A Crossroads Resource
1a. Hawks - Americans who believed in the war and agreed that communism was a threat to the United States.
1b. Doves - Americans who wanted the United States to get out of Vietnam and agreed that the Vietnamese should work out their own problems.
2. War lasted from 1954-1975.
3. The hawks and doves could not agree. The doves marched in the streets and had peace rallies. Sometimes hawks showed up at these protests and fights would break out. Meetings and marches against the war grew bigger and bigger. A tragedy occurred in 1970 at Kent State in Ohio. Four students were killed by special soldiers who were trying to keep order on the campus.
4. Since America was sick of the cost and dissension of a war it did not win, veterans were ignored and sometimes met with hostility.
5. A Vietnam veteran named Jan Scruggs decided that there should be a special memorial which would list all the names of those who died in Vietnam (nearly 60,000). He finally got permission to build a memorial in Washington, DC. A nationwide contest fou nd Maya YingLin to have the winning design for the memorial. It would be a black wall standing between the sunny world and the dark earth. On Veteran's Day 1982, the memorial was open to visitors.