The point was that Vietnam was pointless.
The people of South Vietnam weren't willing to fight for or support the oligarchy that ruled their country. American troops were fighting a limited war for untenable political objectives we would have had to have kept fighting and pouring troops and lives into in order to maintain the status quo. Yet the American governments had been blatantly telling the American people for years that victory was just around the corner, when clearly that wasn't true.
Men fought and died for pieces of land that the minute they left, control reverted back to the enemy in many cases. So they literally died for nothing. In many cases it was impossible to tell who was our enemy and who were our allies among the Vietnamese people. We weren't just fighting soldiers but women and children as well, which was an unpopular situation domestically and with American troops. We obtained no traditional objects of war, capturing and holding territory, defeating and breaking an enemy government,
Thirty years after when this film ended, 1968, we were trading partners with the People's Republic of Vietnam. They are firmly part of the world capitalist economy. So what did all their fighting for a Communist state achieve? Where they in fact committed Communists or was allying with the Soviets are cynical calculated choice to avoid being dominated by the Chinese or foreign colonialist powers?
I think Kubrick did a excellent job of portraying this situation.
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DaveBowman2001
9 years ago
Nice summary.
And now we see similar situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. With all our military might and budget being the only world superpower, these invasions should be a layup, but war is profitable for everyone involved and the desperation to keep the world currency flowing. Now in the absence of a superpower, we have to fight an ideological/tactical boogeyman "Terrorism".
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dlynch843
9 years ago
Yes. And that whole sniper sequence was the Vietman War in microcosm--the hi-tech rich American forces entering into a war fought by people who used any means necessary to fight--using women, civilians. It's like Cowboy said--'that sniper's just tryin' to suck us in one-at-a-time.' But American leadership was dragging us into the 'big Muddy' of an Asian war. The majority of the Vietnamese people--the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in the South, saw Americans as foreign occupiers, just like the French and Japanese before them, which was understandable.
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