Immorality of the Vietnam War
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This study will consider how the moral lives of American individuals were affected by the Vietnam War and how the United States grappled with the war from an ethical point of view. The Vietnam War was a thoroughly immoral war, based on misguided Cold War ideology and macho American patriotism and, therefore, individuals and the nation as a whole were morally compromised by their participation in that war. The war was immoral because the U.S. cared nothing for the people of Vietnam, but only sought to face down the Soviet Union and/or China using the proxy of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. The same flaw in the American character which led to the war is still operative. This flaw is the arrogant, macho, immature attitude which led the nation to battle the "communist enemy" in a land where it did not belong and which made it unable to accept the fact that it lost that war and should never have been there in the first place. So much blood and suffering was invested by individuals and nationally that the U.S. still finds it hard to look back and admit its great mistake without equivocation.Tim O'Brien, in If I Die in a Combat Zone, expresses the individual point of view. O'Brien sees the war as wrong morally, but in his conclusion he demonstrates a need to emphasize benefits from the war. The essential benefit would be the complete humility he and the nation could learn and experience by admitting without reservation that it waged and lost an immoral war. This benefit has not
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e like the Vietnam war, it is almost impossible to see that investment as the complete and utter tragedy it was.
Just as the individual O'Brien saw the war as immoral and yet participated anyway, so did many of the leaders of the nation similarly see the war as immoral and yet continued to lead the nation deeper and deeper into it. Recently released audio recordings of Lyndon Johnson six months after Kennedy's assassination reveal his knowledge of the lack of moral grounds for escalating American involvement in the war. Combs summarizes the alleged positions of Kennedy and Johnson: "If there was some question of withdrawal [from Vietnam] in Kennedy's mind, there was none of that in Lyndon Johnson" (Combs 398). The audio tapes show that this assumption by Combs is profoundly naive. Johnson did consider withdrawal, along with every other alternative, but concluded that he would never be "the first American President to lose a war" (Combs 398). Johnson's immoral attitude is comparable to that of a bully in the schoolyard who will fight to the end only because his reputation is at stake. Herring writes: "The experience of Vietnam raises an even more fundamental moral issue: however noble the goals of an outside nation may be, the act
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Approximate Word count = 1211
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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