Movies and television have painted a deeply embedded picture of Vietnam veterans in the American collective consciousness. Somehow, despite the numerous books, articles, and documentaries produced about the war and those who fought it, some of them are simply untrue.
The false ideas aren’t just small myths, either. These misconceptions paint a distorted picture of who fought in Vietnam and the ability of the enemy and shaped how we perceived war for decades after the conflict ended. Here are the most common myths about the Vietnam War that civilians really believe, along with the truth about them.
The U.S. Won Every Battle of the Vietnam War But Still Lost the War
If anyone told this myth to the veterans who fought at Lang Vei in 1968, Kham Duc later that same year, or Fire Support Base Ripcord in 1970, they’d probably get a sharp, curt history lesson in logistics and math. Movies and television make it seem like the Viet Cong (VC), and People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) attacked in human waves with no armor, air force, or artillery.
In reality, PAVN forces had a lot to work with, were careful planners, and used everything they could to level the playing field with U.S. firepower, including weather, hours of darkness, and the civilian population. To undermine the enemy’s ability is to do a disservice to those who made gallant stands in the face of overwhelming odds, whether they won or lost.
As for losing the war, the U.S. might have failed to meet its objectives in Vietnam, but Communism was not spread to other “domino theory” countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, or the Philippines. The Vietnam War was the turning point for global Communism.
The Viet Cong Were a Bunch Of Plucky, Underequipped Farmers
The VC were pro-Communist guerrillas operating in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They were often portrayed as bands of fighters, poorly supplied and using old weapons to make random ambushes on U.S. troops across the South. Although they were probably often hungry and poorly provided with food, the VC was well-coordinated from Hanoi.
To top it off, North Vietnam began receiving funds, arms, and supplies from Communist China and the Soviet Union from the first days of American involvement in Vietnam, starting in 1964. More than $3.2 billion in military aid flooded into the South in the form of rocket launchers, grenades, and machine guns.
U.S. Troops in the Vietnam War Were Mostly Draftees
In 1985, the results of the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study of the Research Triangle Institute were released, which should have put this myth to bed forever. It revealed that 70% of the 2.7 million people who served in the Vietnam War actually volunteered to serve there, with only 11% saying they did so to avoid being drafted.
Related to this myth is the idea that the Vietnam draft relied on the poor or on minority groups to fill its ranks. Again, the myth doesn’t match the facts. Only 12.7% of draftees were Black and had no significantly higher chance of dying in combat than any other race. As for drafting the poor, research from the Veterans of Foreign Wars says that 50% of combat troops were from middle-class backgrounds and that the Vietnam War’s fighting force was the best-educated force of their time.
Vietnam Veterans are Primarily Homeless, Addicted, or Crazy
This pervasive myth might come from those who watched Lieutenant Dan in “Forrest Gump” but didn’t watch the entire movie. Homelessness among veterans is a big issue, but it’s not limited to Vietnam-era of veterans. There is also no difference in drug addiction rates between Vietnam veterans and civilians from the same age group.
97% of Vietnam veterans left the military with an honorable discharge. Furthermore, by 1987, the unemployment rate among Vietnam vets was 4.8%, while the rest of the country faced a 6.2% unemployment rate. They earned 18% more on average than non-veterans and are less likely to be in prison. Just like Lt. Dan at the end of “Forrest Gump,” Vietnam veterans got their stuff together.
This article originally appeared on the website TOGETHER WE SERVED 12/7/22. Here is the direct link: https://blog.togetherweserved.com/2022/12/07/4-vietnam-war-myths-civilians-believe/
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I’ve included links below to two more articles on my website relating to Vietnam War myths.
https://cherrieswriter.com/2014/06/27/vietnam-war-common-myths-dispelled/
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CherriesWriter - Vietnam War website 
Greetings! I went to the Pittsburgh Vet Center in the early 1980s. I remember seeing a magazine at the Vets Center that said “The majority of Veterans of WWII were drafted while the majority of Vietnam Veterans volunteered to serve.”
We grew up in a World that was constantly threatened by Communism. They said they would bury us.
That may have been an article in Solider of Fortune magazine.
D. Wolfe
I Corp. 1970
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I reenlisted in 1965 with my assignment in RVN in my MOS of 11B.
I served for 365 days & rode a small plane out with a 45 on my belt guarding embassy’s mail to get back to CAlli.
My duties were Forward Observer for 81mm mortars . Went out w/patrol & brought back 6 of the 9 that went & was given a fire team afterwards & served as Inf small arms
I take pride in the fact I did my job & stepped up to fill the vacancies of those killed or wounded in the chain of command.
I was awarded the air medal as hot lzs were kept track of & 25 triggered the award.
We were winning when I left in Feb. of 1967. The rest is on Congress & our left loving media. Co C 2nd Bn 12th Cav. !st Cav air mobile
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A Fifth Vietnam Myth that just keeps on keeping on: That the war was lost because of the Left leaning media. Trump today still uses that Left leaning media crap to bamboozle us. In fact, for years during the war the media just pretty much presented the news as if “we could see the light at the end of the tunnel” As the tunnel never ended and the corpses piled up, the blinders did start to come off. If we had listened to our our Pentagon Papers, we were being told by our own intelligence that the war could not be won. So was the Pentagon part of some Left leaning media.?
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Well, ask a kid (to me a kid would be 35 ish and under) about any war. Or history of our country in general for that matter. Talk about a deer-in-the-headlights look. We have idiots running the greatest nation on earth. That includes demLICANS and republiCRATS. The trickle down of stupidity and ignorance runs downhill from there. Makes me sick. Get rid of God and the pledge to our country’s flag and the rest will surely follow. My family lineage served in every military branch of service honorably. Including me. That in itself has become is a mind-boggling Odessey. And, ya, I like your article and all of them I read
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HUH? In 1964 when we made the decision to step into The Big Muddy that was the unwinnable Vietnam War, no one had gotten rid of god and the pledge to the flag. Its more likely that those icons were attacked by an angry counter culture in later years as the war dragged on and on and on and on and…..
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Guess I was just venting. I should not have commented and will refrain from further comments. Thank you
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The truth!
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It is. important to consider the precursor of the Vietnam War: Sir Robert Thompson’s victory in the Malay conflict (1948 to 1960) in which he successfully defeated Maoist insurgents by using a strategy that emphasizes improving lives of individuals in individual villages. Details are readily available on line. LBJ ignored Sir Thompson’s advice and chose Senior US Military Brass WW2 strategy that ultimately was abandoned in 1975 when the Democrats regained control. However, the North Vietnamese ultimately did not win: the US Military’s Rest and Relaxation “R&R” visits prevailed by setting the seeds of free enterprise from Korea to Malaysia. In 1985, North Vietnam adopted a government + business program that exists today resulting in peace and prosperity.
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Yeah. OK. But there really were significant differences between Malaya and Vietnam. The Brit strategy worked because the uprising there was mostly by Chinese in Malaya, not by an indigenous population who had been fighting for national independence (including against the Chinese for a thousand years). Ho in Vietnam had been appealing for years for Viet independence and was very attracted to Western values. Unfortunately, he died just as our war was reaching a critical stage and his hard-liners and generals finished up the war against us. If our war had never happened or ended earlier, Vietnam might have adopted that more moderate policy that exists today and lots of lives might have been saved. Who can say? But everything we did there was wrong.
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People don’t know that two divisions of NVA were sent south from North Vietnam with no hope of returning home while the War was being fought.
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We all had different experiences depending, and it depended on the year we arrived in Vietnam. Early arrivals had to learn from trial and error, and we passed the info on to the new replacements. Our unit was B co. 1/18 infantry, Ist Infantry Div. We were at Bearcat around the Long Bin area.
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This article mirrors my experiences in Vietnam. I was in Brave Co, 3/22, the Regulars, 69-70. We operated around Tay Ninh.
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Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
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I joined in 67 arrived in country 17 dec. 1st cav LZ baldy Icorps The NVA were good fighters. Ithank you for telling it like it was. Welcome home brothers and Sisters God bless all of you.
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As usual the article was on point.
All I can say is 🙏.
Gunner Bob 67-68
1st ID
1/4 Cav. D troop Air
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Accurate and good to read.
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The following excerpt from the article makes no sense to me:
“….It revealed that 70% of the 2.7 million people who served in the Vietnam War actually volunteered to serve there, with only 11% saying they did so to avoid being drafted….”
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PS: I was 3rdRRU (ASA) Mobile Det/Det-1 DaNang/PhuBai, Nov.’62-Oct.’63,
“advisory” period, before Vietnam was called a “War.” Things were quiet in I-Corps at that time, probably safer than being on the street in Saigon.
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Not sure where the term “PAVN” was used. When I was there the Vietnamese troops were referred to as ARVNs as in Army of the Republic of Viet Nam. Perhaps the PAVN thing was Army lingo; I was a Marine.
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PAVN was Peoples’ Army of Vietnam in North Vietnam, NLF was National Liberation Front aka Viet Cong, VC, in South Vietnam.
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The term PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam), identifies regular troops of the North Vietnamese Army or NVA as they were commonly known by their Western opponents.
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I was in Vietnam from 65-66, and we always referred to the enemy forces gooks, VC, and NVA=North Vietnam Army! I was also an RA-12735397. I was only 18 years and we had other RAs but mostly US draftees! I grew up really fast and found myself running point often as well as ambushes at squad levels. We had an M60, and an M14 rifle. Around March of 66, they took our M14s away and gave us an M16 which was not field tested. It was constantly missed-fired or doubled-fed causing the weapon to be useless. It was a scary situation and it was not until about June of 1966 that we got a supposedly better weapon. Half truth, it still sucked, and it caused heavens knows how many US casualties.
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I was the only RA in my company in Basic. All rest were draftees. I know because we had to yell our service number when going into the mess hall. I got my draft notice and figured sooner in, sooner out. So I hopped on my bicycle and headed for the draft board across town. But then I saw the recruiter building a few blocks from my place, so I stopped there and signed up, not realizing that added a year to my active duty. I’m glad I did, though because that gave me 18 months in Germany which was a great experience.
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Much about the war became myth based upon the agenda wishing to be portrayed. There are no simple answers. The political failure was due to politicians wanting to be directly in charge, yet somehow avoiding any responsibility for any consequence.
They deftly and with great cowardice pointed to those serving for all bad outcomes. There has never been a negative public reaction toward those serving as when during and after the war. The politicians never had a reckoning for their involvement. Both those against and those supporting the war avoided the blame for their roles. They followed a polite fiction and abdicated all responsibility.
Vietnam was tragic much because of great political hubris matched significantly by political ignorance. Idealism, especially anti-communist idealism, fostered a rigid political posture lending itself to inadequate policy and disastrous decision-making. There was little pragmatic thinking about who we were dealing with. We fought much of the war in the wrong places for the wrong reasons.
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I thank my brothers, and sisters, who willfully served in the Vietnam War. I make no mistake in saying this. Thank you, Semper Fi
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In Basic, we had about 5 white guys to every Black guy. In cook school and in Vietnam, same ratio plus some Puerto Ricans. Race was never an issue until I went to Germany. There seemed to be a higher ratio of Black guys there, and most were heavily indoctrinated. They believed they were slaves in a white man’s army, and would refuse promotions. This worked out great for me – I got E-5 real fast. I went out one evening and saw a guy preaching hate and discontent to large number of Black guys. I figured it was psych warfare from the Russians.
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James Meredith (USAF Vet) denied admission to UMiss b/c of his race (1962), then, shot in 1966 marching for equality/right to vote; Birmingham Church bombed killing 4 young girls (1963); Medgar Evers (US Army Vet) shot and killed by white sniper (1963); Martin Luther King, civil rights leader, shot and killed by white sniper (1963); interracial marriage illegal in many states until Sup Ct decision (1967); Civil Rights Acts passed to prohibit racial discrimination in voting, housing, public accommodations (1964-1968); Confederate flags displayed by white southerners (on APC’s, in hootches), during Vietnam War.
These are just a few of the “facts” of which black soldiers aware in the ’60’s and ’70’s, while they were being asked to fight to bring democracy/freedom/liberty to the Vietnamese people. It’s hard to describe most black soldiers’ reaction to the Vietnam War as being “heavily indoctrinated” as part of “psych warfare by the Russians.”
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Errata: MLK was assassinated, in 1968 (not 1963).
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As a serious amateur reader in history since the age of 7 (yeah, 7!) and a minor in history in college (major in Art) AND a volunteer right out of high school for a 6 year Army Reserve obligation in 1958 (discharged 1964) I know that every study proving one thing can be found another study proving the other. After my discharge in ’64, I spent the next 10 years actively protesting the Vietnam war. Even though none of us grunts or civilians ever saw the infamous secret Pentagon Papers, unseen by the public until 1970, all US intelligence was warning that the Vietnam war was unwinnable. All our leadership, liberal, centrist, conservative, simply kicked the can down the road so that they could not be blamed for “losing a country to the commies.” Results. Lots and lots ‘o dead on both sides. The rest is armchair fighting.
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Gary, I can tell you that the war started on the wrong foot, we had an Artillery General, Westmoreland who started the war with what he called, “Search and Destroy Missions”. His main interest was the enemy’s body count. After each battle, he would send a SITREP back to the white on the body count. He knew we were losing a lot of good young and never change his tactics to fight a well-organized enemy. In November 1965 a whole Vietnamese Ranger Unit was masqueraded in The Michelin Plantation with its 5 US SF soldiers. We were ordered to try and recover their remains in February 1966. All we found were some skeletal remains and no way to ID anybody. We lost 60,000 American military men in-country including the MIAs. So many soldiers were sacrificed in a war that was impossible to win in a hostile environment. The horrible heat, the monsoons, triple canopy jungles, rice paddies, mosquitoes, and the most poisonous snakes on the planet were in Vietnam. The war was lost before we even started!
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My unit in 25 th 3/22 grunts were %80 draftees in 67-68
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