Losing Vietnam On The Home Front - 1672 Words

Nick Smith U.S. History A Mr. Nance March 23, 2016 Losing Vietnam on the Home-front Forty six years have passed since the United States officially stopped their involvement in Vietnam. Not since the Civil war had the country been so torn. Every American family was impacted, losing husbands, sons, and daughters. Over fifty thousand Americans were killed and many more still suffer deep physical and emotional scars . Veterans took their own lives, were treated as social outcasts, or ended up on the streets with the homeless. The Vietnam conflict was a war that many did not understand and that left a nation questioning the government they had always trusted. It wasn’t until Johnson began his massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam†¦show more content†¦involvement in the Vietnam War. Some advocates within this movement advocated a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Vietnam. In 1965 the movement began to gain national prominence. Aggressive actions by police and protesters turned the anti-war demonstrations in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention into a riot. News reports of American military abuses, such as the 1968 My Lai Massacre, brought new attention and support to the anti-war movement bringing it to its height. The movement continued to prosper over the span of the conflict. The Má » ¹ Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. The massacre, which was later called the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War, took place in two hamlets of SÆ ¡n Má » ¹ village in Quá º £ng Ngà £i Province. These hamlets were marked on the U.S. Army topographic maps as My Lai and My Khe. The U.S. military codeword for the alleged Viet Cong stronghold in that area was Pinkville, and the carnage was initially referred to as the Pinkville Massacre. Later, when the U.S. Army started its investigation, the media changed it to the Massacre at Songmy. Currently, the event is referred to as the My Lai Massacre in the United States and called the Son My Massacre in Vietnam. High-profile opposition to the Vietnam war turned to street protests in an effort to turn U.S.