Protest Movement Analysis

Reunification of the Protest Movement: “Ohio” When the protest movement began to fracture, it was reunified by a few major events. The first was the My Lai Massacre. In March of 1968, an American infantry unit entered My Lai, a Vietnamese hamlet. They encountered no resistance, but still slaughtered between 175 and 400 people, raped many women, and destroyed Vietnamese property. News of this was publicized in November 1969. This is when the tide began to turn; more and more frequently, the war was identifed as inhumane and unfair. A major cause of this shift in view was the My Lai Massacre. To make matters worse, on May 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon sent 30,000 American troops and 50,000 South Vietnamese troops across the Cambodian border.

This gave them an ethos that previous protest groups did not possess. It was founded in 1967, and had over 40,000 members at its time of fruition. They called for troops to be withdrawn and brought back to the United States. One Vietnam veteran, John Kerry, testified to the Senate for the Winter Soldier investigation on behalf of this group. During this testimony, he made public some of the atrocities committed by American soldiers. In it, he stated, “I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of

[...] We who have come here to Washington have come here because we feel we have to be winter soldiers now. We could come back to this country; we could be quiet; we could hold our silence; we could not tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, the fact that the crimes threaten it, not reds, and not redcoats but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak out. [...] We are asking here in Washington for some action, action from the Congress of the United States of America which as the power to raise and maintain armies, and which by the Constitution also has the power to declare war.

We have come here, not to the President, because we believe that this body can be responsive to the will of the people, and we believe that the will of the people says that we should be out of Vietnam now.”. This statement came as a kick-start to action for many American citizens. After hearing a first-hand