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vietnam
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The Vietnam War Debate; A War Within a War “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior” (O'Brien, 1990). Introduction: The statement above was made by Tim O'Brien in his semi-autobiographical novel The Things They Carried. This one statement essentially illuminates the core of the debate surrounding the Vietnam War. The battle between morality and aggression; between liberal and conservative; between heart and mind, was as volatile on the home front as it was overseas. The numerous vociferous protests against the war, both within the government and society, essentially created a ‘war within a war’ in which the ethics and motivations of political leaders and policy makers continually came into question. The issue of whether or not the United States should have so deeply committed itself to the goal of containing communism in South Vietnam remains a hot topic of debate even today. The debate is directly related to the controversy over whether the problems in Southeast Asia were chiefly political and economic in nature or directly related to the military. The United States’ strategy essentially clung to the notion that the core of the problem in Vietnam was indeed military-based; however there is much evidence to show that political and economic interests are what truly drove the decision-making machine. Unfortunately, the Vietnam War was a losing battle from the start. As is stated by David Halberstam in his book The Best and the Brightest, “we were fighting the birthrate of the nation, that the war was essentially a stalemate -- but a stalemate which favored the other side, since eventually we would have to go home” (Halberstam, 1973).
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