The War Of The Vietnam War - 1866 Words

As President John F. Kennedy had once said, â€Å"Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.† Recorded as one of America’s most gruesome military excursions, the Vietnam War claimed approximately 2.1 million Vietnamese and American soldiers’ lives. The natural demography of Vietnam changed forever as American forces, in a rabid hunt for North Vietnamese guerilla fighters, sprayed approximately 3.5 million acres of bucolic forests with chemical weapons and dropped nearly 6.8 million tons of bombs on the rural landscape, most of which hit small villages filled with innocent civilians (â€Å"The American Involvement†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ). Regarding the crimes American soldiers carried out against the Vietnamese population as the ultimate threat to†¦show more content†¦After World War II, The United States played a detrimental role in recognizing France’s right to colonial rule in Vietnam. As a result, the French instituted repressive control, and an estimated 600,000 to 2,000,000 Vietnamese were starved to death while Vietnamese rice was exported to France (Gunn). Oppressed and furious, the Vietnamese, led by Ho Chi Minh, a communist who had pursued Vietnamese autonomy all of his life, declared their independence in 1945 and overthrew the French five years later. However, France and the United States continued to instill their influence in South Vietnam by inserting their own democratic puppets (â€Å"The American Involvement†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ). In essence, the United States, under the pretense of combating an oncoming â€Å"plague† of Communism, instigated a war in 1965 against North Vietnam with the intention to prevent the southern and northern portions of Vietnam from uniting and achieving sovereignty under one government. Kerry perceived the war as an illegitimate act against a people who have longed to be free from foreign intervention and thus, wants to end the war by calling on the Senate to begin w ithdrawing troops. With the declaration of war against North Vietnam, American troops committed an uncountable number of atrocities against the Vietnamese population, which Kerry assesses in his speech. An excerpt from Kerry’s