Question/Problem 4: How and why did the Vietnam War divide Americans?

The following excerpt defines "escalation" and explains how it worked during the Vietnam War:

When two sides in a conflict respond to each other's actions with greater and greater force, the process is known as escalation. Like the steps of an escalator, the number of soldiers rises higher and higher, and the number of battles, injuries, and deaths goes up with it. This is what happened in Vietnam. The Vietcong and the United States began to fight each other with more and more soldiers and firepower.

When the number of attacks onU.S. servicemen increased in 1964, President Johnson decided to begin bombing North Vietnam, which helped the Vietcong with weapons and supplies. The bombing, in turn, led the Vietcong to attack more American troops. The U.S. responded by sending more troops to Vietnam. From December 1964 to June 1965, the number of American ground forces in Vietnam more than tripled, from 23,500 to 75,000.

The reversals of the last several months have led our military to ask for 206,000 more troops. This weekend, it was announced that some of them-- a 'moderate' increase, it was said-- would soon be sent. But isn't this exactly what we have always done in the past? If we examine the history of this conflict, we find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time-- at every crisis-- we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issured more confident communiques. Every time, we hyave been assured that this one last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just one more step up the ladder.

But all the escalations, all the last steps, have brought us no closer to success than we were before. Rather, as the scale of the fighting has increased, South Vietnamese society has become less and less capable of organizing or defending itself, and we have more and more assumed the whole burden of the war.

And once again, the President tells us, as we have been told for twenty years, that 'we are going to win;' 'victory' is coming. But what are the true facts? What is our present situation?