The Impact Of The War On The Peoples Of Vietnam And The USA

Question 1

What was the impact of the war on Vietnam?

Answer 1

• Many villages and communists were destroyed during the fighting.
• Civilians suffered brutal treatment including torture, and murder. About two million Vietnamese are thought to have died during the conflict.
• The war left hundreds of thousands of orphans and wounded civilians and soldiers to be cared for after the war.
• The economic effects of the war were devastating; fields, animals, crops and forests were destroyed, making a poor country even poorer. The Vietnamese were soon unable to feed their population.
• The environmental was badly damaged, littered with crashed planes, vechiles and guns and a landscape pitted with unexploded bombs, shells and mines.

Question 2

What were the effects of the war on the United States?

Answer 2

• During the fighting, many Americans began to oppose the war. A protest movement started and many young American men avoided or refused the draft (conscription into the armed forces). Some fled to Canada or Europe, others tore up or burnt their draft papers.
• There was widespread resentment that many well-off young men managed to avoid the draft, for example by going to university. Poorer Americans, many of them black, did most of the fighting.

Question 3

Why did some Americans oppose the war?

Answer 3

• There were heavy casualties. A total of 58,000 troops were killed.
• TV showed pictures of the horrors of the war (e.g. Napalm). The media played an important part in creating opposition to the war. (There was little media coverage of the war from the Communist side; e.g. North Vietnamese atrocities were rarely shown, My Lai was.)
• Many Americans said that the war was immoral. The US government had no right to impose its views on a poor nation like Vietnam.
• Don’t forget that many Americans did still support the war and the fight against communism.

Question 4

How did Americans protest against the war?

Answer 4

• The protest movement started in 1964, grew quickly after 1965 and became bigger after the bombing of Cambodia in 1970.
• Marches and demonstrations were common, especially on university campuses. The worst incident took place at Kent State University in May 1970, when National Guardsmen shot four students dead.
• Young people were especially critical of the war. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of rebellion and “dropping out”. Hippies told people to “make love, not war”.
• Some war veterans opposed the war, too. At the Veterans’ March in Washington in 1971, some ex-soldiers threw away the medals they had won for bravery during the war.

Question 5

What effects did the war have in Americans who fought in it?

Answer 5

• Some suffered illness, or had deformed children, if they had handles Agent Orange.
• Many veterans had serious mental problems and tens of thousands committed suicide after the war.
• Vietnam veterans were often treated as second-class citizens, not returning heroes. Returning soldiers were more likely to turn to crime, alcohol, drug addiction, suicide or suffer broken marriages.

Question 6

What other effects on the USA were there?

Answer 6

• The war cost billions of dollars.
• Some blamed the war for increasing racism in the USA, as many blacks, rightly or wrongly, believed that too many of their young men’s had fought in the war.
• The USA was blamed for war crimes in Vietnam.
• Large numbers of books, films, TV shows, plays, etc. we’re produced during and after the war.
• Some people thought that the Vietnam War led to less respect for authority - this was linked to the student movement.