I'm not an expert on the Vietnam War but I find it interesting that both Communist Russia and China supported the North. The deaths due the US in Vietnam seems orders of magnitude smaller than the allies of WWII at 50 Million verses 50 Thousand dead. This implies that having nuclear weapons in fact reduced the amount of suffering. Australia should get more nuclear weapons.

Dear David F.,

A good portion of the Woodstock audience was draft
age. They saw what happened to Martin Luther King
and the race riots. They took it to heart that
there was inequality in the world. For many young people
Woodstock has become a cultural touchstone. Half a
million young people were there. They lived in peace for
three days. They cooperated to share food, shelter ...
and drugs. Woodstock was seen as the peak of a youth movement
that felt like it was about to change the world.

It was an era of the civil rights movement, unrest and
protest. Woodstock became an opportunity for young people
to escape into music and spread a message of unity and peace.

Canem Malum,

The Vietnamese experience was similar to that of Korea.

Both arose as post-colonial movements to create nation-states: Vietnam against the French, Korea against the Japanese.

But both were split on the type of political system they should have: Communist or democratic.

They were both split into North and South to resolve the problem but in the Cold War era they became the battlefields for a wider global conflict between the US and the USSR.

Does that help in understanding what had happened?

The deaths due the US in Vietnam ......
Canem Malum,
Please don't read this as sarcasm, I have every possible respect for those who fought for a more free World even though this freedom is starting to haunt us now.
I have no personal experience re Vietnam but what I hear from many Vets here is that, many US soldiers took some unnecessary chances by being loud & smoke Dope which was very quickly alerting the soldiers they were fighting & that gave them the element of surprise.
I'm certain that there were soldiers in every Army/Air Force who fully qualify as heroes but never got recognised because of being pushed aside by those who desired to be seen as heroes at all costs !

The US did not resort to using nuclear weapons in
Vietnam for a variety of reasons, fear of the damage
it would cause to the US's international reputation,
domestic political considerations, a reluctance to
break the "tradition" of non-use and a realization that
although there were plenty of viable targets such as
airfields, ports, and supply lines, only extensive use
of nuclear weapons would be likely to have a decisive
military impact.

Added to this was a strong opposition on moral grounds
from key figures such as Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara and President Johnson's concern at the long term
consequences of the use of such weapons.

A 1966 CIA Memorandum for the Director came out strongly
against the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam for a
variety of reasons - principle among them were that there
"would be widespread and fundamental revulsion that the US
had broken the 20 year taboo on the use of nuclear weapons".

Dear Foxy,

You are right in that it was the era of the civil rights movement. However, the greatest advance in civil rights was due to Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act. Lyndon Johnson knew that the Democratic Party would lose the south, and they did with Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ which appealed to the white, racist power structure in that part of the country. Johnson's sponsoring the act was apparently due to moral conviction. Nixon was responsible for the horrible bombing of Cambodia which had largely been free of war although the Ho Chi Minh trail ran through part of it. Both Johnson with the Civil Rights Act and Nixon with the Environmental Protection Agency and the opening to China did good things for the US in spite of their carrying on the war. I can’t see anything redeeming about Trump.

I don’t know what the audience at Woodstock took to heart. They retreated from the reality of the war and racial inequality to a festival replete with crap drugs and crap music. I saw nothing good about it. A lot of them followed the philosophy of Timothy Leary who popularized the catchphrase that promoted his philosophy, "turn on, tune in, drop out".

I was concerned that my two sons would be drawn into the war. Although the older one was opposed to the war he would have gone if called as he told me, “I don’t want to miss the experience of my generation.” The war ended before they were old enough to go.