What About the Vietnam War ???

Question

What were some of the political and social outcomes of the Vietnam War?

I work at a retirement home and some of the ex Vietnam War Vets like to talk about the past, thanx. =)

Answer 1

Most ex military like to talk about their war experiences, My father died of a stroke , believing that he was in hospital in France where he had been wounded in WW2 the Horrors of war are deeply embedded in the brain , conscious or sub conscious.Most people cannot imagine the horrors that veterans have seen.

Answer 2

In my experience, most ex military DON'T want to talk about their military experience.

Oh sure, they'll tell you about good stuff and they'll tell you the easy stuff, but the really intense stuff, they've bottled up for years and they don't let out.

they've bottled up so long that they can't let it out.

I had a relative who was in the Dieppe raid (one of the original commando raids) they rammed a ship into some dock gates, jumped off & planted explosives & were supposed to meet at a pier to get home in wooden motorboats (no Americans were involved, so it hasn't been Hollywood'd)

To help them tell each other in the dark- they wore bright white webbing. Those that made it to the escape boats got pummelled by the defences as they sailed away.

I had no idea about this until an old bloke who was at the funeral, who'd also been on the raid told me.

I wonder what he'd seen, what he'd done...

How many he'd killed, how many of his friends he'd lost that day.

He had a stack of medals in his stuff. No-one knew about his wartime experiences until he was dead.

He'd kept it quiet all these years- no boasting, just silence.

Answer 3

The years following the end of the Vietnam War were tough on the armed forces.  The end of the war coinsided with the beginning of the Carter administration and history has taught us what happened when an ignorant democrat came into office.  Actually it has happened twice since the end of the Vietnam war, and both times the military was the first to suffer economic set backs.

There's a price to pay when this is allowed to happen.  In carter's case, he couldn't even launch a rescue mission for our hostages in Iran without the whole mission turning into a train wreck.  This mission needed to be aborted because of air craft failing to perform properly, members  of the mission being killed because of unanticipated desert conditions, and unexpected accidents.

Under Clinton the military budget was once again cut to the bone, but in this case Clinton knew something the rest of the country did not know.  Clinton knew that he would never commit troops to combat, and as a result six attacks on the US or its interests were never avenged by this bottom feeder, Bill Clinton !

I'm inclined to believe many of those Vietnam vets will agree with this assessment, if you tell it the way I told it to you !

Answer 4

Seriously, the best thing you can do is just listen.

Answer 5

There were lots of anti-war protestors. Some of them were really hateful. They would gather at the airports and when the returning soldiers got off the plane they would spit on them and call them "baby burners".

Twenty or so years later they got their proper homecoming with the memorial wall in Washington DC. Hollywood started making movies where Vietnam vets were misunderstood heros. They also started making movies that showed the US government as having betrayed the soldiers (as opposed to the war protestors).

Now there's kind of a resurgence of anti-Vietnam vet propaganda by the Obama campaign. A lot of them are proposing that John McCain bombed children and other civilians during his time in Vietnam. They accuse him of having post traumatic stress disorder. Of course these are the same people who are treating the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as though they are criminals.