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America entered Vietnam to prevent communists from winning the war, which they did anyways. But, do you think the idea to enter Vietnam to fight communism was a good idea?
| Yeah it was. We can't just let a country turn communist. | 2 | |
| No it wasn't. It wasn't worth risking American lives to fight communism | 11 |
Different era. I believe that the majority of Americans supported the war at the outset. However, when they instituted the draft, coupled with the horrendous casualties, the nations tune changed. I'm not positive you can really declare a winner or loser of the Vietnam war though. I suppose an argument could be made for both sides winning or losing. All in all, the whole thing was a tragedy. The soldiers, innocents, and sheer destruction makes it a very sad chapter in the country's history.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
As with every historical event, we have the luxury of looking back with all we know now and being very wise. The Cold War ended nearly thirty years ago, and so a lot of the people here won't be able to remember the prevailing mindset of that time.
Armchair generals and barroom geopolitical experts can point out all the mistakes that were made in Vietnam, and pontificate on how things could have been handled better. But the people who made the decision that the USA should get involved in Vietnam and the generals who ran the war were not all idiots. They did what seemed to be the right thing to protect the national interests of the USA (forget all the idealistic guff about defending freedom as an abstract concept; it's always about, "what's good for business, is good for the USA").
Unfortunately, they weren't psychics, and they were trapped in the mindset of their day, just as we're unable to escape the mindset and preoccupations of our time.
In fifty years, people may look back at those alive today and wonder how the hell we could keep on burning fossil fuels, why we ever thought that a global communication network with built-in anonymity was a good idea, or what ever possessed us to think that outsourcing most manufacturing to China, or developing AI was a great idea. Or people in 2068 may wonder why nobody noticed in 2018 that something was happening in some obscure backwater of Asia that would come to pose a dire threat to the human species.
It was a totally useless war. Many lives were lost on both sides including a lot of civilians. North Vietnam won anyway. Vietnam is now a beautiful country. Communist but beautiful.
The war should never have happened. Toward the end one general was quoted as saying we backed the wrong side. North Vietnam was communist but South Vietnam was supposedly democratic but was corrupt as hell.
The best war movie from that era is PLATOON. If you haven't seen it you have to as it is said to be the most realistic of movies of that genre.
Are you taking a summer semester history class, and doing your homework right now?
The mind set back then was this: communism is terrible, and if one country turns to communism, then EVERY country will follow through a domino effect, so to prevent that: kill all commies. If it was good or bad we'll never know, maybe we'd live in a communist paradise/hell today, maybe it would've ended fine anyway. Or, maybe more people would have died because of communism than there died in the war against it.
We'll never know, better not focus too much on the past.