raises the question—was this hawk actually a
In his speech, Eugene McCarthy describes why fighting the Vietnam War was a poor decision to make. First, he mentions how John F. Kennedy gave hope and courage to America and its people in 1963; on the other hand, in 1967, America was in a period of frustration and distrust due to the escalation of the Vietnam War. McCarthy states that America is not the world police and should not be giving promises that they could not follow through with. Moreover, the United States was fighting a pointless war where there are no changes being seen. “I see little evidence that the administration has set any limits on the price which it will pay for a military victory which becomes less and less sure and more hollow and empty in promise” (McCarthy). Throughout the duration of the war, the United States made very little progress, even though they had p...
Only in the Vietnam War was the United States’ participation criticized. This is such a gigantic change from prior wars that it bears study as to why it happened, and better yet, should have it happened. This paper will discuss the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, by asking the simple question, Should have the United States’ gotten involved in the first place? This paper will prove that, in fact, America should not have gotten involved in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War took place between 1947- 1975.
Moss, G. D. (2010). Vietnam: An American Ordeal (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Retrieved from http://devry.vitalsource.com/books/9781256086260
Roark, James L. "Vietnam and the Limits of Power 1961-1975." The American Promise: A History of the United States. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 1,062- 1,100. Print.
He was also a Gulf War veteran who commanded an armored cavalry. His desire in writing this book was to examine, through the recently declassified documents, manuscript collections, and the Joint Chief of Staff official histories, where the responsibility for the Vietnam foreign policy disaster lay, but also examine the decisions made that involved the United States in a war they could not win. This book details the discussion of government policy in the stages of the Vietnam crisis from 1961-July 1965. It examines the main characters of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert McNamara, in addition to the military, which included the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It began in the Kennedy era amidst the Bay of Pigs incident and how that led to mistrust of the military planning by advisors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The purpose of this paper is to better understand the political dynamics that were in play at the very beginning of the Vietnam crisis that eventually lead to the disastrous war in Vietnam. It will examine the historical record from various viewpoints and hope to discover those instances where a failure in communication lead to a cascade effect of fear and uncertainty that set into motion those events that drew the political leaders of the United States deeper and deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam and south-east Asia. How did the Logic of Fear dominate the thinking and policies at the time? The hypothesis of this paper is to show that those failures in communication and signaling could plausibly have been avoided with more adept diplomacy, and subsequently the war in Vietnam could have been averted.
“A Better War” focuses on the later years of the highly controversial Vietnam war. As mentioned in the prologue, there is very little attention given to the ladder part of the war (1968-1975). Famous writings such as America’s Longest War by George Harring as well as Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, a book that would later go on to win a Pulitzer Prize, only gave a small fraction of their pages to discuss the conflict under the command of General Abrams and post launch of the Tet Offensive in 1968 (prologue xiv). Missing aspects that would be pivotal to grasping the full story behind one of America’s most criticized political endeavors.
The book, We Were Soldiers Once... And Young, begins at a pivotal point in American history. The year was 1965; the year America began to directly interfere with the Vietnam affairs and send our young men to defend the notion of "freedom." During this year, Vietnam interested and concerned only a few Americans. In fact, the controversy of American involvement in Vietnam had hardly begun. But this all changed in November 1965 at the Ia Drang Valley in distant Vietnam. The Battle at LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany was the first major battle of the Vietnam conflict; a conflict that lasted decade and caused American turmoil for many more years.
Vietnam is known as, “America’s Lost War,” because America did not achieve the end goal of a completely democratic country. Protests and riots broke out over the controversy of sending American soldiers to fight and as a result, the veterans did not receive much recognition when they returned home. However it made a pathway for 21st century warfare. On the occasion of the Iraq war, K.T. Mcfarland, the Deputy National Security Advisor for the United States of America, proposed a statement about the purpose of American soldiers after meeting with political officials from Israel. In her address delivered four years ago, she stated, “One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before