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 come because soldiers like O'Brien see the war as more beneficial than it was:
You add things up. You lost a friend to the war, and you gained a friend. You compromised one principle and fulfilled another. You learned . . . that war is not all bad; it may not make a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not something to scoff at (O'Brien 204).
All of these post-war cliches miss the point of the Vietnam War. Every individual and every nation must c...