5. The Cost Of War Flashcards
What was the financial cost of the war?
The US government spent just over $170 billion on the war.
Added to this were the costs of benefits and pensions paid out to Vietnam veterans who were injured, and the families of dead soldiers.
The country was much poorer and many faced starvation.
When Lyndon B Johnson became president in 1963 he promised to introduce the ‘great society’ to prevent poverty.
This included giving money to education and providing free healthcare for the elderly
However, Johnson had to redirect this money into the war so he could never complete his ‘great society’ reforms.
What was the human cost of the war?
Around 58,000 Americans were killed.
Soldiers were also sent home every day with missing limbs.
Many of those who survived the war were affected psychologically as a result of drug dependency or because of the horrors they had witnessed.
The governments of North and South Vietnam did not keep accurate records of the dead and injured.
It is estimated that 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed at 5 million were injured.
Millions of civilians became refugees during the US search and destroy missions.
Around 100,000 babies are believed to be a result of relationships between US soldiers and Vietnamese women.
These children were sent off to families all over the world.
Those who weren’t adopted were shunned from society as they were seen as a reminder of war.
What was the environmental cost of the war?
In 1969 over 1 million hectars of forest were destroyed using agent Orange.
Also thousands of hectars of farmland were sprayed with a chemical that made it useless for food production.
Today there are many children in Vietnam that are growing up with diseases and disabilities caused by the harmful chemicals that are still in the soil
7 million tons of bombs that were dropped on Vietnam still remain there today and continue to cause death and injury when they’re accidentally detonated.
How was USAs reputation effected by the war?
The growing anti-war movement caused a split between those who supported the war and those who felt the government was wrong to continue with it.
Events like the My Lai massacre, bombings of Cambodia and the Watergate scandal damaged the credibility of the government.
The war had to prove that the USA could not contain communism like it had in Europe.
As well as this communism did not spread to Thailand or India so the Domino theory was also proved wrong.
