Vietnam War

===In the United States===
{{Main|United States in the Vietnam War}}
[[File:Marine da nang.jpg|thumb|upright|A young [[United States Marine Corps|Marine]] private waits on the beach during the Marine landing, [[Da Nang]], 3 August 1965]]

Failure of U.S. goals in the war is often placed at different institutions and levels. Some have suggested that the failure of the war was due to political failures of U.S. leadership.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Lippman |first=Thomas W. |date=9 April 1995 |title=McNamara Writes Vietnam Mea Culpa |newspaper=The Washington Post |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/04/09/mcnamara-writes-vietnam-mea-culpa/a85cc058-54fe-4074-bda3-b374885ede8f/ |access-date=28 March 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191228230351/https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/04/09/mcnamara-writes-vietnam-mea-culpa/a85cc058-54fe-4074-bda3-b374885ede8f/ |archive-date=28 December 2019 |quote=As recounted by McNamara{{Nbsp}}... the war could and should have been avoided and should have been halted at several key junctures, one as early as 1963. According to McNamara, he and other senior advisers to President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to head it off through ignorance, inattention, flawed thinking, political expediency and lack of courage.}}</ref> Others point to a failure of U.S. military doctrine. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated that "the achievement of a military victory by U.S. forces in Vietnam was indeed a dangerous illusion."<ref name=McNamara/>{{Rp|368}} The inability to bring Hanoi to the bargaining table by bombing also illustrated another U.S. miscalculation, and demonstrated the limitations of U.S. military abilities in achieving political goals.<ref name=Karnow/>{{Rp|17}} As [[Chief of Staff of the United States Army|Army Chief of Staff]] [[Harold Keith Johnson]] noted, "if anything came out of Vietnam, it was that air power couldn't do the job."<ref name="Buzzano">{{Cite web |last=Buzzanco |first=Bob |date=17 April 2000 |title=25 Years After End of Vietnam War, Myths Keep Us from Coming to Terms with Vietnam |url=http://www.commondreams.org/views/041700-106.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080605195117/http://www.commondreams.org/views/041700-106.htm |archive-date=5 June 2008 |access-date=11 June 2008 |website=[[The Baltimore Sun]]}}</ref> General William Westmoreland admitted that the bombing had been ineffective, saying he doubted "that the North Vietnamese would have relented."<ref name=Buzzano/> U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in a secret memo to President Gerald Ford that "in terms of military tactics … our armed forces are not suited to this kind of war. Even the Special Forces who had been designed for it could not prevail."{{Sfn|Kissinger|1975}}

Hanoi had persistently sought unification of the country since the Geneva Accords, and the effects of U.S. bombings had negligible impact on the goals of the North Vietnamese government.<ref name=Nguyen/>{{Rp|1–10}} The effects of U.S. bombing campaigns had mobilized the people throughout North Vietnam and mobilized international support for North Vietnam due to the perception of a super-power attempting to bomb a significantly smaller, agrarian society into submission.<ref name=Nguyen/>{{Rp|48–52}}

In the post-war era, Americans struggled to absorb the lessons of the military intervention. President [[Ronald Reagan]] coined the term "[[Vietnam Syndrome]]" to describe the reluctance of the American public and politicians to support further military interventions abroad after Vietnam. U.S. public polling in 1978 revealed that nearly 72% of Americans believed the war was "fundamentally wrong and immoral."<ref name="Hagopian" />{{Rp|10}}

The [[Vietnam War POW/MIA issue]], concerning the fate of U.S. service personnel listed as [[missing in action]], persisted for many years after the war's conclusion. The costs of the war loom large in American popular consciousness; a 1990 poll showed that the public incorrectly believed that more Americans died in Vietnam than in World War II.<ref>{{Cite web |date=8 May 2001 |title=Victory in Europe 56 Years Ago |url=http://www.gallup.com/poll/1552/Victory-Europe-Years-Ago.aspx |publisher=Gallup News Service}}</ref>

====Financial cost====
{| class="wikitable floatright" style="width: 35%;"
|+United States expenditures in South Vietnam (SVN) (1953–1974) Direct costs only. Some estimates are higher.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Dacy |first=Douglas |url=https://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/108054.pdf |title=Foreign aid, war, and economic development: South Vietnam 1955–1975 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1986 |isbn=978-0-521-30327-9 |page=242}}</ref>
|-
! U.S. military costs || U.S. military aid to SVN || U.S. economic aid to SVN || Total || Total (2015 dollars)
|-
| $111&nbsp;billion || $16.138&nbsp;billion || $7.315&nbsp;billion || $134.53&nbsp;billion || $1.020&nbsp;trillion
|}

Between 1953 and 1975, the United States was estimated to have spent $168&nbsp;billion on the war (equivalent to ${{Inflation|US|0.168|1964|r=2}} trillion in {{Inflation/year|US}}).<ref>{{Cite news |date=22 January 2014 |title=How Much Did The Vietnam War Cost? |language=en-US |work=The Vietnam War |url=https://thevietnamwar.info/how-much-vietnam-war-cost/ |access-date=17 May 2018}}</ref> This resulted in a large federal [[United States public debt|budget deficit]]. Other figures point to $138.9&nbsp;billion from 1965 to 1974 (not inflation-adjusted), 10 times all education spending in the US and 50 times more than housing and community development spending within that time period.<ref name="CQ">{{Cite web |title=CQ Almanac Online Edition |url=https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal75-1213988#H2_1 |access-date=14 June 2018 |website=library.cqpress.com}}</ref> General record-keeping was reported to have been sloppy for government spending during the war.<ref name=CQ/> It was stated that war-spending could have paid off every mortgage in the US at that time, with money leftover.<ref name=CQ/>

As of 2013, the U.S. government is paying Vietnam veterans and their families or survivors more than $22&nbsp;billion a year in war-related claims.<ref>{{Cite news |date=20 March 2013 |title=US still making payments to relatives of Civil War veterans, analysis finds |work=Fox News |agency=[[Associated Press]] |url=http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/03/20/us-still-paying-for-costs-civil-war-analysis-finds/}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Jim Lobe |date=30 March 2013 |title=Iraq, Afghanistan Wars Will Cost U.S. 4–6 Trillion Dollars: Report |agency=[[Inter Press Service]] |url=http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/03/iraq-afghanistan-wars-will-cost-u-s-4-6-trillion-dollars-report/}}</ref>

====Impact on the U.S. military====
{{See also|Vietnam War resisters in Canada|Vietnam War resisters in Sweden}}

[[File:OperationHueCity1967wounded.jpg|thumb|left|A marine gets his wounds treated during operations in Huế City, in 1968]]
More than 3&nbsp;million Americans served in the Vietnam War, some 1.5&nbsp;million of whom actually saw combat in Vietnam.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory |url=http://www.stanford.edu/group/fredturner/cgi-bin/drupal/?q=node/7 |publisher=Stanford University |access-date=29 May 2011 |archive-date=8 May 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120508201447/http://www.stanford.edu/group/fredturner/cgi-bin/drupal/?q=node%2F7 |url-status=dead }}</ref> James E. Westheider wrote that "At the height of American involvement in 1968, for example, 543,000 American military personnel were stationed in Vietnam, but only 80,000 were considered combat troops."{{Sfn|Westheider|2007|p=78}} Conscription in the United States had existed since World War II, but ended in January 1973.<ref name=bbmdst>{{cite news |url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=rjoTAAAAIBAJ&pg=6104%2C3785258 |newspaper=The Bulletin |location=Bend, Oregon |agency=UPI |title=Military draft system stopped |date=January 27, 1973 |page=1}}</ref><ref name=mdebld>{{cite news |url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=_6ojAAAAIBAJ&pg=5837%2C1959488 |newspaper=The Times-News |location=Hendersonville, North Carolina |agency=Associated Press |title=Military draft ended by Laird |date=January 27, 1973 |page=1 }}</ref>

By the war's end, 58,220 American soldiers had been killed,<ref name="USd&w" group="A" /> more than 150,000 had been wounded, and at least 21,000 had been permanently disabled.<ref name="DigitalHistory">{{Cite web |title=The War's Costs |url=http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=513 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080505035502/http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=513 |archive-date=5 May 2008 |access-date=3 November 2019 |publisher=Digital History}}</ref> The average age of the U.S. troops killed in Vietnam was 23.11 years.<ref>Combat Area Casualty File, November 1993. (The CACF is the basis for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, i.e. The Wall), Center for Electronic Records, National Archives, Washington, DC</ref> According to Dale Kueter, "Of those killed in combat, 86.3 percent were white, 12.5 percent were black and the remainder from other races."<ref name="Kueter" /> Approximately 830,000 Vietnam veterans suffered some degree of [[posttraumatic stress disorder]] (PTSD).<ref name="DigitalHistory" /> Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD in unprecedented numbers, as many as 15.2% of Vietnam veterans, because the U.S. military had routinely provided heavy psychoactive drugs, including amphetamines, to American servicemen, which left them unable to process adequately their traumas at the time.<ref>{{Cite magazine |date=8 April 2016 |title=The Drugs That Built a Super Soldier: During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Military Plied Its Servicemen with Speed, Steroids, and Painkillers to Help Them Handle Extended Combat |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/the-drugs-that-built-a-super-soldier/477183/ |magazine=The Atlantic|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20230520145751/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/the-drugs-that-built-a-super-soldier/477183/|archive-date=May 20, 2023}}</ref> Drug use, racial tensions, and the growing incidence of fragging—attempting to kill unpopular officers and non-commissioned officers with grenades or other weapons—created severe problems for the U.S. military and impacted its capability of undertaking combat operations. Between 1969 and 1971 the U.S. Army recorded more than 900 attacks by troops on their own officers and NCOs with 99 killed.<ref name="Lepre">{{Cite book |last=Lepre |first=George |title=Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted their Officers in Vietnam |publisher=Texas Tech University Press |year=2011 |isbn=978-0-89672-715-1}}</ref>{{Rp|44–47}} An estimated 125,000 Americans left for Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft,<ref>{{Cite news |date=19 November 2005 |title=War Resisters Remain in Canada with No Regrets |work=ABC News |url=https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1325339 |access-date=26 February 2010|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20230312063551/https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1325339|archive-date=March 12, 2023}}</ref> and approximately 50,000 American servicemen deserted.<ref>{{Cite web |date=28 June 2005 |title=Vietnam War Resisters in Canada Open Arms to U.S. Military Deserters |url=http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=24009b4dc8fe8dadcfa96c37bce9dea6 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140812205654/http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=24009b4dc8fe8dadcfa96c37bce9dea6 |archive-date=12 August 2014 |access-date=12 August 2014 |publisher=Pacific News Service}}</ref> In January 1977, United States president [[Jimmy Carter]] granted a full and unconditional pardon to all Vietnam-era [[Draft evasion in the Vietnam War|draft evaders]] with [[Proclamation 4483]].<ref>{{Cite web |date=21 January 1977 |title=Proclamation 4483: Granting Pardon for Violations of the Selective Service Act, August 4, 1964 To March 38, 1973 |url=http://www.usdoj.gov/pardon/carter_proclamation.htm |access-date=11 June 2008|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20230404185642/https://www.justice.gov/pardon/proclamation-4483-granting-pardon-violations-selective-service-act|archive-date=April 4, 2023}}</ref>

The Vietnam War called into question the U.S. Army doctrine. Marine Corps general [[Victor H. Krulak]] heavily criticized Westmoreland's attrition strategy, calling it "wasteful of American lives{{Nbsp}}... with small likelihood of a successful outcome."<ref name=Buzzano/> In addition, doubts surfaced about the ability of the military to train foreign forces. Furthermore, throughout the war there was found to be considerable flaws and dishonesty by officers and commanders due to promotions being tied to the body count system touted by Westmoreland and McNamara.<ref name=Mohr/> And behind the scenes Secretary of Defense McNamara wrote in a memo to President Johnson his doubts about the war: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."<ref>{{Cite magazine |last=Scheer |first=Robert |date=8 July 2009 |title=McNamara's Evil Lives On |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mcnamaras-evil-lives/ |magazine=The Nation |issn=0027-8378 |access-date=28 February 2020|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20230404185636/https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mcnamaras-evil-lives/|archive-date=April 4, 2023}}</ref>