How where America's actions during the Vietnam war 'disgraceful'?

Question:I am writing an essay about why there were protests against America's involement in Vietnam. I need to know why the US tactics during the war were described as disgraceful.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I am writing an essay about why there were protests against America's involement in Vietnam. I need to know why the US tactics during the war were described as disgraceful.

It was not that the tactics were so disgraceful, though there was a lot of unnecessary bombing and artillery fire and there were instances in which troops of all nations destroyed Vietnamese civilians and villages.
The problem with 'Nam was that the military-industrial complex was driving that war by preaching "Communism is coming to the U.S.A. if not stopped there".
Yeah..well, it happened anyway. The U.S. has become extremely socialistic and is becoming more so every day.
It turned out that the big name 'protesters' (the bands, big name figures like Dylan, the Airplane, The Doors, etc) were
A. lying to us. They were in it for the money and nothing else
B. tools of those who were in the process of destroying the U.S. republic

Unfortunately, the most of us children of that era bought into the lies which has resulted in the political mess that we have today.

O, the most famous disgraceful incident was the Me Lai occurance. You can get more detail by using a search engine that I will be allowed to give here.

It was similar in a lot of ways to the war Bush started.

They were not disgraceful. If you look at what happened when we did pull out... the North swept down and killed millions in Vietnam continuing spilling blood all the way into Cambodia. Millions. Thats what we were holding back. The US held in check the utter oblivion of millions. The disgrace was pulling out and leaving them to be slaughtered.

For the most part, it was a brilliant enemy propaganda coup. The American Media has always been Liberal, and so inclined to highlight the very worst incidents and magnify them beyond all reason. Yes there were incidents such as the Me Lai incident, but when enemy combatants looked just like ordinary peasants, and children were used by the VC as unwitting 'suicide bombers', American troopers were understandably nervous about ANYONE who came too close in battle situations. It was terribly unfair to label our soldiers 'baby killers' when half the time the babies were DOING the killing!

dogwood, you have no idea how ironic your answer is!
Harv, napalm was invented during WWII. What's your problem? And agent orange was supposed to be a defoliant. Would YOU like to be shot at from behind an impenetrable cover of jungle?

Napalm, agent orange?? These in themselves are disgraceful and for a so called civilised country to use them well, about sums up the US. Do as we say not as we do.

What is disgraceful is 33 years after the fact, there are still Americans fighting the Cold War, telling us everything they did in Vietnam was right, and everything the Vietnamese did was wrong. Be careful when asking questions about the Second Indochina War - I see only a few answers that pass for objective, and most of the answers contain way too much bias to be any where near the truth.

"We had to destroy the village to save it."

Check out the quote (and the article written by Douglas Herman) which can be found at the source below:

turing actually has a point. Many 'protesters' didn't want to join the military to go fight a war in Vietnam. Sure, some parts of the war were 'disgraceful', but you must also remember, that's war! The media posted daily body counts, both US and North Vietnam losses. I read somewhere that someone added up the losses that the media used for the North Vietnam, and their losses exceeded the population of Vietnam.

The protesters also did a good job selling to the public that the soldiers over in Vietnam were all baby killers, murderers and rapists.

You could do an essay on how 'disgraceful' the media and protesters were to the soldiers, and how their actions effected US foreign affairs for decades to come (something we're still suffering from) because of the media and protesters lack of foresight on such issues. All they cared about was the war, not the effects of it afterwords.