Allegory for Vietnam War?

I don't think it was. The book the movie was based on was published in 1964 and the first US combat troops didn't land in Vietnam until 1965.

The massacre is most certainly either based on the Sand Creek Massacre in which Chivington attack a peaceful Cheyenne camp, or the *beep* Massacre in which Custer attack the Cheyenne, or it was based on both. In both cases the head Cheyenne chief was Black Kettle who died in the *beep* Massacre.

If memory serves, Pauline Kael focused almost exclusively on the Vietnam metaphors in her review of lbm. This review can probably be found in one of her books, either Going Steady or Deeper Into Movies. In my opinion, it's got to be more than a coincidence that Sunshine is portrayed by Asian-born actress Aimee Eccles. On the other hand, when I was in college, lbm author Thomas Berger visited my creative writing class and was asked by my professor about this subject. Berger replied that he didn't intend lbm to be a Vietnam allegory, and that he had low regard for writers who use the historical fiction genre to comment on current events. So I guess Arthur Penn and screenwriter Calder Willingham were using a little artistic license.

I've heard about the parallels with Vietnam and I wouldn't be surprised.

In Martin Scorsese's documentary about American movies, he brought up an interesting point about Arthur Penn...he said he admires Penn's "anti" movies...Little Big Man was his "anti-Western," Bonnie and Clyde his "anti-gangster" movie, and so on.

I saw Arthur Penn speak at Brandeis University in the spring of 1971 and he was asked directly about this. He said he did not intend Little Big Man to be an allegory for the war on Vietnam. He said he used Asian actors for some of the Cheyenne charachters in part because the very idea was suggested in Thomas Berger's book of the same name. That having been said, the war in Vietnam was raging when this film was being made and Penn had no need for such an allegory - any more than Peckinpah in THE WILD BUNCH - since everybody in the film-going world was going to make that association anyway.

I thought of this with Custer's repeated "You're trying to create a reversal of a Custer decision" comments. Very similar to the US Government's stubborn insistence on the suicide mission in Vietnam.

not the movie was/is an allegory to the Vietnam War but the Vietnam War nearly turned out to become an allegory to the "American Indian" genocide imho.
Read Bradbury's "Martian chronicles" if you look for a true allegory: white American settlers on Mars get the chance to live together with "natives" (i.e. the "Martians" who have a much higher developed culture) and mess it all up again. This time, no one survives except one single family while earth gets destroyed in a global nuclear war. They have to abandon a way of life that was wrong (= exploitation of everything) - last chance.

Definitely. It's about the moral bankruptcy of white society and white privilege in America.

Just as the Viet Cong and the Black Panthers were romanticized by jaded white youth, so too are the Cheyenne warriors romanticized here. Through Jack, corrupt, sadistic, egomaniacal, imperialistic and bigoted white masculinity is traded in for dignified and spiritual Cheyenne masculinity.

You could call it a countercultural Western.