Corrected Culture Project: Vietnam - Soldiers as Victims and Villains

Sooo... we had to give a presentation about a topic concerning US culture. I chose American war crimes in the Vietnam War. And I must say: I was absolutely fascinated by that topic. Of course not in the positive sense of the word- war is not cool or anything. But before I started digging I was more like: well yeah, might be cool.The deeper I got, the more passionate I got. I couldn't stop reading and listening to Veteran interviews. I had never heard about what had really happened there. How soldiers turned into animals - or better: were turned into animals. I started talking to friends of mine who are soldiers in the US army.... soldiers who had seen war in Iraq and Afghanistan....soldiers who know what it's like. So I compared the Vietnam war to the "newer" wars. I asked them what they knew about Vietnam...what they had learned in school. Some had known all about the war crimes, others had never heard about them. Anyway, this was the coolest and most interesting thing I've ever done in my English classes (from second school to college). I even started telling Austrian friends about that war, and it was more than interesting to study the faces people made when they heard about the war crimes and how the soldiers were treated when they returned home.

Vietnam: Soldiers as Victims and Villains

In December 1956, in the midst of the Cold War era, a proxy war started that would cost billions of dollars, and even worse, millions of Vietnamese and American lives. This war would change Americans’ attitude toward their soldiers drastically. Gradually, the invincible heroes of WW2 became the “drug addicts” and “baby killers” of the Vietnam War.

In 1941, Ho Chi Minh, a communist Vietnamese revolutionary leader, decided to fight against the French occupiers in his country. The US was so afraid of communist expansion that they decided to side with France and fight against Ho Chi Minh and his followers. In 1960, communist sympathizers in South Vietnam founded the National Liberation Front (NLF), also known as the Viet Cong, to fight a guerilla war against the South and everyone who opposed communism. In the early 1960s, due to the deterioration of the situation, President Lyndon Johnson sent the first US troops to Vietnam.

Americans had never fought a war like this. The soldiers had not been trained for guerilla attacks. The Viet Cong were disguised, hid in tunnels and towns, and used their women and children to fight against the US troops. For the first time, soldiers had to fight against an “invisible” enemy. Perhaps out of desperation, the US army soon decided to use the attrition strategy to win the war. This means that they tried to outgun the enemy and win the war by raising the body count. In basic training, the US soldiers were brainwashed into seeing the Vietnamese not as humans but as heartless enemies who need to perish. In Vietnam, the officers often put great pressure on soldiers just to achieve a high body count, and consequently the soldiers stopped distinguishing between civilians and the Viet Cong. This and various other circumstances such as drug abuse, desperation, and the toll the heat and the Vietnamese wildlife took on the soldiers resulted in an unusual high rate of war crimes. In the My Lai Massacre, for example, American soldiers raped, shot and mutilated 347 to 504 unarmed civilians. According to interviews with Veterans, they had been told by their superiors that everyone who would be in the village during their attack should be considered as an enemy. They assumed that civilians would be at the market at that time. When the unit entered the village, they saw mostly women and children. Simply following their superiors’ orders, the soldiers shot all of them. The use of “Agent Orange” was another frequently committed war crime in Vietnam. Actually a herbicide, it was used to defoliate forests and deprive the Viet Cong of cover. The toxic substance had devastating effects not only on those people who came in direct contact with it but also on generations that had not yet been born. Rising numbers of disabled babies and miscarriages in Vietnam as well as in the States was the result.

Over the years, the media coverage of the war changed drastically. At first, the US soldier was portrayed as a hero who was fighting for his country. The media influenced the Americans into believing that sending troops to Southeast Asia was for a good cause. Only gradually, as more and more reporters accompanied the soldiers, did the cruelty of the war entered American homes via television. For the first time in the history of American war, soldiers openly admitted their frustration in interviews. The major turning point, however, was the Tet offensive. The Viet Cong attacked the Americans with more than 80,000 fighters and in 100 places at the same time. Watching their soldiers die and retreat, the US audience was rattled. From that moment onward, the media coverage of the war became increasingly negative. The soldiers were portrayed as crazy drug addicts and the war as a lost cause. The My Lai Massacre became the leading story and brought the topic of war crime into American households. This also changed the American attitude toward the war and those who fought in it. Never had soldiers been looked at as negatively as after Vietnam. Never had they experienced so little support by the ones they wanted to protect. Americans turned their backs on returning soldiers, spit on them or called them “children killers”. Because of the traumatic events soldiers had experienced in Vietnam, many suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. However, due to the negative opinion on Vietnam veterans, most of them were left alone with their problems. This and the guilt many felt had terrible consequences: more than 50,000 Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war - about as many soldiers had been killed in action.

When President Nixon ended the war in 1975, more and more information about the cruelty of the war and about how much the government had held back became public, causing the people’s trust in governmental institutions and in the Army to decrease rapidly. The anti-war movement had gained support throughout the war, but after the war it was not only the anti-war movement supporters who raised questions such as “who is to blame?” The majority of Americans, however, seemed to refuse to talk about the war. Losing Saigon to the Viet Cong again led to a loss of pride and self-esteem in the American people, who had always believed their army was invincible.
[880 words]