The Wrong Sides at War

In a news article that I remember reading from the 1980s, my dad seemed to imply that the United States was fighting, “On the wrong side,” of the Vietnam War. A possibility is that people think that he meant the wrong side of the conflict between capitalism and communism during the Cold War, intending that the United States was fighting for the capitalist side, which was the wrong side, and they should fight for the communist side. I visited France with Mom and Dad, and I remember seeing parts of the film, All Quiet on the Western Front, in a museum. If I remember correctly, All Quiet on the Western Front depicts trench warfare for World War I. A historical anecdote is that opposing forces played soccer around Christmas in No Man’s Land during World War I. During the United States’s Civil War, some people fighting for the Union had family in the Confederacy, and some people fighting for the Confederacy had family in the Union. From my understanding of my Dad, when he said that the United States was fighting on the, “Wrong side,” of the Vietnam War, he meant that the people of South Vietnam and the United States and the people of the North Vietnam and communist countries were just people on the wrong side of the Cold War, similar to the Europeans fighting during World War I or people with family on the opposite side of the Civil War of the United States.