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The Vietnam War : The "Silenced Majority"

The Vietnam War : The "Silenced Majority"

    The Vietnam War, the nation's longest, cost fifty-eight thousand American lives. Only the Civil War and the two world wars were deadlier for Americans. During the decade of direct U.S. military participation in Vietnam beginning in 1964, the U.S Treasury spent over $140 billion on the war, enough money to fund urban renewal projects in every major American city. Despite these enormous costs and their accompanying public and private trauma for the American people, the United States failed, for the first time in its history, to achieve its stated war aims. The goal was to preserve a separate, independent, non-communist government in South Vietnam, but after April 1975, Communism returned to the entire nation.
Beneath the popular assumption that the War in Vietnam was a battle between "the willing good" (capitalists) and "the deceiving evil" (communists), neither side knew who, what, or why they were fighting. The common majority (innocent Vietnamese farmers, confused American soldiers, and the nations' people themselves) had no reason to support a war of exterminative proportions

    In my opinion, any war is a war we can do without. What makes this war particularly repugnant is that it also had a draft.   Many Vietnam veterans, both alive and deceased, never wanted to go to war in the first place. The Selective Service System of the United States forced young men, just out of high school, to go into combat where many committed unspeakable war crimes. Vietnam veteran John Kerry spoke of these atrocities in his speech to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971:

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and...