Nathan c
Q2.
Defeat in the Vietnam War had many consequences for America as the country and its people were changed forever. The war had ended and in 1973 the last US soldiers had left Vietnam but the consequences of the war were already being seen. In the years immediately after the war, America suffered financially as taxes rose and the soldiers who fought in the war were being unfairly blamed for the embarrassing defeat they had to endure. In the long term, the people of America lost trust in their leaders because they felt that they had lied to them about how well the war was going and now the US forces are far less aggressive.
The results of this war were very serious for the Americans because they had lost nearly 60,000 soldiers and around 150,000 were injured. Not only did America have to cope with this loss of death, pain and suffering they were also forced to deal with the huge financial cost of fighting a war 9000 miles away. The government spent over 350 billion on the war which was a huge amount of money and not surprisingly there wasn’t enough money to spend on the important social issues that America was promised at the time, also as a result of this taxes had to rise which caused up roar within communities. This meant that everybody in America was paying for getting involved in a war that didn’t have anything to do with them really, because of the rise in taxes and higher inflation goods in America cost much more. These tax rises made the government very unpopular as it was them who raised them in order to off the debts.
A second consequence of all this spending was that all the social programmes that had been planned to help the least well off were scrapped because America couldn’t afford to pull it off. The government had promised to improve education and housing but again it could not keep to its promises. The issue of housing was to prove a major problem for the government. Statistics show that more was spent on the war than social issues and this meant that its plans to pull down the number of slums and ghettos were stopped. It was mostly black people who lived in these places and so this caused major racial tension. The government also didn’t pay for schools to be improved and so the level of education dropped and the crime rates rose dramatically. As well as this the ex soldiers were treated very poorly. They were treated in dirty hospitals with untrained doctors and nurses, they were often short of supplies because of how much the government spent on the war. This was a horrible thing for the people of America to do because the troops had risked their lives fighting in that war and should have been treated with respect not treated as lepers. The human cost of the war also had a great impact on the American people, 58,000 soldiers lost there lives and 153,000 were severely injured. As well as people who were physically affected there was also many men who come back with serious mental issues because of the disturbing things they had witnessed during there time in Vietnam. Many people resented the government because they believed that they had suffered with the loss of family and friends for nothing because at the end of the war they were no better off than before. This lowered the morale of the people and as a result of this many people committed suicide because of the blame and the fact that the government didn’t provide any after support for them.
