This is a sticky subject, but My Lai and area bombing, mining the Ho Chi Minh trail and so on created a very very bad image.
Also, the way the war was run from a tactical standpoint contributed to it...men would have boots back on the ground in the US as little as 36 hours after being in intense jungle combat against a determined enemy. The image of the traumatized, disaffected soldier became a common touchstone for those opposed to the war. Units weren't brought home as cohesive wholes, camaraderie broke down.
The most prominent images from the opposition during the war were captured US pilots. You can't draft a man and then put him in the cockpit: those guys were all volunteers. I think there was some transferal of peoples' anger from these volunteers to ALL troops in Vietnam. What certainly didn't help (in their minds) was that despite the fear of the draft and so on, the majority of the military in Vietnam was a volunteer force: guys willingly signed up, and a lot of them re-upped and stayed in country with their units tour after tour.
So because of those things I think the perception became "ALL of the military volunteered to go and kill, so they're all basically murderers."
|