...The Vietnam Experience The Vietnam War is one oft the most gruesome wars after 2nd world war. The war was between the years 1959-75. It was twenty years of war to no avail. Millions of people lost their lives – young soldiers from America and Vietnam, and many civil. After several years of war in Vietnam with France, a peace treaty was signed and the republic of Vietnam was created in South Vietnam with Ngo Dinh Diem as leader, and the north was ruled by communists. South Vietnam was receiving financial and military support from the United States, but the Diem regime was corrupt and the repression was a help to strengthen the communists opposition in South Vietnam. The military wing, called the Vietcong began in 1956 a guerilla war, where the smaller forces is fighting against a bigger strength. In 1964 the United States participate in the war, because they claim that some of their ships has been attacked. Systematically the U.S. started bombing the North Vietnamese cities, but while America were more advanced in the military, they where not able to defeat their opponents. The Vietnam War is especially known for its cruelty towards the civilian population, for example the My Lai massacre. The Americans were not familiar of this kind of guerilla war as the Vietcong's performed, and that is why it lead to a significant loss of civilian populations. Many stories and movies has been written and made to show just how extremely horrible and terrible this war has been, both from...
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...the freedom of control from Great Britain and having freedom. This freedom was written in 1776 under a document called the Constitution. This formal document gave the rights of all Americans under the new form of control, that gives rights and the opinion of the people living their called: Democracy. This control of democracy seemed to be fitted for all, giving people rights in and to them, letting them elects their leaders and having justice by their peers, but this form of Democracy, and having it has been lost, or are no longer there. People who had rights or justification are no longer there or have been taken away. From Past...
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...Tim O'Brien. The stories in this book tell what life was like during the Vietnam War for many of the young soldiers, and their thoughts and feelings when they returned to the United States. Tim O’Brien earned a Purple Heart when he got hit with shrapnel in a grenade attack in Vietnam (NEA, 2007). During the book one of the main characters talked about goes by the name as Kiowa. Kiowa was a Native American and also a Baptist. He was a very honest and trustworthy soldier who always tried to help his fellow soldiers get through the complicated times of the war. Tragically Kiowa’s death during the war showed no dignity towards him. After a long day the platoon decided to settle down along a river, but they soon decided that they set up camp in a sewage field due to the repugnant smell. The rain came down without an end in sight, and the ground bubbled with the extra rain and heat. Out of nowhere rounds of mortar started to fall onto...
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...When remembering and talking about war veterans we often talk about the battles they fought or the training that they went through. However, this is a very small aspect of veterans military life and experience. There are so much more interesting and fascinating topics to talk about when discussing war veterans. The war veteran I’m researching is John Aguilar. He is a native minnesotan who was a war medic or corpsman during the vietnam war. In this interview and essay, many fascinating aspects of his past military life are talked about including what he did as a medic and his own astonishing war experiences. There are many fascinating things to consider when remembering or discussing military veterans. When remembering vietnam veterans, it is important to consider the effect boot camp has on soldiers, injuries that soldiers have during war, and how veterans are treated by civilians when they come back home. When discussing military related experiences, the effect boot camp has on soldiers is hardly considered or talked about. The following quote from an article on...
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...The Cold War The Cold War, often dated from 1947 to 1991, was a sustained state of political and military tension between powers in the Western Bloc, dominated by the United States with NATO among its allies, and powers in the Eastern Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union along with the Warsaw Pact. Role of USSR and USA to the conflicts in the Cold War The Cold War began after World War II. The main enemies were the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War got its name because both sides were afraid of fighting each other directly. In a "hot war," nuclear weapons might destroy everything. So, instead, both sides fought each other indirectly. They supported opposing sides in conflicts in different parts of the world. They also used words as weapons. They threatened and denounced each other. Or they tried to make each other look foolish. Over the years, leaders on both sides changed. Yet the Cold War continued. It was the major force in world politics for most of the second half of the twentieth century. The Cold War world was separated into three groups. The United States led the West, including countries with democratic political systems. The Soviet Union led the East. This including countries with communist political systems. The non-aligned group included countries that did not want to be tied to either the West or the East. Harry Truman was the first American president to fight the Cold War. He used several policies. One was the Truman Doctrine. This was a plan...
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...Prisoners of war in Vietnam were literally surviving hell in the years that they were there. Some prisoners were there for more than six years, and they came back with scars, physically and emotionally, that showed what they had been through. Although they were not treated well in Vietnam, they still managed to have hope in the prisons. Leo Thorsness and the other prisoners of war went through many difficult situations, but were still able to thrive while they were in Vietnam. During their final years in Vietnam, there was a failed rescue mission that made all the prisoners move into one camp, the Hanoi Hilton. All the prisoners got to meet each other since they were staying in one big cell. When the first Sunday came around, everyone decided...
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...April 29, 2013 Cause and Effect of War The Vietnam War was during the years of 1964-1975. This is the longest military conflict in U.S. History. Around 85,000 Americans were killed during this war. This war cost over 150 billion dollars. The war involved the North Vietnamese army and the National Liberation Front on one side against the United States and the South Vietnamese army. The war was fought in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and a little in North Vietnam. One cause of the war was that the Vietnamese had struggled for their independence from France which was a result of the First Indochina War. As a result of this war, the country was divided into North and South Vietnam. The United States got involved in Vietnam because U.S. authorities thought that if the whole country fell under communist control, this would cause a domino effect and communism would spread through all of Southeast Asia. This was the reason to get involved in Vietnam. When the Japanese finally surrendered on September 2, 1945 in the First Indochina war, Ho also declared independence for Vietnam. The French refused to accept Vietnam’s independence, and later drove the Viet Minh into the north of the country. In 1965, the United States sent troops to help maintain the Southern Vietnamese government. Unfortunately, their plan didn’t work and in 1975 Vietnamese was under Communist control. The United States demanded for Japan to leave Indochina, or else they would be forced to use military action. After...
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...Unwinnable war II The unwinnable war speech is a speech that is written and spoken by Robert F. Kennedy, which will say, that he is the sender of this text. The speech was hold under the circumstances of the Vietnam War. At the time the speech was hold, USA was loosing in Vietnam and Robert F. Kennedy was presidential candidate. Which will say that he by some knew about the war and its consequences. The speech is turned against the explicit audience of the USA population, who assumed that the US was winning the war in Vietnam. He is using rhetorical devises as logos and Ethos, he is well formulated and trying to make his points as clear as possible and do it with a passion about the topic. He uses logos when he want’s to make a point clear to his audience: ‘’Imagine the impact in our own country if an equivalent number—over 25 million Americans—were wandering homeless or interned in refugee camps, and millions more refugees were being created as New York and Chicago, Washington and Boston, were being destroyed by a war raging in their streets.’’ (l. 58-61, p. 3) So as we can se in this example, he both use some sort of figurative language because he compares the Vietnam situation in a American perspective and while he do that, he is emphasizing he’s argument by putting numbers to the bigger picture and appealing to people with logos. He does also uses pathos in a smaller degree as here, when he both appealing with logos and pathos at the same time: ‘‘you cannot expect...
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...Most Americans sent to Vietnam were chosen by the draft. The Selective Service System, as it was called, favored the middle and upper classes. College students could avoid service, as could those in “critical” occupations, such as teachers and engineers. As the war escalated, the draft was changed so that some students were called up through a lottery system. Still, those who knew the medical requirements might be able to produce a doctor’s affidavit certifying a weak knee, flat feet, or bad eyes—all grounds for flunking the physical. Of the 1200 men in Harvard’s class of 1970, only 56 served in the military, and only 2 of them in V The poorest and least educated were also likely to escape service, because the Armed Forces Qualification Test and the physical often screened them out. Thus the sons of blue-collar America were most likely to accept Uncle Sam’s letter of induction. Once in uniform, the sons of Hispanic and black Americans who had fewer skills were more often assigned to combat duty. The draft also made it a relatively young man’s war. The average age of soldiers serving in Vietnam was 19, compared with the average of 26 for World War II. Most American infantry came to Vietnam ready and willing to fight. But physical and psychological hardships took their toll. An American search-and-destroy mission would fight its way into a Communist-controlled hamlet, clear and burn it, and move on—only to be ordered back days or weeks later because the enemy had moved in again...
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...Cold War: Postwar Estrangement The Western democracies and the Soviet Union discussed the progress of World War II and the nature of the postwar settlement at conferences in Tehran (1943), Yalta (February 1945), and Potsdam (July-August 1945). After the war, disputes between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, particularly over the Soviet takeover of East European states, led Winston Churchill to warn in 1946 that an "iron curtain" was descending through the middle of Europe. For his part, Joseph Stalin deepened the estrangement between the United States and the Soviet Union when he asserted in 1946 that World War II was an unavoidable and inevitable consequence of "capitalist imperialism" and implied that such a war might reoccur. The Cold War was a period of East-West competition, tension, and conflict short of full-scale war, characterized by mutual perceptions of hostile intention between military-political alliances or blocs. There were real wars, sometimes called "proxy wars" because they were fought by Soviet allies rather than the USSR itself -- along with competition for influence in the Third World, and a major superpower arms race. After Stalin's death, East-West relations went through phases of alternating relaxation and confrontation, including a cooperative phase during the 1960s and another, termed dtente, during the 1970s. A final phase during the late 1980s and early 1990s was hailed by President Mikhail Gorbachev, and especially by the president...
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...been the cause of numerous failures in military operations. Operation Ivory Coast, a daring raid on the prisoner of war (POW) camp Son Tay during the Vietnamese war, was one such operation. Considered by many as a stunning tactical success, this mission was a failure from an intelligence standpoint, and the ultimate goal of the operation, to rescue the POW’s held at Son Tay, was unsuccessful. Operation Ivory Coast Background and Planning In the spring of 1970, intelligence gathered from the United States Air Force through analysis of aerial imagery confirmed the presence of fifty five American POW’s, a handful of which were in a condition requiring urgent rescue, located at a compound near Son Tay, 23 miles west of Hanoi. Planning was finalized in August of 1970 to conduct a raid to rescue the POW’s. It would be a joint effort between Air Force search and rescue teams and Army Special Forces. Col Arthur “Bull” Simons was given command of the ground forces. With just over a hundred service members for the ground force, a mock site was built at Eglin Air Force Base, and the joint force conducted roughly 170 training missions in preparation for the operation. Air Force pilots flew over one thousand hours at different locations in the southeastearn United States, practicing the dissimilar aircraft formations they would use during infiltration of the prison camp. The final planning phase of the operation set a date window of October 21st through the 25th, but that was later pushed...
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...COLD WAR & World Leadership Wartime Peace Conferences (1945): • Yalta Conference - Peace conference held between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in order to establish the goals of WWII. They agreed to try people in Japan and Germany and the creation of the United Nation ( a world peace organization created in order to prevent further world wars. It created 6 offices all of which worked collectively to regulated political and economic affairs, promote peace and human rights.) Stalin promised to hold free elections in Poland after the war ended, but he never kept it. • San Francisco Conference - the 50 nation's delegates agree upon allowing 2 soviet satellites and the Soviet Union a seat in the UN. Iron Curtains - used to describe the boundary that separated the Warsaw Pact countries (Soviet and its satellites) from the NATO countries (North Atlantic Treaty Organization - created in order to encourage economic flow and alliances.) Cold War (1946-1989) - war of ideas waged between the US and the Soviets, in which each nation attempted to influence the political and economic views of another nation. They used weapons such as: • propaganda - advertisement • economic and military aid (Marshall Plan under Truman provided aid to nations that would remove trading barriers and cooperate economically; Truman Doctrine provided military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey) • alliances - military agreement to protect each other against another's aggression...
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...Vietnam War: U.S. Involvement increased to the brink of war with the Tonkin Gulf Incident Questions to ponder… 1. Was the growing conflict in South Vietnam an “armed attack” from the North, as the Administration (Johnson) contended? ANSWER: 2. Was it primarily a civil war, provoked by the brutal policies of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, which drove desperate peasants, minority tribesmen, and urban intellectuals into the ranks of the NLF? ANSWER: Yes, it was a civil war between the north and south for control of the country. Both sides were equally as brutal, however, the communists were more brutal when push came to shove. 3. Was the NLF itself a creature of Hanoi? ANSWER: I believe that it was. I think it was a direct creature from the north Vietmin. 4. Was the NLF an independent organization truly representative of the aspirations of the people in South Vietnam? ANSWER: No, it was an organization that represented Ho Chi Minh’s asperations to untie the north and the south under communist rule. 5. Had the United States, or the DRV, broken the Geneva Accords? No, in 1954, The United States responded by hastily putting together a humanitarian mission to assist those wishing to move south. A joint US-French naval task force was assembled near Haiphong harbour, while US personnel and aid workers organised refugee camps, food and medical supplies in South Vietnam. The operation – pointedly titled Passage to Freedom – was a successful, if...
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...The Vietnam War was a war in which two major power country, US and Soviet Union, who were the power holders of what events were to take place in Vietnam and the other neighboring countries around Vietnam. The battle between the two was mainly over political because of the split of Vietnam and the rise of power on the communist side as North Vietnam tried to form a communist country by forcefully reuniting South Vietnam with the help of the Soviet Union. After the French lost power over Vietnam and left Vietnam, there was a power vacuum that resulted to the war. Due to the terrain of Vietnam being a jungle, the US was having many difficulties preventing Soviet and China, Soviets’ ally, from sending in weapons to arm North Vietnamese...
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...AAS210 Essay 3 The aftermath of the Vietnam War forced over 1 million Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees to leave their homes in order to look for asylum within other nations. The domestic and international policies that ensued resulted in high forms of racialization of these refugees. Firstly, and to me the gravest form of racialization was a general ethnic racialization of all refugees by many of the refugee’s fellow Eastern Asiatic countries. Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines began refusing many of the “second wave” of refugees based on the fact that they did not want to receive anymore refugees within those, as their refugee camps began to fill; many times not even restocking their boats or giving bare minimums before forcing refugee ships to re-sail into the sea where it is estimated that more then half died. The Hmong who did flee faced political racialization by the Laotian government, as they were ostracized by their government for their aiding of the U.S. in the Laotian civil war. The Laotian government specifically rooted out any Hmong possible, while forcing many of which into their own internment camps, in which did not survive, all this while the Laotian government forced many others of the Hmong into hiding, in fear of similar resentment and treatment. Although originally received well, the “boat people” who landed in America were labeled outcast as reminders of an unpopular war in which they had lost. They faced social...
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