No Hearts and Selfish Minds

While watching Hearts and Minds, I found myself trying to listen for two things: a person who could convince me they believed in what they were fighting for and a legitimate reason for the U.S. to be fighting in the Vietnam War - I found neither. Instead, I found myself wondering what I would have done had I of been a soldier forced to go fight in a war for a cause I didn't believe in. A war with no direct threat to our nation's well being, only a theory that someday the spread of communism would be imposed on our people. The idea that I would be risking my life to prevent a theory, the "domino theory", would most likely end up with me buying a one-way ticket to Canada.

It is obvious that this is an anti-war film, but I think that I am yet to view or read some kind of material supporting what we did in Vietnam. All information I have gathered and analyzed leads me to believe that we were in the wrong. This film really did a good job moving me from my somewhat indifferent position on the U.S. being in the war to me being on the side of "what the hell were we doing over there." You know how at the sporting events, a thermometer looking gadget comes up on the jumbo tron and says "Louder" and you are supposed to scream as loud as you can to move the meter closer to one side. Well, that "louder" was the unsure voices of our soldiers, the politicians admitting they were in the wrong, and the scenes of inhumane deaths pushing my meter closer to the "I'm against what we did in the Vietnam War" side. I was waiting the whole documentary for some person to push my meter back towards the "Quiet" side, the indifferent position I was initialy in, and say something that made me think we were fighting for something justified.

The title "No Hearts and Selfish Minds" came to my head at the same time these other anti-war thoughts did. No hearts sprouted from the scenes of airplanes making daily trips over the Vietnamese land to give them their daily dosage of poison. How did we know that the enemy was going to be the recipient of this poison? We didn't, but we had a general idea that they were in the area and the fact that there were probably innocent people in the area as well didn't seem to be much of a concern leading me to come up with no hearts. We just figured that punishing the Vietnamese on a consistent basis would be at some point enough for them to want to surrender to us and give us the victory. This is where selfish minds comes into play. Rather we had a legitimate reason to be fighting in the war or not, rather we were making progress towards a cause we believed to be justified, we just didn't want to leave Vietnam and have the war remembered as a failure. Even though lifes would continue to be lost, families and friends would continue to be heart broken, our government believed a victory was enough to keep fighting for. Maybe, they were right, maybe their was a reason bigger than I can comprehend at this point with my little knowledge on the war, but I know that I am a believer of solving a situation with words rather than force and the fact that we human beings can get to a point where we are this hostile with one another is beyond me. What have we turned into and how did we get this way? I found myself asking this question as I pressed the power button on the T.V.