Hearts and Minds utilizes cunning video editing techniques and heart-wrenching audio to retell the Vietnam War from the soldiers’ perspective, not Washington’s. The war embodied a few characteristics that symbolize the deterioration of core values held by most Americans:
“Don’t talk to strangers” rings through my head everyday. The little phrase aims at protecting the youth from those gosh darn strangers. What if the stranger happens to be your government? Not only do people not associate with strangers, they flat out run from them.
Brainwashed. A keyword, typically thought of when referring to communism, used to describe how military personnel become the young men that everyone wants to be. Through dehumanization, the troops learn to associate the enemy with nothingness, evil, and savage.
Freedom. The United States fought the Vietnam War to preserve freedom. Freedom for the Americans never became in danger, instead the US sought to fight for the Vietnamese peoples’ freedom. Unbeknownst to the officials in Washington, freedom for the Vietnamese meant freedom from foreign oppressors, not communism. Many people had a clear sense as to why the United States entered the war—to stop the spread of communism, or at least this is what the government wanted them to think.
Lies. Lying causes controversy. There comes a point when a lying to protect someone no longer protects said person but harms him or her. When multiple presidents lie, especially about the same issue, there is an issue. When a government fabricates an entire story to intentionally mislead a group of people, there is bound to be a few mishaps. It was easy to buy into the lie because Americans naturally want to win and expect to win. The few who spoke out against the lie were cast out because no one likes a naysayer. Eventually, the truth comes out: a prominent figure, Cliff Clifford, had “no hesitancy in saying that [he] had never been more wrong about Vietnam.”
Detached. Not only did the troops disassociate the people of Vietnam with the basic human rights everyone deserves, the troops went so far as to detach themselves from their actions. That is to say that people did not seem to be willing to take responsibility for their actions. Partially due to technology, the fighter pilots did not have to do much in order to kill a multitude of people. This allowed them to not feel responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. If that wasn’t enough, some viewed the killing of innocent people as just a job. A job the soldiers went to everyday—just a routine, a routine they had no control over.
It becomes easy to see as to why the Vietnam War is not talk about. It was a complete and utter failure that many people did not want to admit and still do not admit.
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