Vietnam War
...ountry. Many people feel that he pushed a war that shouldn’t of happened; but I think what he did was to the best interest of the United States.” I brought up the subject of nuclear weapons and asked Heath how he felt about our nuclear weapons based in Europe growing from 2,500 to 7,200. I also brought up the fact that the Soviet built up their nuclear weapons and asked how he felt about that. He said, “ It was very scary. We knew as the United States that we could have a nuclear war on our hands. I feared for my brother knowing that he was in the army and the risks he was taking. I was always scared that he would lose each other that way. I support Kennedy though in his reasoning. He kept us safe and we are all here today. He obviously must have known what he was doing even though most people criticized him. I didn’t really believe that the Soviet would remove their missiles though. I was very leery. That is one thing that has scared me throughout “Operation Freedom.” I always think that we could end up in a Nuclear War and that just bothers me.” In our text it says that Johnson’s authorization of Operation Rolling Thunder sparked a mass movement against the war. In April 1965, students for a Democratic Society recruited twenty thousand people for the first major protest, a rally in Washington, D.C. and SDS chapters sprang up on more than three hundred college campuses across the country. I asked him how he felt about this and about people calling it a “white man’s war”. Operation Rolling Thunder was kind of a surprise to me. I really didn’t expect Johnson to do that. I felt that we did kill a lot of innocent people, however, we were protecting someone who needed our help. Sometimes you have to look at the whole picture and not the small picture. All of the people who were striking were looking at the war from a narrow mind. They weren’t thinking about what would happen if everything turned into a communist government. Our soldiers were over there fighting for freedom and protecting innocent people. Just as they are doing with “Operation Freedom.” The people in the United States make me mad. They want to live in freedom and they want to ...