The Jungles of Vietnam to the living rooms of America: The Vietnam War

The Cover of Life Magazine, November, 1965, suggesting the future role the media would play in changing ordinary American's feelings about the war through reporting

It is difficult to assign a defined start and end date to America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2, 1964, when a naval battle occurred in the North Vietnam ocean between the USS Maddox, the USS Ticonderoga and North Vietnamese patrols is often marked as a start date. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution shortly after the incident, giving Lyndon B. Johnson the ability to use any means necessary to resolve conflict in Vietnam and prevent South Vietnam from falling to communism (u.s. history). The Vietnam war created conflict on the U.S. home front and generated rampant mistrust of authority as the media brought the horrors of war from the battlefields to American television screens and the American people began to feel that they had been lied to about the conflict's progress by government officials. In 1975,  the Montreal Gazette's Marshall Mcluhan stated that "Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. The war was lost in the living room of America -- not the battlefields of Vietnam" (Quotes in Vietnam, 2011) Vietnam was the first war that the US had ever lost and this fact had a disheartening and divisive effect on the American public. Protests such as the 1970 student protest at Kent State characterized a growing antiwar sentiment on the home front. The effects of the Vietnam war and the divisions it caused between Americans would linger beyond the war itself making the US people nervous about involving themselves in future foreign conflicts and more cynical about the true intentions of government. The US remained a strong global force after losing Vietnam, but she was a shaken nation. Loss was unprecedented in American history and the division created between pro and anti war fronts at home would haunt American society through foreign actions and policy decisions to come.

References:

            U.S. History.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1983.html

           Quotes in Vietnam War. (2011, November 26). Retrieved from http://www.notable-quotes.com/v/vietnam_war_quotes.html

            Sitikoff, H. (1999). Modern american poetry. Retrieved from http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/postwar.htm