WHAT IMPACT DID THE VIETNAM WAR HAVE ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?
During the short span of the Vietnamese war, 2.5 million people died, and millions more displaced. More bombs were dropped than all of World War II, and over one quarter of Vietnam’s forests were killed by Agent Orange. No war has divided the American public like the Vietnam War. The American people wanted nothing to do with the Vietnam war. Having witnessed the unthinkable acts of violence through their TV’s, and the obviousness that the Vietnamese did not want them there in the first place, the majority of Americans distanced themselves from the war. The Vietnam war was also their most debilitating war, costing them more than $167 billion dollars a year. This pushed the US economy to its limits, and resulted in its only defeat thus far. FOCUS QUESTIONS: HOW DID AMERICANS FEEL ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR? At the start of the war, the US president had the American public believing that they had to go to war. Vietnam was communist, and that’s all that mattered. They thousands of men, with eac
