Truman Doctrine During The Vietnam War

“One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.” Walter Dean Meyers vividly expresses the horror that the twenty yearlong Vietnam War had brought upon American soldiers and service people in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. Through the Truman Doctrine, the Diem Regime, and the Domino Theory, the involvement of the United States in the War in Vietnam War was justifiable. What happened after the United States traveled to Asia, was not.

The Vietnam War, or the Second

Truman presented to congress, an American policy that would limit and contain the communist powers of the world, specifically the USSR(Frazier 3). This plan was originally created for the spread of communist control in Greece and Turkey. The Doctrine was originally supposed to, as Truman stated in his 1947 speech in a congressional joint session, “be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.”(Frazier 12) This piece of legislature was very helpful in the countering of communist power in Eastern Europe. Because of the Truman Doctrine, the United States decided to start intervening in other parts of the world, in order to stop the spread of communism. Like the Korean War, American exceptionalism had sent a stigma of a feeling of importance to American government officials. This stigma led to the rationalization that the United States has to be the forerunning country in the world in the battle against

As shown by the picture, China was the first nation to go completely into a communist form of government, followed by the Korean War between the North and South Koreas, which was then followed by the Vietnam War, fought between the Communist North and Dictatorial South(Ninkovich 24). The war in Vietnam was also fought in Laos and Cambodia, causing those dominoes to be tilted as well. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia were also experiencing communist parties in their countries, however it was never taken into any form of power or