Casualties In The Vietnam War

Casualties in war are and inevitable. When fighting guerilla warfare, it can be difficult to tell the enemy from friend, civilian from fighter. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong dressed as the villagers, blurring the lines between friend and foe. During the war, civilian casualties happened. March sixteenth, 1968 was a day of devastating civilian losses for the South Vietnamese when the troops from the United States entered the city of My Lai, and encountered resistance from the villagers. On this day, 347 villagers were attacked and viciously killed by these soldiers who had been sent there to protect them. These soldiers were weary of the war and could not understand why they were fighting anymore (Isserman and Kazin 2012, 213). It is events

The view of the United States was that South Vietnam had strategic value in maintaining a democratic foothold in Asia. Leaders like Senator Kennedy referred to the budding nation as a “proving ground for democracy” and threw their support behind the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had been elected in a fixed election (Isserman and Kazin 2012, 67,68). Diem’s democratic regime was far from democratic as he persecuted his opponents, took land from the people and redistributed it to the wealthy and his own supporters. The US overlooked these actions in their blind support of Diem, contempt for Ho Chi Minh who was the communist leader in North Vietnam, and intense desire to see democracy succeed over communism in the country (Isserman and Kazin 2012, 69). The Soviet Union and China, the two largest communist countries in Asia at the time did not view the Vietnam war as a proving ground to test the US and democracy and saw the outcome as a communist triumph (Isserman and Kazin 2012, 72). The peasants of South Vietnam though, saw Diems actions and behavior in contrast to Ho Chi Minh, who had always championed Vietnamese independence from foreign rule (Isserman and Kazin 2012, 65). They would assist the Northern Vietnamese army and aided the Viet Cong in fighting the war where they could. Some of the Southern Vietnamese would join the Viet Cong to support

The leaders of the US were too focused on their own goals, such as the stopping the continued rise of communism, to stop and discover what the people of Vietnam truly wanted and when they realized that they had made a mistake in their choice of leader for the Republic of Vietnam, they stayed the course instead of admitting their error and taking corrective action. This damaged the US reputation in the eyes of the Vietnamese and led to further deterioration of the war effort and eventually the acceptance that the cause was