Rationale Of The Vietnam War

The first of over two million American boots touched ground in Vietnam in May of 1965, but for what reason were they being deployed to a foreign country? Most soldiers did not even know the exact reason they were being deployed. Derek Seidman’s article tells the world that soldiers did not know why they were actually fighting. The article states:
Few knew why they were fighting; once they arrived in-country, the Cold War rationale for the war felt like a vapid abstraction. The “body count” strategy seemed perverse, and military victories brought no political headway. As the war went on, few wanted to be, as the saying went, the last soldier to die for a mistake. This attitude reverberated beyond combat roles and throughout the whole military(Seidman). …show more content…
Vietnam is full of complex geographical features that make navigating Vietnam a challenge. These land features include thick jungles, swamps, rivers, river deltas, rice fields, and mountains with the occasional city or village. These made guerilla warfare easy for the Viet Cong while remaining difficult for an army, the U.S. in this case, to navigate. On top of the difficult geographical features, some soldiers decided that they would rather end their life than fight a war that a majority of the United States people did not want any part of. If the Vietnam War was so rough and depressing for these soldiers, the government should have known better than to stay involved in such a war. Unmotivated soldiers could, and did, lead to a defeat of the United States. The Viet Cong, the name of the forces that the United States were fighting, used a guerilla style of fighting. This style of fighting was not well known by the U.S. which quickly became an obvious problem for military personnel. Suzanna McCabe wrote an article that included information from soldiers that said, “American soldiers found themselves fighting a very different kind of war than the U.S. had ever experienced. To a large extent, they were engaged in guerrilla warfare -- against fighters who didn't wear uniforms, roamed the countryside in small groups, and could blend into the civilian population. It was sometimes hard to know who the enemy …show more content…
The U.S. is a people-ran government, and demonstrators showed that the war was not wanted in the United States, but the government did not listen to its people. College protests were very common across the country as they still are to this day. One set of protests on a college campus in Ohio turned deadly. The sight of these deadly protests was on the campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Unarmed students were protesting bombings in Cambodia that were part of the Vietnam War when the Ohio National Guard was called in to take control. Previous to the National Guard being called, the students were known to have thrown beer bottles at cop cars and stones at police officers. These actions were what caused the National Guard to be called in to take control. Tear gas was used to disperse crowds, but the gas had little to no effect on the crowds. Members of the Guard fired many shots into the air with rifles, but pistol rounds were fired into some of the crowds. After the thirteen seconds of shooting were over, nine students were wounded, and four other students were killed. These actions caused outrage among the American people. The Ohio National Guard was questioned by the people of Ohio. They did not actually question them, but the the people just wanted to know why they felt that they needed to fire guns into crowds. On top of all of the devastation caused in the United States, the