Student Protests During Vietnam

"Hell no! We won't Go" is one of the memorable (or, for some disturbing) shouts uttered by many young people during the Viet Nam war- a war as unpopular as the current Iraq war. The difference was then that the cause was anti-Communism and the need to prop up a regime in South Vietnam that was as corrupt as any but was anti-Communist. John F. Kennedy was supposed to have said about that government: "They're bastards. But they're out bastards!" One needs to examine why there was so much unrest and opposition to the war among young, mostly college-level or college-educated Americans. One reason, of course, was that there was a draft. Young men were forced, by lottery to go into the armed forces to fight a war tens of thousands of miles from home, against an enemy who used military tactics not taught at West Point, and a war where returning veterans painted a terrifying picture about jungle conditions and the viciousness of the Viet Cong and all North Vietnamese and their Communist Chinese and Russian allies.

One problem that turned much public opinion against student unrest was that those who protested the war were seen as the "privileged"- those able to avoid milita

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Category: History - S