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2. Notable Weapons of Vietnam Napalm: Gasoline-based explosive

3. Agent Orange: Chemical that destroyed jungle foliage
Agent Orange: Chemical that destroyed jungle foliage. Linked to cancers, diabetes and serious birth defects, malformations

4. The M-16 Assault Rifle -Pros: lightweight, plastic, light bullets, could carry more (more bullets, in theory means more casualties) -Cons: jammed in water, unreliable, hard to maintain, bullets too light to penetrate thick jungle foliage Helicopters: -Helicopters the “new cavalry”, very light and can be moved ANYWHERE -Can basically deploy troops at any location and get around any barriers

5. General William Westmoreland
Commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam
Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) – South Vietnamese Army
Plan – destroy their morale through WAR OF ATTRITION – gradual wearing down of the enemy by continuous harassment.
Search and Destroy Missions: rooting out civilians with suspected ties to Vietcong (killed civilians, livestock, burned villages – thereby causing them to lose the “battle for hearts and minds”
Vietcong used Guerrilla warfare
elusive enemy with surprise attacks
Tunnels in jungle
Civilians in village
Booby traps and mines
U.S. began to track success by “body count” of Vietcong (since they couldn’t measure success by the amount of territory taken)

6. Vietcong Underground Tunnels

7. American public support for the war erodes further during the late 1960s
Credibility Gap: briefings from the government did not match the coverage of the Vietnam War on television (once again, the power of TV!)
TET OFFENSIVE (1968): Massive surprise N. Vietnamese and Vietcong attack on S. Vietnamese and American forces (very clear that we weren’t “winning”
Johnson’s press briefings on the status of the war were presented significantly differently than reports by highly regarded journalists:
Walter Cronkite
Morley Safer
Dan Rather

8. My Lai Massacre, November 1969
New York Times Seymour Hersh reported
March 16, 1968 – U.S. platoon massacred innocent civilians
Lieutenant William Calley Jr.
Looking for Vietcong, killed 350 – 500, most of which were women, children and elderly
Sentenced to imprisonment (served 3 years before being paroled)
Platoon, “only following orders”
“Kill anything that breathes.”

9. My Lai

10. Pentagon Papers (1971)
Leaked classified documents which revealed the extent to which the American public had been systematically lied to about Vietnam. Leaked by report’s author, Daniel Ellsberg.
Never any plan for withdrawing from Vietnam
Covert bombing raids on Laos and Cambodia
Covert reconnaissance and attacks by U.S. marines in North Vietnamese waters prior to Gulf of Tonkin Incident

11. How did the Vietnam War end? What kind of effect did it have?
By 1973, war was over for U.S.
1975 = S.Vietnam surrenders to N.Vietnam, becomes communist million Vietnamese flee the country
58,000 Americans killed, 303,000 wounded
15% diagnosed with PTSD (post- traumatic stress disorder)
Troops, rather than being honored, often treated as social pariahs, even monsters
Vietnamese deaths = 3-4 million

12. End of Vietnam…who was to blame for defeat???

13. Discussion Question (CP):
For those who were drafted and not medically exempt or enrolled in college, there was little that could be done to avoid military service without great upheaval in one’s personal life:
Go to jail
Flee the country
Claim to be gay (rarely granted a deferment during Vietnam)
Personally injure one’s self
…in the end, a great many objectors would decide to report for duty anyway.
What would you have done if you had been drafted to fight in the Vietnam War? Why would you have made that choice?