Last year was the 50th anniversary of the most critical year of the war, 1967, with drastically increased U.S. The chaos that was the 1968 Democratic National Convention was a microcosm of America’s political and social environment.Įventually, America’s social-political crisis fizzled much as the war itself did … with the abrupt destruction of a city and a culture, the fall of Saigon. Young people in the streets started speaking their minds, and the adults in most families simply didn’t want to hear it. Individuals began choosing sides, until the nation disintegrated into two unmoving, unmovable factions. among a surprising and surprised group, the civilians. That daily, unblinking exposure to the horrors of armed conflict contributed to making the Vietnam War one of America’s most divisive wars. Americans - including the mothers and fathers, the sons and daughters, the friends and extended family of the soldiers - watched the Vietnam War every single night in all its bloody, horrific detail, up close and personal on the television evening news. It was also the first war that captured American civilians - not with guns, but with the unwavering, unblinking eye of countless cameras. It was the first modern war America lost. It lasted a full generation: officially, from November 1955 (or earlier, in 1950, if one counts the presence of American military advisors stationed in Southeast Asia) to April 1975 with the fall of Saigon. Only a decade after World War II ended, virtually every nation of the world was at least diplomatically involved in the Southeast Asian conflict. The difference in the naming of a single conflict demonstrates most dramatically how the war was perceived around the world. The Vietnamese called it the Resistance War Against America or, more simply, the American War. 2, 2018) ― Americans called it the Second Indochina War or, most predominantly, the Vietnam War.
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