"But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say, and you can't rely on their judgment; and the – the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong." -- Richard Nixon
             This quote comes from Richard Nixon in 1971 while the Vietnam War had another two years of conflict remaining and casualties on both sides were at an all-time high. Before my Peace Studies class, I knew that popular opinion labeled the Vietnam War as unjust, but I knew very little as to why this was a common sentiment. Over the past few months, we have been presented with ample evidence that this war was fought for the wrong reasons against an enemy that had been fighting years before we came. From 1964 when tensions in Vietnam began to mount followed by an escalation of troops, President Johnson questioned the possibility of victory against an enemy as determined and established as the People's Army of Vietnam. The Vietnam War was wrong on so many levels: the lower class of America accounted for nearly all of U.S. casualties; we devastated North Vietnam with more bombs than were dropped by all sides in World War II; we completely ignored histories lessons and went into this war gung-ho with no entrance or exit strategy; and the list goes on.
             To start with we will look at the most horrific part of war: casualties. In terms of the devastation inflicted upon Vietnam and its inhabitants, I guess you could say we won the war. We had a 17-1 kill ratio among soldiers fighting in the war. 17 Vietnamese soldiers dead for every 1 of ours. Lyndon B. Johnson and the other war criminals that got us into the Vietnam quagmire must have felt it was a fair trade: 17 communists for one capitalist. The totality of U.S. casualties was ...