Lessons Learned

There are multiple lessons that can be learned from the Vietnam War, some of which are: Emphasize with the enemy, you can’t change human nature, reexamine your reasoning, and we only see what we want to see, and only believe what we want to believe. Emphasizing with Vietnam may have been the most important lesson that we could have learned from the Vietnam War. If we would have simply tried to see Vietnam’s point of view, and see why they wanted to fight, then we could have avoided fighting and tried to solving things diplomatically. Also, we should have reexamined if what we were doing was right, given the fact that none of our allies supported us in this situation, and congress did not even declare war. We should have thought about this more before we went in, and even more when no one was supporting us. This should have been a big sign to us, that what we were doing might not have been right, proving the lesson that we should always be open to reexamine our reasons. The next lesson that we learned from not only Vietnam, but also other wars, is we only see what we want to see, and believe what we want to believe. The main reason we increased the number of troops was we thought that U.S. ships were attacked by the North Vietnamese, even though there was no confirmation of this attack. So we implied that the North Vietnam was going to destroy us and we needed to fight back, but that reason and belief was formed on false evidence and is what we wanted to see. We wanted to go to war, so the military looked for an excuse to increase the efforts on Vietnam. This is proof of the lesson that we only see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe. The final lesson is the lesson that we cannot change human nature. It is human nature to fight and start wars, but we should do everything within our power to solve things by looking at issues in a different perspective and how much support you have, then leave war as a final sting of defense.