Dbq Essay On The Vietnam War

With communism on the rise, America is forced to contain communism to stop the domino effect of communism from taking over. With communism taking over the united states is forced to join the war in Vietnam. This war was one of many, but controversy strikes this one hard. The Vietnam War was controversial for a variety of reasons. While the Vietnam War was originally supported due to the containment of communism and the domino effect it sparked controversy due to the credibility gap and the united states army draft.

Although the war was controversial in many aspects, this side of the war was not controversial due to the fact of the containment and its domino effect. In Document 1 of 1964 the united states congress during the Golf of Tonkin

In doc 8 James Fallows writes about his draft board experience and says “Even as the last of the Cambridge contingent was throwing its urine and deliberately failing its color-blindness tests, buses from the next board began to arrive. These bore the boys from Chelsea, thick, dark-haired young men, the white proles [members of the working class] of Boston. Most of them were younger than us, since they had just left high school, and it had clearly never occurred to them that there might be a way around the draft. They walked through the examination lines like so many cattle off to slaughter. I tried to avoid noticing, but the results were inescapable. While perhaps four out of five of my friends from Harvard were being deferred, just the opposite was happening to the Chelsea boys.” this highlights how the draft was unfair and unjust to people of the lower class because they didn't have deferments like college or a doctors note that could be faked. They had nothing to stop them from going to war and that was unjust and unfair. In Doc 10, during Martin Luther King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech in 1967, he says” It became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem” This further affirms the biases and unfairness of the draft, the poor couldn't do anything about the draft because they couldn't get any deferments like the rich high and middle-class