Vietnam Lessons

VIETNAM LESSONS ESSAY

The Vietnam War has taught us many things that have even helped us in present times. We know that things aren't always as they seem, we shouldn't get into a fight that's not ours, and that we are sometimes lied to.

One lesson that we can learn from the war is that even when it looks like we're winning, it doesn't mean that we actually are winning. In the Vietnam War, it definitely looked like the United States was winning because there was a big difference when comparing the casualty rates. Two million Vietnamese died and only 58,000 Americans- that's about 34 Vietnamese for every one American.

Another lesson that the Vietnam War taught us was that we shouldn't get so involved in another country's affair. We entered this war, positive that we were going to stop the spread of communism. Once we were in the war for a long time, the American public began to dislike the war, because (1) Many men were drafted who did not want to fight, (2) Americans could see the war like never before on their televisions and it seemed very violent, (3) It killed many people from both sides, and there's still many more reasons. Most the people who had a positive opinion on the war changed their minds, especially because we were in it for longer than expected.

Leading to a third lesson of the Vietnam War- credibility gaps do happen. The government is not always right. President Lyndon Baines Johnson said that the war would only last a few months, but those months turned into years and many people's morale changed a lot in that extra time. Also another example of a credibility gap was the Pentagon Papers. In the Pentagon Papers, was a 7,000 page document about how the United States was planning to go to war even before the Gulf of Tonkin and we weren't planning on leaving until we were victorious.

Out of all our problems of the