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Summary Of Chapter Nine Of Lies My Teacher Told Me

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Countless Americans lack education of the Vietnam War and what treatment the Vietnamese population received during the war. Many times the behavior conducted towards the Vietnamese portrayed American soldiers mistreating the noncombatants. James W. Loewen’s chapter nine of Lies My Teacher Told Me leads readers through the occurrences in the Vietnam War by elaborating the war crimes enacted by American soldiers, examining the intervention of America in the war, and describing pictures that were taken during the war. One subject Loewen uncovers is the analysis of the war crimes throughout the Vietnam War. Loewen recites John Kerry’s statement about the numerous veterans that admitted to the war crimes when he said, “many American troops personally
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James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me is an honest approach to early American and modern American history. Loewen sampled eighteen high school history textbooks and personally dissected each book and compared them to one another and his findings as a professional writer for the History Channel’s History magazine. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, Loewen tackles the misconceptions and inaccuracies that he discovered when reading these popularly taught American textbooks. The book directly covers major events in American history from Columbus’s first arrival in the Caribbean to the Vietnam War and goes into vast detail about the faults that modern textbooks make when describing such events.

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While the Vietnamese authors emphasize themes of loss, trauma, and devastation caused by the war, the American authors tend to focus on disillusionment, disorientation, and challenges to American exceptionalism posed by the conflict. Despite these differences, both sets of authors offer critiques of the dominant narratives of the war, challenging official government propaganda and providing counter-narratives that deepen our understanding of the conflict. The Vietnamese authors' focus on the personal and collective trauma caused by the war is rooted in the historical and cultural context of Vietnam, which has experienced centuries of colonization and war. In contrast, the American authors' disillusionment and challenges to American exceptionalism reflect the larger cultural and historical context of the United States, which has often viewed itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom. These perspectives on the war can be used to deepen our understanding of other conflicts and global issues today, particularly in terms of recognizing the ways in which historical and cultural contexts shape our perceptions of and responses to

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The Vietnam War was a war that conflicted with many Americans due to the wrongful morality and actions taken during the war. The U.S. took action in the war to continue the fight to keep communism from spreading. The war was a shock for America as it took a defeat in the end, North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam, the side we had backed. Although America did not have the most casualties, this was a win, but overall, physical casualties were not only lost in this war but mentally it took a great toll. In the book, A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, his story begins with a memoir that allows readers to develop a deeper understanding of a soldier in war.

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The Vietnam war took a major death toll in Vietnam, United States, South Korea, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. Just in the U.S., “more than 58,000 American soldiers were killed while more than 150,000 others wounded”. On both sides, there were almost 2 million civilians dead and 1.1 simply on the Vietnamese side. The My Lai Massacre, where soldiers brutally killed Vietnamese children and mothers, presents an example where the war mentally changed the soldiers in the war in a very horrendous way. On the other hand, the United States took brutal losses in the Tet Offensive, where the Vietcong slaughtered over 100 towns and twelve United States air bases.

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“Woodstein” and Watergate, Edward Snowden and the NSA, and Seymour Hersh and My Lai exposed the hidden wrongs of the US government with staggeringly influential power to change both the government and journalism. Here, we will be focusing on the fallout from Hersh’s reports on the 1968 massacres at My Lai (“Pinkville”), Vietnam. With the exposer of US Army immorality by Seymour Hersh of the St. Louis Dispatch in a series of reports the field of war journalism was forever changed into two distinct eras, Pre and post Vietnam and fundamentally changed the journalist, military relationship.

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The American convention is that they were Vietcong soldiers. But three out of four patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese hospital afterward for burns from napalm, or jellied gasoline, were village women” (477). When studying American history from this perspective, one sees not only the good American forces had hoped to do, but also the harm that they caused. The information that comes to light when using this perspective, like the example of the injured Vietnamese civilians, brings forward questions that might have remained unasked; for example, was the attack wounding and killing civilians a necessary evil when fighting communism? Did American forces have the right to decide that sacrifices would be made by Vietnamese people?

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The U.S. also spread pro-refugee propaganda sharing imagery of “saving” the Vietnamese. The “operation babylift ” image in lecture 4A, portrays a “rescue” narrative, however, this propaganda was made to cover up the severe refugee situation America had created in Vietnam. This narrative comes in contrast to how the U.S. interfered with the war based on ideology and invested money, weapons, and the lives of many Americans which led created a lot of instability within the country. The war had a severe impact on the people of Vietnam with many civilian deaths, the destruction of livelihoods, and even having children, women, and the elderly fight. Furthermore, as more Vietnamese sought asylum in the U.S., Americans experienced “compassion fatigue” and provided fewer resources for these

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