Vietnam War Memory

In 1945, the Vietnam War began with the U.S joining the forces of the Republic of South Vietnam against North Vietnam between 1965-1968. The U.S failed to gain a military victory and ultimately lost the war due to the fact that South Vietnam was taken over by the communists (North Vietnam) who ended seizing the U.S Embassy in Saigon in April 1975. In 1966, around a year after the U.S involvement in Vietnam, anti-war groups began to protest the war as immoral and debauched and by 1968, American journalists started accusing the government of lack of progress. Furthermore, in 1971, the Pentagon Papers exposed President Johnson’s falsification of the facts and hiding the truth from the American public. What was to be taken into consideration, …show more content…
In “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien writes in a personal way in order to show the firsthand experiences of the soldiers in the battles as well as the intangibility of their memories. In fact, on page 67 the narrator discusses Lemon’s death as an obscure flash of light, but later on recalls the same story through different memories in various ways such as “he stepped on the grenade” Pg.74. Similarly to Nixon’s actions, on July 28 1965, President Johnson ordered an increase in American military forces from 75,000 to 125,000, which required raising the monthly draft call from 17,000 to 35,000 men as part of his politics of containment strategy to prevent the spread of communism abroad. President Johnson emphasized the U.S commitments towards South Vietnam and believed their involvement to be integral to winning. In contrast, many americans believed then that America represents democracy and freedom countering the U.S continuous involvement in the Vietnam War. Henceforth, the various divided opinions on the necessity of the war and its causes and effects, were portrayed from generation to generation, through various mediums such as books, articles and speeches. Those have shaped the memories of their times according to personal interpretations, political moods and social fabrics. Historians and …show more content…
While the written and televised media tried to focus on fact and accuracy, their messages was often veiled in projecting feelings of justification or self-absolvement for an America with a mission to aid the Vietnamese achieve freedom and justice and contain communism or with a self-assigned duty of policing government and affecting politics. Historians, for the most endeavored to articulate a detached narrative of the Vietnam War though the memories they have shaped on the collective have been mostly buried in their books. Ultimately, the sum of all these ways created a spectrum of memories of the Vietnam War throughout many generations which has been preserved with the ultimate goal of maintaining the intensity and compassion of that major event and a consistent reminder of valuing our soldiers no matter how we remember their