Perception of The Vietnam War Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Perception of The Vietnam War - Essay Example However, America’s involvement in Vietnam began long before the decision to send troops into the region. Near the beginning of 1950, the Ho Chi Minh regime in Vietnam had been recognized as the governing body by Communist China, and the Soviet Union3. Thus, the Truman administration was faced with the decision of whether to allow communism to extend throughout Vietnam, or to attempt to fight it. Three key sources will be examined as part of this discussion, which take different perspectives and approaches to discussion on the war. These are, Vietnam Wars 1945-1990, A Rumor of War and the movie Platoon. This article focuses on the perceptions of the Vietnam War as portrayed in these three sources and argues that to understand the way that the Vietnam War occurred, and its true cost, it is important to examine many different perspectives. The first aspect of this argument is to understand the way that Vietnam veterans were treated, and the attitudes of the country to war. Becaus e of the high controversy that surrounded the Vietnam War, many veterans felt ostracized and mistreated on their return to America. To help mitigate this, some books and movies, such as the ones being discussed in this article, attempted to portray the Vietnam War in a different light. Platoon attempted this by showing harsh reality of the war from the American perspective, without glamorizing the events through propaganda. The film tells the story of a young, naive soldier, Chris Taylor, who enters the war full of high hopes and the desire to serve his country. The director uses the experiences of Chris to enlighten the audience about the confusion that soldiers felt during the war, and to create a connection between the people that viewed the movie, and the soldiers. The approach of personalizing the soldier that was used in Platoon, was also used in the book A Rumor of War, which is a war memoir written by Philip Caputo about his own experiences in the war. Both of these sources take a highly personal and emotionally charged approach to explain the difficulties that soldiers faced during the war. In addition, this perspective helps viewers to sympathize with the soldiers, and to better understand the role that they played in the war. One of the biggest contentions about Vietnam is the politics, specifically, whether the United States should ever have become involved in the war. This approach is considered differently in the sources. In Platoon, Stone does not address the morality of the presence of Americans in Vietnam. His characters do discuss the desire to go home, it is not because of the morality of the war, but because of how bad it is for them. As Chris comments â€Å"Someone once wrote: â€Å"Hell is the impossibility of reason.† That’s what this place feels like. Hell.† Thus, for the soldiers, the politics of the war matter little; they are all involved in their own personal, and deadly, hell. In A Rumor of War, the author expr essly states â€Å"This book does not pretend to be a history. It has nothing to do with politics, power, strategy, influence, national interests or foreign policy†4. In contrast, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 focuses almost exclusively on the political aspect. This is indicated by the fact that the author opens the introduction with the question â€Å"Why are we in Vietnam?†5 This question suggests a very different focus to the book, one that is expanded on throughout the introduction and then the rest of the

Developing and Improving Skills to Achieve Success Essay

Developing and Improving Skills to Achieve Success - Essay Example Relative to my strengths, it is noteworthy that I am willing to work on them and improve on them sufficiently. I believe that proper training, exposing myself to useful literature and gathering self-belief and confidence in aspects, which I engage in would be instrumental My paramount objective is set upon my skills as I aim at pursuing a â€Å"masters in business administration†. I find myself in a position that requires me to apply various skills to attain success in my studies. Hence, my objective is to access diverse categories of resources that will improve my existing skills, develop new skills, and change my flaws to strengths. I plan to do this by demystifying the skills I possess, improving them and finding ways of nurturing the ones I do not possess. Next, I need to illustrate my flaws, put effort into the ways of turning them into strengths and useful skills. As I mentioned earlier, I have already identified all the skills, both weak and strong skills, and in two ye ars’ time, I strongly believe I will achieve my objective. I am a fast learner and two years period is ample time for me to achieve my goals and put my skills to test. The following are my skills, both weak and strong, how I intend to improve on them and their usefulness in my life. Communication skill Communication is the act of transmitting information from one person to the other through different mediums. Communication needs qualities that act as a measure of how efficient one is in transmitting information to other people. I consider the communication skill as one of my strong points. Whilst undertaking my course on international business, I was exposed to different resources on the contact procedure. International business involves people from different regions and different cultures participating in the same business. In order to do so successfully, communication is a key skill that comes to play. This is because different people have different cultural beliefs and dif ferent ways of communication. Hence, when one is communicating with different people one needs to learn about their culture. In my quest to achieve my objective, I plan to improve my communication skills in various ways. One is by structuring my thoughts; in turn, I will be able to transmit verbally, well-structured information to the recipient (Barker 2010). Another area of interest that needs improvement to achieve a better communication skill is making better observations. In turn, this will enable me to develop confidence in what I say thus communicate efficiently. Regular summary processes on aspects, which I need to communicate is a way of improving my communication skills; furthermore, it saves time. I will develop my communication skills by improving the constituting factors thus enhancing success (Condrill and Bough 1999). Number skill The number skill is crucial in diverse societal processes making it crucial as an individual intends to address diverse stipulated goals. Ap parently, one of my flaws becomes manifest in Mathematics; I am poor in the discipline but one of my goals is to improve on my weaknesses and turn them into strengths, I will strategically develop my mathematics skill and use it in the future. Mathematics is a useful discipline when it comes to the study of the master’s in business administration; hence, it is one of my objectives to develop the skill (Nolting 2011).