Political
Following the end of America’s combat role in Vietnam in 1973, and the subsequent fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in 1975, the often prophesied and much feared resurgence of McCarthyite Red-baiting, the bitter accusations of "who lost Vietnam?" barely transpired. Rather than massive recriminations, a collective amnesia took hold. The majority of Americans, it appeared, neither wanted to talk or think about their nation's longest and most debilitating war--the only war the United States ever lost. That forgetfulness gave way in the early 1980s to a renewed interest in the war: Hollywood, network television, and the music industry made Vietnam a staple of popular culture; and scholars, journalists, and Vietnam veterans produced a flood of literature on the conflict, especially concerning its lessons and legacies. Much of it, emphasising the enormity of the damage done to American attitudes, institutions, and foreign policy by the Vietnam ordeal, echoed George R. Kennan's depiction of the Vietnam War as "the most disastrous of all America's undertakings over the whole two hundred years of its history."
Initially, the humiliating defeat imposed by a nation Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had described as "a fourth-rate power" caused a loss of pride and self-confidence in a people that liked to think of the United States as invincible. An agonising reappraisal of American power and glory dampened the celebration of the Bicentennial birthday in 1976. So did the economic woes then afflicting the United States, which many blamed on the estimated $167 billion spent on the war. President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to finance a major war and the Great Society simultaneously, without a significant increase in taxation, launched a runaway double-digit inflation and mounting federal debt that ravaged the American economy and eroded living standards from the late 1960s into the 1990s.
The United States also paid a high political cost for the Vietnam War. It weakened public faith in government, and in the honesty and competence of its leaders. Indeed, scepticism, if not cynicism, and a high degree of suspicion of and distrust toward authority of all kind characterised the views of an increasing number of Americans in the wake of the war. The military, especially, was discredited for years. It would gradually rebound to become once again one of the most highly esteemed organisations in the United States. In the main, however, as never before, Americans after the Vietnam War neither respected nor trusted public institutions.
They were wary of official calls to intervene abroad in the cause of democracy and freedom, and the bipartisan consensus that had supported American foreign policy since the 1940s dissolved. Democrats, in particular, questioned the need to contain communism everywhere around the globe and to play the role of the planet's policeman. The Democratic majority in Congress would enact the 1973 War Powers Resolution, ostensibly forbidding the president from sending U.S. troops into combat for more than ninety days without congressional consent. Exercising a greater assertiveness in matters of foreign policy, Congress increasingly emphasised the limits of American power, and the ceiling on the cost Americans would pay in pursuit of specific foreign policy objectives. The fear of getting bogged down in another quagmire made a majority of Americans reluctant to intervene militarily in Third World countries. The neo-isolationist tendency that former President Richard M. Nixon called "the Vietnam syndrome" would be most manifest in the public debates over President Ronald Reagan's interventionist policies in Nicaragua and President George Bush's decision to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Despite the victorious outcome of the Persian Gulf War for the United States and its allies, and President Bush's declaration in March 1991--"By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"--The fear of intervention would reappear in the public debate over President Bill Clinton's commitment of U.S. peacekeeping forces in Somalia and Bosnia. Quite clearly, for at least a quarter of a century after the Vietnam War ended, that conflict continued to loom large in the minds of Americans. Accordingly, a new consensus among foreign policy makers, reflecting the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, became manifest: the United States should use military force only as a last resort; only where the national interest is clearly involved; only when there is strong public support; and only in the likelihood of a relatively quick, inexpensive victory.
Another consensus also gradually emerged. At first, rather than giving returning veterans of the war welcoming parades, Americans seemed to shun, if not denigrate, the 2 million-plus Americans who went to Vietnam, the 1.6 million who served in combat, the 300,000 physically wounded, the many more who bore psychological scars, the 2,387 listed as "missing in action," and the more than 58,000 who died. Virtually nothing was done to aid veterans and their loved ones who needed assistance in adjusting. Then a torrent of fiction, films, and television programs depicted Vietnam vets as drug-crazed psychotic killers, as vicious executioners in Vietnam and equally vicious menaces at home. Not until after the 1982 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., did American culture acknowledge their sacrifice and suffering, and concede that most had been good soldiers in a bad war.
Yet this altered view of the Vietnam veterans as victims as much as victimisers, if not as brave heroes, was not accompanied by new public policies. Although most veterans did succeed in making the transition to ordinary civilian life, many did not. More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than had died in it. Even more--perhaps three-quarters of a million--became part of the lost army of the homeless. And the nearly 700,000 draftees, many of them poor, badly educated, and non-white, who had received less than honourable discharges, depriving them of educational and medical benefits, found it especially difficult to get and keep jobs, to maintain family relationships, and to stay out of jail. Although a majority of Americans came to view dysfunctional veterans as needing support and medical attention rather than moral condemnation, the Veterans Administration, reluctant to admit the special difficulties faced by these veterans and their need for additional benefits, first denied the harm done by chemicals like Agent Orange and by the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) afflicting as many as 700,000, and then stalled on providing treatment.
Mostly, remembrances continue to be stirred by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the most visited site in the nation's capital. Its stark black granite reflecting panels, covered with the names of the more than 58,000 American men and women who died in Vietnam, is a shrine to the dead, a tombstone in a sloping valley of death. Lacking all the symbols of heroism, glory, patriotism, and moral certainty that more conventional war memorials possess, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a sombre reminder of the loss of too many young Americans, and of what the war did to the United States and its messianic belief in its own overweening virtue.
Reinforcing this position is the stark fact of Fifty-eight thousand plus died in the Vietnam War. Yet, according to official statistics, only 20,000 Vietnam veterans had committed suicide, Yet “While doing research for his novel, Suicide Wall, Alexander Paul contacted Point Man International and was given the name of a retired VA doctor, and conducted a phone interview with him. In that interview, the doctor related that his estimate of the number of Vietnam Veteran suicides was 200,000 men, and that the reason the official suicide statistics were so much lower was that in many cases the suicides were documented as accidents, primarily single-car drunk driving accidents and self inflicted gunshot wounds that were not accompanied by a suicide note or statement. According to the doctor, the under reporting of suicides was primarily an act of kindness to the surviving relatives”.(. This demonstrates perhaps the most poignant effect of the war that the effect was greatest on those who fought.
One of the first big-budget Hollywood films to confront the Vietnam War, "The Deer Hunter," showed captive American soldiers tortured and forced to engage in a grisly game of Russian roulette. The film's grim depiction of young Americans' loss of innocence stirred raw emotion in audiences in 1978, three years after the war's end. The tumultuous response to "The Deer Hunter" mirrored the divisions the war wrought in American society. For young and old, rich and poor, white and minority, Vietnam became the great divide, the catalyst for a seismic shift in contemporary pop culture. The antiwar movement, coupled with the disillusionment of Watergate and the youth culture's embrace of mind-altering drugs, helped create a new breed of alienated antiheroes who have held sway in the culture for a generation, from John Lennon and Jack Nicholson to Kurt Cobain, this new pop culture sensibility embraced a provocative antiauthoritarianism that offered a clean break from the sunny optimism of films and music in the 1950s and early 1960s. The war sparked an era of distrust, paranoia and cynicism among musicians, filmmakers, novelists and comedians. It could be heard everywhere, but especially in pop music, in the protest ballads of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, then in Top 40 hits like Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" and Edwin Starr's "War.". Jimmy Hendrix became an antiwar symbol in the late 1960s with his jarring rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Hollywood didn't directly address Vietnam until the war was over. But many of the most acclaimed films of the late '60s and early '70s, including "The Godfather," "Chinatown," "Easy Rider" and "Midnight Cowboy," were seen as heavily influenced by a distrust and cynicism that grew out of the war. Pop icons who embodied the mercurial spirit of this new counterculture were all shaped by the war: John Lennon performed at peace concerts; Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight crown for refusing to be drafted; Jimmy Hendrix, a onetime member of the 101st Airborne division, regularly played "Machine Gun" in concert, dedicating the song to "all the soldiers fighting in Chicago, Milwaukee, New York and, yeah, all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam.", supporting the soldiers as innocent pawns of an uncaring, warmongering, government.
Hendrix's feedback-laced version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" became so fixed in youth culture consciousness that when Francis Ford Coppola made "Apocalypse Now," the director hired Randy Hansen, a Hendrix impersonator, to re-create the late guitarist's raw style on the film's soundtrack. The war provoked art that fed the burgeoning "us versus them" antiwar spirit of the times.
In Vietnam, soldiers listened to Hendrix and Dylan, black Marines in Da Nang started a riot when officers removed R&B records from the PX jukebox. In the last days of US involvement in the war, troops played the Animals' "We've Gotta Get Out of This Place." As Michael Herr wrote in his wartime memoir, "Dispatches," when he returned to the United States he couldn't tell "the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn't even have to fuse."
The gulf between Vietnam critics and supporters was just as wide a decade after the war had ended. In 1984, when Reagan was running for re-election, Bruce Springsteen released "Born in the U.S.A.," whose title song spoke in the voice of an embittered Vietnam veteran. The widely divergent reactions to the album, whose cover had Springsteen in front of a huge American flag, showed how easily pop images can mean different things to different people in different political eras. Rock critics viewed "Born in the U.S.A." as a bitter indictment of America's involvement in Vietnam, but many fans saw the song as an endorsement of patriotic values. After seeing Springsteen in concert, George Will wrote an admiring column, praising the star's blue-collar outfit of T-shirt and headband, which reminded Will of another pop symbol: Robert De Niro in "The Deer Hunter." Soon Reagan was on the bandwagon, praising Springsteen during a New Jersey campaign stop, saying America's future "rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: Bruce Springsteen."
Springsteen let his music speak for itself. But his use of Vietnam as a metaphor for his disillusionment with '80s Reaganomics helped inspire a new generation of socially conscious musicians.
Vietnam’s impact culturally in America is through films such as “Apocalypse Now and the “Deer-Hunter”, and through songs such as Edwin Stars “War”, and the Beatles “All you need is Love”. These lasting and evocative influences amongst US culture, though steadily growing less and less, show generations that weren’t alive in the 1960’s and early 70’s, what the war meant to different generations. But perhaps the best image to define the emotional, cultural, and physcological effect of the war, is in Washington DC, where a memorial showing three dishevelled, tired soldiers in the jungle, one Black, Hispanic, and white, are waiting for something, they are staring at the black wall with all the names of those killed or are missing. Culturally, through the mediums of Film, music and television reporting of the war, the impact on America after the war was that it’s cultural effect on America has been documented and deemed as important for the change that it evoked culturally, than the war that was fought.
