Vietnam and “The War at Home”

Abstract

The scale of the Vietnam War made it an issue no one could avoid. The antiwar movement was able to link up disparate constituencies of the New Left, providing a center and a common language, because it alone could reach into every American home, neighborhood, town, city, and suburb. Though the fighting was done mostly by poor and working-class “grunts,” 2.5 million young men (and several thousand young women) of every class, color, and region served in Vietnam. More than 153,000 were wounded and over 58,000 died, shipped home in bodybags that became the symbol of the war’s cost. The war was fought to contain communism and revolution anywhere and everywhere, but its major impact at home was to break the Cold War’s quarantine of militant radicalism. Eventually, the United States itself was no longer “contained,” as the war destroyed the presidencies of the two preeminent Cold War presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

We don’t know anything about Communism, socialism, and all that, but we do know that Negroes have caught hell here under this American Democracy.

—McComb chapter, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, July 1965

It is said that we are fighting against North Vietnam’s aggression rather than its ideology and that the “other side” has only to “stop doing what it is doing” in order to restore peace. But what are the North Vietnamese doing, except participating in a civil war, not in a foreign country but on the other side of a demarcation line between two sectors of the same country, a civil war in which Americans from ten thousand miles across the ocean are also participating?

—Senator J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power, 1966

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission—to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that has driven this country the last ten years or more, so from when thirty years from now our brothers go down a street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say “Vietnam” and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

—Lieutenant John Kerry, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Testimony Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971