The Human Cost of the Vietnam War

While researching the school library’s archive of Bizz Johnson’s correspondences with his constituency, I was inspired to use this Archive Dive essay to shed some light on the human toll of the Vietnam War. I was galvanized unto this course after coming across two letters in particular – one from a Miss N. Harris, and the other from a man named John W. Shaw. Both of these communications were sent in the Fall of 1969 – the height of the Vietnam War, and plead for an end to the horrific conflict. In Harris’s case, a form letter from the “Individuals Against the Crime of Silence” group is used in an attempt to shame the political forces supporting the war. Not only does it declare the war’s blatant immorality, but also reminds the reader that those who committed “crimes against humanity” during World War II were justly punished for their crimes at the Nuremberg hearings (Harris). By contrast, Shaw’s letter was but a simple sentence printed via telegram. “Please please please stop the war”, it entreated desperately (Shaw).

This fear was well-founded, for the fate of those caught up in the violence was neither gentle, nor fairly distributed. For example, a study conducted with the top six United States universities – Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale reflected that, compared to World Wars I and II, the rich and educated students used student exemptions to participate far less in the Vietnam war, leaving the lower classes to expend their lives in the name of the Capitalistic success they never achieved. Unlike the World Wars, Vietnam resonated more as a shameless fight between opposing political ideologies, and as a result, engendered less patriotic fervor among young, fighting-age men. In this war, recruits were bought less with national pride, and more through force of authority. Alec Campbell, who wrote on the study, posits that this fact fittingly calls back to a saying common among Confederate soldiers during the Civil War – “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” (Campbell 743).

Those who did fight, and the wounds they suffered over the course of the war were grievous, and thanks to the power of the burgeoning media, shocking to the everyday citizenry back on American soil. The extent of the damage can perhaps best be explained by medical workers on both United States hospital ships and at Vietnamese Hospitals. Aboard the USS Repose, one nurse commented on the severity of injury and the associated mental strain that goes into treating them. According to her: “sometimes you have a patient who’s a triple amputee and is blind, frankly you want him to die because you know what he’s going back to.” (Weinraub). Staff at Danang Civil Hospital had similar testimony, recounting surgeries on shrapnel-blasted children and blood infusions performed with old, deteriorating blood supplies. Far from rare, these gruesome incidents made up the day-to-day cases of medical workers throughout the war, tarring Vietnam in an ever more bloody light.

Despite the Vietnam War’s eventual end, its legacy has caused a great number of deaths even up to modern times. Case in point, in 2011 the New York times published a story asserting that the leftover landmines and other unexploded ordnance that still plague over a fifth of Vietnam’s land have killed 42,132 Vietnamese people and maimed an additional 62,163 more since the end of official hostilities roughly forty years ago. (“Vietnam: More Than…”). Uncounted multitudes of these weapons lie undiscovered, ensuring that the ghost of the Vietnam war will linger violently for years to come.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If this is true, then I cannot think of a more fitting way to sum up my thoughts on the atrocity of Vietnam than with an image. Something that registers with most as more concrete than the duplicity of words.

Little is known regarding the photo above, only that it depicts one of Vietnam’s many war casualties. What strikes me the most is the state of the corpse – mangled in such a manner that its identity is nigh impossible to divine. Is it a man or a woman? An adult or a child? Vietnamese or American? Soldier or civilian? I think it describes war perfectly. It shows, with nothing held back, that in death we are all the same (Photograph VA045981). And what can we, fragile humans that we are do in the face of such a dark truth?

 

Campbell, Alec. “Elites and Death in Vietnam and Other U.S. Wars: A Research Note.” Armed Forces & Society 37.4 (2011): 743-52. Web.

Harris, N. Letter to the author. 21 November 1960. TS.

Photograph VA045981. Digital image. Vietnam Virtual Archive. James E. Bone
Collection, 6 July 2006. Web. 1 Sept. 2015.

Shaw, John. Letter to the author. 15 October 1969. TS.

“Vietnam: More Than 100,000 Casualties From Explosives Since War Ended.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 2011: n. pag.  Print.

Weinraub, Bernard. “Treating Vietnam War Casualties Is a Grueling Struggle.” The New York Times 27 Aug. 1967: n.  pag. Print.