Hearts and Minds (1974)

[ZoetMB]

There is too much finger-pointing in it and dangerous half-truths about a war in which the United States was clearly facing multiple enemies.

I haven't seen this yet and I'm not sure if I saw this when originally released, but if I did, I've forgotten it. But just dealing with the actual issues and not the film itself, how were we "clearly facing multiple enemies"? The domino theory has long been completely discredited and the proof that we actually had no enemies (aside from the ones we labeled as enemies) is that after we lost the war (and we did indeed lose that war) and abandoned Vietnam, nothing happened. The Communists took over the country, the country had peace for the first time in decades, and eventually American companies started doing business there and now American tourists visit the place. So we lost 50,000 American boys for what? Vietnam is still Communist today and we don't even think about it. No threat to the U.S. whatsoever. (Having said that, millions did die in Cambodia and Laos, but that would have happened with or without our involvement.)

There isn't always moral equivalency. Sometimes, one side IS more wrong than the other. Boys died because LBJ, who was a great president in other ways, didn't want to be the first President to "lose" a war and it took Congress years to decide to abandon the quagmire, which we finally did during the Nixon administration in August of 1973 with the war itself ending in 1975 when the North captured Saigon. The war was illegal (never declared by Congress), racist and split our country in two.

Just as there weren't two equivalent sides to Hitler's desire to rule the world during WWII, there weren't two equivalent sides in Vietnam. We went in there and destroyed as much of the South, which we were supposedly there to "save", including murdering numerous women and children, as the North.

When it comes down to it, we never won the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, who resented their corrupt government that we supported and we had absolutely no idea how to fight a guerrilla war, aside from trying to destroy every inch of the place with Napalm. And having McNamara, a former General Motors executive, running the war was a complete disaster.