In fact, he deserves enormous credit for helping us, half a century after the peak of the fighting, to see beyond old arguments about which side was right. It was as if the United States used “a flamethrower to weed a flower border.”Through vivid accounts of battle and suffering, Hastings shows that the American war machine devastated the society it intended to save, using enormous firepower that did more to demoralize the South Vietnamese population than to defeat the Communists. “If America’s war leadership often flaunted its inhumanity, that of North Vietnam matched it cruelty for cruelty,” Hastings contends.It’s a depressing but also curiously refreshing and mostly convincing way of thinking about the war. Four Kent State University students were killed and nine were injured on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd gathered to protest the Vietnam War. Thirty years is a lot to cover even in 752 pages. On the American side, for example, we learn little about the geopolitical calculations that led presidents from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon to fixate on the need to stop Communist expansion in Southeast Asia.

The United States, France, China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Laos and other countries would over time become Vietnam War protests began small among peace activists and leftist intellectuals on college campuses but gained national prominence in 1965, after the United States began bombing North Vietnam in earnest. The Columbine shooting In the wake of the February 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—during which 17 people were killed and more than a dozen injured—students at that high school and across the United States have been galvanized into action. VIETNAM An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 By Max Hastings Illustrated. Even though both men understood that the United States could no longer achieve its objectives in Vietnam after 1968, Hastings argues, political calculations led them to keep fighting for another four years, at the cost of 21,000 American lives, only to agree in 1973 to a peace deal that they knew had no chance of sticking.The book also excoriates the South Vietnamese. Although American forces often fought effectively on the battlefield, Hastings asserts, those successes proved irrelevant because Americans failed in the more important and far more delicate task of cultivating a South Vietnamese state capable of commanding the loyalty of its own people. With dawn still two hours away, Nixon gazed into the darkness where protestors were The Columbine shooting on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, occurred when two teens went on a shooting spree, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others, before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide.

However, the stage was set for trouble.The following day, Saturday, May 2, there were rumors that radicals were making threats against the town of Kent and the university. Actually, closer attention to the big ideas that drove each side might have reinforced his central point by underlining how much damage was done in the name of competing ideologies that meshed poorly with the needs of Vietnamese society.
However, this image is hardly the only lasting legacy of the events of May 4th.Indeed, the Kent State shooting remains symbolic of the division in public opinion about war in general, and the Vietnam War specifically. Sometimes revolutionaries wear the white hats as they struggle to overthrow a corrupt South Vietnamese regime and rid their nation of American invaders bent on controlling its destiny. 9 thoughts on “ The Real Tragedy of the Vietnam War ” Add Comment. More than any other single event, the Kent State shootings would become a focal point of Richard Nixon couldn’t sleep. The My Lai Massacre: 33 Disturbing Photos Of The War Crime The U.S. Got Away With View Gallery On March 16, 1968, U.S. Army soldiers acting on orders from their commanding officers massacred several hundred innocent Vietnamese civilians. For all that, Hastings’s judgment falls most harshly on the Communists. Wayne says: July 28, 2015 at 5:06 pm I was in ROTC in 1965-66 and vividly recall an Army Captain describing a scenario not entirely unlike that that occurred at My Lai, women, children and the elderly as a VC village, possibly a ambush setup and to take them down. Segregation was made law several times in 18th and 19th-century America as some believed that black and white people were incapable of coexisting.
Rejecting recent scholarship suggesting that leaders in Saigon may have had more legitimacy than often supposed, Hastings berates them as corrupt autocrats reliant on the United States and uninterested in the welfare of their people.

Led by Jefferson Davis and existing from 1861 to 1865, the Confederacy struggled for legitimacy and was never Segregation is the practice of requiring separate housing, education and other services for people of color. The students may have believed that they were right in continuing their mass protest in response to the Cambodian invasion, even though this protest followed the posting and reading by the university of an order to ban rallies and an order to disperse… Some of the Guardsmen on Blanket Hill, fearful and anxious from prior events, may have believed in their own minds that their lives were in danger.


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