The Vietnam War was a severe detriment to America's spirits. It took the United States nearly twenty years to fully recover from the war. In the 1970's, it seemed that all everybody wanted to do was forget the decade prior. People wanted to forget the anti-war protests, the assassinations, hippies, radicals, and most of all the Vietnam War. 58,000 Americans had died in a war that many believed the United States should never have been involved in. There is a sentiment that all of these men died for nothing because Americans ended up pulling all troops out of Vietnam after over a decade of fighting which resulted in the South Vietnamese losing the war anyway. The U.S. had to learn its lesson the hard way, with ten years of fruitless war that was not theirs to fight in the first place, but at least they will not make the same mistake again. President Ronald Reagan once said that "there will be no more Vietnams".
After all of Vietnam was completely taken over by Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, nearly 1 million Vietnamese and Cambodians immigrated to the United States. This started to give the U.S. more racial diversity but also led to more racist sentiments. Many Americans looked at the Vietnamese migrants as the enemy simply because of their association with the Vietnam War. Another group of people that also fell victim to this sentiment were the many veterans of the war. In addition to having to live with injuries from the war, veterans had to deal with the scorn of the general public who did not appreciate their participation in the Vietnam War. Veterans were even portrayed as violent and crazy in major motion pictures. People held the soldiers responsible for the war at first, but in recent years these men have been largely recognized for their contributions and for serving their country bravely. This recognition took until the 1990's to achieve, because until the Gulf War in 1991, any military intervention was largely bemoaned by the American public. Fear that Vietnam would repeat itself ran rampant throughout the country for the better part of two decades after the Vietnam War had ended.