The Effects of Vietnam on American Culture

American Culture During and After the Vietnam War

The war in Vietnam is unique amongst American wars not simply for its painfully enduring length , the widespread controversy it invoked and its continuing role as a point of contention in the ideology of `just war but for the extremity of its psychological impact as well . If it is not unusual for a war to produce so many participants with deep-seeded and inescapably nightmarish memories , it may be unique that so many of these stories have found their way to history 's permanent record . In

the case of the Vietnam War , the psychological impact on the soldiers who fought their would mirror that levied on the American public . This is well captured in the politics of the era as well as in many of the most prominent examples of literature and film based on the nation 's experiences in the losing war . Tim O 'Brien 's The Things They Carried is a useful point of consideration . This account of the Vietnam War through the first-hand perspective of one of its veterans is illuminating of the chaotic , futile and perpetually haunting nature of war that reveals long-term emotional ramifications for its survivors In a sense , this work helps to direct a discussion on the way this impact was likewise imposed on America as a whole

In his of the experiences of his troop , O 'Brien 's words give a palpable sense of the horror experienced by combatants in mid-fight , even in a seat of victory . Though the United States could not claim this , it had certainly succeeded in dispensing a remarkable degree of destruction in its enemy 's homeland . This would impose a sense of responsibility for average Americans , who would exit the war with a clear realization of the carnage for which they were responsible In a telling passage , O 'Brien captures the guilty American psyche through the eyes of a young and somewhat reluctant soldier . Here O 'Brien 's depiction of the extent of war 's impact on his psychological state of being extends to his sympathetically distraught consideration of his enemy as well . But even more , it provides a metaphor for an America stripped of its innocence and weighed down by a recognition of what it had done . O 'Brien tells of a recently killed enemy soldier that the blood at the neck had gone a deep purplish black . Clean fingernails , clean hair-he had been a soldier for only a single day After his years at the university , the man I killed returned to his new wife to the village of My Khe , where he enlisted as a common rifleman with the 48th Vietcong Battalion . He knew he would die quickly . He knew he would see a flash of light . He knew he would fall dead and wake up in the stories of his village and people (130

Just as O 'Brien 's novel would be suitable in such passages for identifying the experience of the soldier with the...