Vietnam War Dbq

Vietnam War: The U.S. Didn’t Lose to the Viet Cong

Sullivan Watson

August 5, 1964. The U.S. sprung into battle after an alleged attack from North Vietnam. The following war was a long 20-year conflict between South Vietnam and Communist North Vietnam. Both sides were eventually supported by world superpowers, caught at the same time in their own Cold War. The U.S. backed the South, and the Soviet Union defended the North. North Vietnam was known for its harsh and effective fighting tactics over the course of the war, including guerilla warfare. Although some might say that the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam because of the tactics used by the North Vietnamese, they actually lost the war because of heavy protesting from citizens, a lack of strength

Document 2 is a song whose lyrics read, “Whoopee! we’re all gonna die. Well, come on mothers throughout the land, Pack your boys off to Vietnam…Be the first one on your block, To have your boy come home in a box.” This quote portrays the war as a way for you to send your child and have them not return, as if it was not patriotic at all, but in fact an efficient way of killing troops. Similarly, in Document 4, an interview with Hupert H. Humphrey, the Vice president of the US at the time, he directly references police violence and mob brutality saying, “Neither mob violence or police brutality have any place in America. Are we to be one nation, or are we to be a nation divided.” For Humphrey to plead for the nation to come together as one country says a lot about the division that protests caused at the time. During the course of the war, millions of Americans participated in anti-war and

also lost the Vietnam War due to lack of support in the our government at the time. The president, Lyndon B. Johnson, lost a lot of supporters by 1967, when a military-funded building in Madison, Wisconsin, was bombed. The bombing was to protest the research of non-ethical weapons used by the U.S. Army during the war. As we can see in Document 10, the educated students of UW-Madison were protesting their own campus building because it represented the unethical weapons used by the US as a whole, including Dow Chemical Company. Dow Chemical Company was contracted by the government to produce napalm B and Agent Orange. According to WorldAtlas.com, the use of these chemicals in the Vietnam War created the second worst chemical warfare event in history, second only to an event in 600 BCE. In an article stating the top 10 worst chemical warfare events in history World Atlas justifies the Vietnam War being the second worst with, “Agent Orange itself breaks down within a week, as a result producing a compound called dioxin. Dioxin lingers in some conditions for up to 100 years and is estimated by the Vietnamese government to have caused up to 400,000 deaths, and 1.5 million birth defects.” The backlash to the use of these chemicals was huge, and the U.S. government was the main target for supporting the production and use of these disliked weapons. After they were exposed for using these chemicals, even more people opposed the war and the US’ decisions. This led to even