"The struggle for Vietnam, a poor South-East Asian country the size of California, comprising mountains, jungles and paddies which enchant twenty-first-century tourists but were uncongenial to twentieth-century Western warriors, lasted three decades and cost between two and three million lives. In the eyes of the world, and even those of the communists’ Chinese and Soviet armourers, for the first twenty years it was a marginal affair. During its last phase, however, the war seized the imagination, roused the dismay and indeed revulsion of hundreds of millions of Western people, while destroying one US president and contributing to the downfall of a second. In the wave of youthful protest against authority which swept many countries in the 1960s, rejection of old sexual morality and an enthusiasm for the joys of marijuana and LSD became conflated with lunges against capitalism and imperialism, of which Vietnam appeared an exceptionally ugly manifestation. Moreover, many older Americans who lacked sympathy for any of those causes came to oppose the war because it was revealed as the fount of systematic deceits by their own government, and also seemed doomed to fail."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018) p. 1
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
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Vietnam War
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