Category Archives: Week 7: Vietnam War

Why has military service been normalized as a one-way ticket for a lifetime supply of security and glory? Or, was this all a recruiting tactic? The Vietnam War is still a war in the U.S. that is glossed over and vaguely discussed in the capacity of its failures. More than that, the demographic of whoContinue reading “The Price for Glory: Was Their Sacrifice for Honor or Just Another Tale of Shame?”

In Christan Appy’s essay, he says the people who served didn’t represent the generation as a whole. He says this because in the article he also says that about 80% of the people who were drafted came from a working-class and poor background. Which was more than any other war America had been a partContinue reading “Vietnam War”

To some, including Christin Appy, the Vietnam War could be seen as a “working-class war.” This is mainly because of the class make-up of those serving in the Vietnam War. Of the American troops serving in the war, about 80 percent were from working-class and lower income backgrounds with only 20 percent coming from white-collarContinue reading “The Vietnam War and the Military Class Divide”

Appy and DeGroot both dove into hard-to-tackle concepts surrounding the Vietnam War, with Appy covering the demographics present during the war and DeGroot talked of the rising and falling morale of the troops. Appy’s argument that Vietnam was a “working-class war” stems from the overwhelming amount of kids from middle-class, blue-collar families that couldn’t affordContinue reading “Culture War: Vietnam’s Demographical Disparities”

In Christian Appy’s article, he explains that the war in Vietnam was a “working-class war” because the men fighting and dying in Vietnam were primarily working-class men. Appy argues this point by comparing the recruitment numbers and deaths of urban working-class neighborhoods such as Dorchester, Massachusetts to suburban upper-middle class and wealthy neighborhoods. Disproportionate numbersContinue reading “Appy & DeGroot single-handedly make me like John Lennon less”

Christian Appy’s work in Americans in Combat critiques the ways in which the Vietnam War’s realities were obscured by sanitized narratives of heroism, particularly emphasizing on how the working class bore the disproportionate burdens in the American military and how their contributions later got ignored. All of his arguments that he presents truly reflects howContinue reading “Fighting for Survival: Class, War and Lies”

Christian Appy argued that Vietnam was a “ working class?” war because most that were drafted were working class people and most of them were the age of 19. The parents of these children were waitresses, factory workers, truck drivers, clerks and, etc… which are working class people.  “ you would be lucky to findContinue reading “Division”

At the time of the Vietnam War, 27 million “baby boomer” men were becoming of draft age. Of the 27 million, the relatively small portion of these young men that were enlisted and served in Vietnam were not representative of the population as a whole—rather, roughly 80% of them came from working-class and poor backgroundsContinue reading “Battles Beyond the Field in Vietnam: The Class Divide and Demoralization”

The Vietnam War was indeed predominately a working-class war; approximately 80 percent of the soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War came from either working-class or extremely impoverished neighborhoods of big cities such as New York and Michigan, etcetera. Furthermore, soldiers, just like their relatively poor counterparts in the cities of USA, also came from sparselyContinue reading “The Social Demographics and Enduring Legacy of the Vietnam War”

Christian Appy argues that the Vietnam War was primarily fought by young men from the working class. Unlike World War II, where participation spanned a broad cross-section of American society, Vietnam’s combat troops were disproportionately taken from lower-income backgrounds. This was largely due to the draft system, which allowed deferments for college students—an option moreContinue reading “The Working-Class War”