The Apology The United States Owes The Vietnam Veterans

The hottest war zone this country has ever been in was being fought by eighteen- and nineteen-year boys, you can call them men if you want. Since I was once a soldier and later an officer, I must point out the facts of being a teenager and being a man. Most of them enlisted and many were drafted to go fight the war in Vietnam. While the United States of America was being defended planes began to return to the states loaded down with the bodies of these young eighteen and nineteen-year-old soldiers in body bags. If you are not knowledgeable about the Institute of Medicine (IOM). You would think it is the Veterans Administration (VA) fault why the Vietnam Veterans have not gotten their benefits. I would advise you to continue reading. Then I want you to ask the question why nongovernmental researchers are being hired to do the research on “Agent Orange?” I also want you to know the Institute of Medicine (IOM) is no longer under the same name. They have the same function but a new name called the Health & Medicine Division which is also nongovernmental. As concerned citizens we must ask the question of why nongovernmental agencies are being allowed to research “Agent Orange?” I am certain the results will not shock you as to why the VA is not able to advance the Vietnam Veterans benefits because they are receiving their reports from the (HMD) stating there is no correlation with “Agent Orange” to the sickness the Vietnam Veterans have. The VA gets these reports every two years. Another well kept secret is the number of agents used in Vietnam. While many of you think there was just “Agent Orange.” My research shows it was a total of six different agents used.

Rooted in recent scholarship, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War offers profound new perspectives on the political, historical, military, and social issues that defined the war and its effect on the United States and Vietnam. Laying the chronological and critical foundations for the volume, David L. Anderson opens with an essay on the Vietnam War's major moments and enduring relevance. Mark Philip Bradley follows with a reexamination of Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism and the Vietminh-led war against French colonialism. Richard H. Immerman revisits Eisenhower's and Kennedy's efforts at nation building in South Vietnam, and Gary R. Hess reviews America's military commitment under Kennedy and Johnson. Lloyd C. Gardner investigates the motivations behind Johnson's escalation of force, and Robert J. McMahon focuses on the pivotal period before and after the Tet Offensive. Jeffrey P. Kimball then makes sense of Nixon's paradoxical decision to end U.S. intervention while pursuing a destructive air war. John Prados and Eric Bergerud devote essays to America's military strategy, while Helen E. Anderson and Robert K. Brigham explore the war's impact on Vietnamese women and urban culture. Melvin Small recounts the domestic tensions created by America's involvement in Vietnam, and Kenton Clymer traces the spread of the war to Laos and Cambodia. Concluding essays by Robert D. Schulzinger and George C. Herring account for the legacy of the war within Vietnamese and American contexts and diagnose the symptoms of the "Vietnam syndrome" evident in later debates about U.S. foreign policy. America's experience in Vietnam continues to figure prominently in discussions about strategy and defense, not to mention within discourse on the identity of the United States as a nation. Anderson's expert collection is therefore essential to understanding America's entanglement in the Vietnam War and the conflict's influence on the nation's future interests abroad.

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States

First published in 1997, this volume explores the twenty years it has taken the United States to decide where Vietnam belongs on its mental landscape, as indicated by the establishment of official diplomatic relations between the two countries on August 5, 1995. Having won the Cold War, but lost a skirmish in Vietnam, America’s defeat can now be set in context against subsequent campaigns in Afghanistan, Angola, El Salvador, Eritrea, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere which suggest that the best any outsider can expect by intervening in Third World domestic conflicts is a hugely expensive, bloody stalemate. Tai Sung-An identifies that, despite America’s painful, deep and very expensive involvement in Vietnam for a lengthy two decades, Americans fought, failed and left while remaining ignorant of the most elementary knowledge of Vietnam, symptomatic of a cultural gap, isolationism and even intellectual complacency.

A blistering critique of the gulf between America's soldiers and the society that sends them off to war, from the bestselling author of The Limits of Power and Washington Rules The United States has been "at war" in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade. Yet as war has become normalized, a yawning gap has opened between America's soldiers and veterans and the society in whose name they fight. For ordinary citizens, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates has acknowledged, armed conflict has become an "abstraction" and military service "something for other people to do." In Breach of Trust, bestselling author Andrew J. Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its pernicious implications: a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory. Among the collateral casualties are values once considered central to democratic practice, including the principle that responsibility for defending the country should rest with its citizens. Citing figures as diverse as the martyr-theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the marine-turned-anti-warrior Smedley Butler, Breach of Trust summons Americans to restore that principle. Rather than something for "other people" to do, national defense should become the business of "we the people." Should Americans refuse to shoulder this responsibility, Bacevich warns, the prospect of endless war, waged by a "foreign legion" of professionals and contractor-mercenaries, beckons. So too does bankruptcy—moral as well as fiscal.

"Containing the public messages, speeches, and statements of the President", 1956-1992.