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(you might hear my sister practicing clarinet in the background)

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Article Published During the War #2: Hopes High as Nixon Calls Bombing Halt

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Article Published During the War #2: Hopes High as Nixon Calls Bombing Halt

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As from 10 o'clock Washington time this morning, all bombing, shelling, and mining of North Vietnam came to an end. The President's press spokesman, Mr Ronald Ziegler, made his announcement shortly before 11am. He attributed the President's decision to the "progress made in negotiations." He said that it was a "unilateral" decision by Mr Nixon "based on his assessment of the negotiations as they stand right now."

As from 10 o'clock Washington time this morning, all bombing, shelling, and mining of North Vietnam came to an end. The President's press spokesman, Mr Ronald Ziegler, made his announcement shortly before 11am. He attributed the President's decision to the "progress made in negotiations." He said that it was a "unilateral" decision by Mr Nixon "based on his assessment of the negotiations as they stand right now."

Nobody quite dared to say that "peace is at hand," but Administration sources in Washington, although claiming to have no knowledge of what had been agreed in Paris, jumped to the conclusion that the President would not have taken such a dramatic step, only five days before his inauguration, unless he had been confident that this time it really was in the bag.

This was also the reaction of Congressional leaders. The Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, said: "My hopes have been raised that an agreement is at hand." The Republican leader, Senator Hugh Scott, said: "I am immensely relieved and thankful to God." Both men had received telephone calls from Dr Kissinger shortly before the announcement was made from the Florida White House.

The announcement followed a spate of rumours, mostly coming out of Saigon, to the effect that Dr Kissinger and Mr Le Duc Tho had reached agreement in Paris last week and that President Thieu was now ready to acquiesce. General Alexander Haig is on his way to Saigon bearing, it is believed, the draft of the revised agreement.

Added force was given to the reports from Saigon by Mr Ziegler's announcement this morning that President Thieu was "fully appraised and fully aware" of the President's decision to stop the bombing. The order had been sent out on Sunday night with 24 hours of Dr Kissinger's sudden return from Paris.

It may be assumed from the frequently stated official US position that the agreement will be deemed to satisfy three conditions. One is the unconditional release of American prisoners-of-war. The second is some formula recognising the integrity of South Vietnam. The third is an arrangement for supervising the ceasefire.

According to the CBS chief correspondent in South Vietnam, Richard Wagner, who cites reliable sources, the revised agreement gives "temporary" recognition to the demilitarised zone. This may well be the face-saving device which turned the trick in Paris. Such wording would enable President Thieu to go on regarding the DMZ as a frontier while Hanoi could go on contending that Vietnam is a single country temporarily divided. It falls short of President Thieu's earlier demands that the sovereignty of his country should be fully recognised and barely meets the conditions put forward by Dr Kissinger in his December 16 press briefing.

There were also unconfirmed reports that Hanoi had now agreed to a ceasefire supervisory force of around 2,500. If so, this is much nearer to what the Americans had in mind and a considerable improvement on the 250 proposed by Hanoi when the negotiations broke down in December.

However, that proposal was made when the negotiations had already reached near-breaking-point and may have been intended to provoke rather than satisfy. Many Indo-China experts believe that the ceasefire will be a pretty ramshackle affair however many are set to supervise it.
Saving face
The terms of the agreement will be studied carefully by Mr Nixon's critics to see if they are measurably and significantly better than could have been obtained at the end of October. The President presumably will claim that the 12-day bombing of the North Vietnamese cities at the end of the year forced Hanoi to enter into a "just and lasting peace." But whoever's face is saved, the important fact will be that America's long involvement in the Indo-Chinese war will be at an end within 60 days of the signing of an agreement.

The Pentagon said today that bombing in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would continue "as necessary." But no details were given and the spokesman declined to clarify the position about protective reaction raids. In the past the US has resumed bombing of North Vietnamese targets in response to threats against or attacks on its reconnaissance flights. The spokesman refused to say if there would be reconnaissance flights.

Mr Nixon is to be inaugurated on Saturday. The White House today said that he would make no public statement before his inaugural address. Dr Kissinger is expected to return to Paris this week. Whether or not a ceasefire agreement is initialled or signed in time for the inaugural celebrations, Mr Nixon will feel entitled to claim that he has discharged his pledge to end the American war in Vietnam during his first term of office.
Topics

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As from 10 o'clock Washington time this morning, all bombing, shelling, and mining of North Vietnam came to an end. The President's press spokesman, Mr Ronald Ziegler, made his announcement shortly before 11am. He attributed the President's decision to the "progress made in negotiations."

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Article Published During the War #1: U.S. Abandons Saigon to Communists

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Article Published During the War #1: U.S. Abandons Saigon to Communists

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I don't think this is an op-ed, but I couldn't find any that are (all the NY Times ones require a subscription).

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The United States finally extricated itself from Vietnam yesterday as Saigon waited to know whether or not Communist troops would take it by force. It was said that the Provisional Revolutionary Government and the new Saigon Administration had reached agreement in principle to call a cease-fire today but there has been no official confirmation from either side. More than 80 helicopters ferried the remaining Americans as well as thousands of Vietnamese, including former Vice-President Ky, to an armada of ships in the South China Sea. Pilots were fished out of the water as they ditched their helicopters to make room for more on the landing pad. Thousands more Vietnamese were evacuated in boats form Vung Tau and others left by plane for Thailand and the Philippines. The final departure came on the orders of Washington and at the insistence of President Duong Van Minh. Early this morning a helicopter with 11 US Marines helping in the evacuation finally took off after being delayed by a burst of small arms fire in the US Embassy.

Saigon, April 29

Saigon was in its death throes today. The Americans were leaving and the city that has been the centre of non-Communist Vietnam since 1954 was confused, frightened, and relieved at the same time.

All afternoon American helicopters - Chinooks, Hueys, Jolly Green Giants - wheeled above, landing precariously on the tops of high buildings to take off Vietnamese and other evacuees.

The way the Americans went was a spectacle in itself. It is a long time since Vietnam has seen so many helicopters, and they swept in at speed, with Phantoms flying overhead. Orange and red flare smoke mushroomed up from the American Embassy and other pick-up points for US personnel.

The evacuation was a fantastic scene as the choppers roared in against a grey and leaden sky, sometimes as many as two dozen visible at once from Central Saigon, and the air was filled with the mutter of their blades.

General Cao Van Vien, Chief of the General Staff, and other senior officers and politicians were reported to have left the city aboard American helicopters, as the North Vietnamese close in for the kill they now seem intent on making.

The city began the day shuttered and silent but traffic intensified as it wore on and vehicles swished through the streets - jeeps carrying army officers and their families, French people headed for their homes or the "safety zones" set up by the French Embassy and the Red Cross, private cars packed with people and luggage.

Many police and most militia disappeared from the streets. Outside the American Embassy hundreds of Vietnamese struggled to get into the building as US Marines on the watchtowers shouted "Di-di" (Go, go), and ARVN soldiers began smashing the windscreens of cars parked near by, large American cars abandoned by their owners, to take out radios and other loot from inside.

President Duong Van Minh and his Prime Minister, Vu Van Mau, were in contact with the Provisional Revolutionary Government asking urgently for negotiations, according to an informed source here.

It was hoped that some kind of talks might begin tonight or tomorrow but there seemed little chance that a cease-fire would accompany them. There seems general agreement that even if the PRG does talk, there will be no end to the fighting until what is left of the South Vietnamese army has been broken.

All along Saigon had expected that somehow it would escape the fate that befell Da Nang and Hu&eacute and all the other cities, and perhaps it still will. But the signs are ominous. Everyone in Saigon now knows that the Provisional Revolutionary Government has rejected the cease-fire and negotiations offer made last night by President Minh. People fear that the Communists seem bent on attacking the city until they create the sort of chaos that, in their book, is called an "uprising."

Saigon's last illusions were really shattered last night when, only half an hour after President Minh had been sworn in, four A37s appeared over Tan Son Nbut and bombed the base. They were, it now seems almost certain, captured planes flown by South Vietnamese pilots who were taken at Phan Rand and turned their coats.

A few hours later came the news that the PRG's reaction to the appointment of Minh was almost completely negative. Some discerned a tiny opening in the wording of the PRG statement, but nobody could be sure. "At the very least they want Saigon down on its knees," a Western diplomat said before leaving, "they want to see those M16s stacked up in a surrender."

The attitudes of the people of Saigon are like the shards of a shattered mirror. The new President may have called for unity, but there is no unity here any longer. "We don't want that damn Communist bastard," said an officer on the Newport bridge after he and his troops had just cleared buildings of North Vietnamese sappers, charging at close quarters with grenades. "We've got to fight to the end."

Early in the morning when the streets were weirdly quiet I met the newspaper seller from Tu Do to whose little girl, a mixed blood child with blond hair and blue eyes, I have often given sweets. Both were dressed in their best clothes, as if for a holiday, and were walking up and down in the little park of Tu Do. They smiled and waved. Other too, were happy.

An elderly clerk, gold teeth flashing, said: "I guarantee you tomorrow there will be peace. Ninety per cent sure. Ten per cent not sure." A bar girl, struggling along Tu Do with two heavy bags, said simply "No business" when I asked her why she was going home.

But the better informed were less sanguine than ordinary people. A Vietnamese journalist said: "they may talk, they may already be talking. But that does not mean they will stop fighting."

In spite of a few outbreaks of looting at American establishments law and order was intact in the city late today, but every now and then a burst of gunfire, or the crump of a shell from an unexpected direction, reminded people of how fragile the situation now is.

But looters closed in on some abandoned American establishments. At the Brinks, the American quarters in central Saigon, youths and women swarmed into the building, reappearing with a fantastic collection of American leftovers - sugar bowls and salt cellars from the restaurant, clothes left in rooms, water heaters. Police fired half heartedly in the air to stop them.

A well-known right-wing politician, packing at his home in the hope of being able to send away his wife and children - he himself intends to stay - said: "I knew the Communists would not change. They never change. I have known then since 1940. They are not interested in talks, only in surrender, and maybe not even in that. If only..." He paused and did not go on.

There is not much time for reflection in Saigon today, but a feeling one senses at every level of the population that this is a momentous event in the life of the nation, the most important few days for Saigon, perhaps, since 1945, when the return of the Western colonialists, first the British and then the French, set the city on the non-Communist path it has been on ever since.

The power that succeeded the French, the United States, has now been reduced to impotence after its vast expenditure of $150,000 millions and 50,000 American lives.

Helicopters settle on top of its fort-like Embassy to take out remaining staff, and the water sprinklers that have whirled on the plush lawns throughout the dry season are finally silent.

The diplomats inside have spent the last week evacuating American and Vietnamese - tidying up after 20 years of American policy in Indo-China. "I feel like someone with a dustpan and broom," one said, "but at least we're trying to fulfil our last obligations."

Whatever happens now, an era is finally over. Journalists, like the Vietnamese themselves, have been simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of what is happening, an event of the utmost significance both for Vietnam and the world. Attempts to encompass it inevitably fail. The only thing to do now is to wait.

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The United States finally extricated itself from Vietnam yesterday as Saigon waited to know whether or not Communist troops would take it by force. It was said that the Provisional Revolutionary Government and the new Saigon Administration had reached agreement in principle to call a cease-fire today but there has been no official confirmation from either side.

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President Johnson drew from the values of American democracy to defend his (and past presidents') decisions to stay involved in Vietnam and other foreign affairs, but his main argument was that the objective is always to protect the American people. He spoke about U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War from a global standpoint so that the audience would hopefully see what he sees is at stake: the peace and security of the free world. Rhetorical devices used include rhetorical questions, ethos (when he highlighted testimonies from leaders of other countries), and pathos (calling on patriotism).

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Lyndon B. Johnson-Speech on Vietnam (September 29, 1967)

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transcript

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September 29, 1967: Speech on Vietnam | Miller Center

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President Johnson reiterates the view of the administration that the security of the United States and the entire free world is at stake in Southeast Asia, and that the U.S. will not abandon the commitments it has made in the region. Johnson quotes Southeast Asian leaders who agree that the U.S.

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History Through the Media: Analysis of Media Bias and Public Opinion Toward Student Protest in the Vietnam War Era

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"Over on the mountain, thunder magic spoke
Let the people know my wisdom
Fill the land with smoke

Better run through the jungle
Better run through the jungle
Better run through the jungle
Whoa don't look back to see"

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Creedence Clearwater Revival: Run Through The Jungle

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Billy Joel - Goodnight Saigon (Official Video)

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"Lyndon Johnson told the nation
Have no fear of escalation
I am trying everyone to please
Though it isn't really war
We're sending fifty thousand more
To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese"

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Tom Paxton - Lyndon Johnson Told The Nation

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originally published 1973

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(Originally published by the Daily News on Jan. 24. 1973. This story was written by Jeffrey Antevil.)

Washington, Jan. 23 (News Bureau) President Nixon announced tonight that the United States and North Vietnam have concluded an agreement to end the longest war in America's history and bring "peace with honor" to Vietnam.

The peace agreement will be formally signed by the U.S. and South Vietnam and North Vietnam and the Viet Cong at Paris on Saturday.

Announcement of the ceasefire came just 11 years, one month and one day after the first American death in the Vietnam conflict - 25-year-old Army Specialist 4th Class James Thomas Davis of Livingston, Tenn., slain in ambush by the Viet Cong 25 miles from Saigon on Dec. 22, 1961.

In his announcement, Nixon addressed the South Vietnamese, telling them that by their work and sacrifice they had won the right to establish their own government and gained the strength to maintain it.

Nixon explained his silence in recent weeks by saying that any comment he might have made possibly could have interfered with the sensitive negotiations.

He told the nation, bitterly divided over the conflict, that it should be proud of the 2.5 million young Americans who served unselfishly to help a friendly government maintain its freedom.

Nixon said nothing meant more to him at this moment than that the long misery of the wives of the prisoners and men who were listed as missing was coming to an end.

The President praised the late President Lyndon Johnson for his arduous efforts to find peace in Vietnam, and expressed deep appreciation for Johnson's support of the Nixon efforts to bring the war to an honorable end.

In one of the ironies of history, Nixon's announcement came one day after the death of Johnson, who sacrificed his political career in the search for peace.

Nixon's address, from the Oval Office of the White House, followed briefings for his cabinet and for Democratic and Republican congressional leaders.

Nixon said that "within 60 days from the time the ceasefire takes effect, all Americans held as prisoners of war throughout Indochina will be released."

The President recalled that he had outlined conditions for such a ceasefire during his speech last May 8. "All the conditions that I laid down then have been met," he said.

Nixon's announcement of a Vietnam peace agreement came almost four years to the day from the first peace talks in Paris. It was on Jan. 26, 1969, that American, North Vietnamese, Viet Cong and South Vietnamese negotiators first gathered at the Hotel Majestic in Paris to try to end the long and bloody war, which cost the U.S. 46,000 dead in combat.

The agreement announced tonight "meets the goals and has the full support of President Nguyen Van Thieu and the government of South Vietnam," Nixon said.

But he warned that its terms "must be scrupulously adhered to." He said United States will abide by the terms - and expects North Vietnam to do the same.

He said the agreement recognizes the Thieu government "as the sole legitimate government of South Vietnam." The United States, the President declared, will continue to aid that government militarily.

"Ending the war is only the first step toward building the peace," he declared.

In speaking of the long awaited release of U.S. PWs, Nixon paid tribute to "some of the bravest people I have ever met" - the wives and families of the prisoners, who, he said, steadfastly supported his quest for the "right kind of peace."

"When others called on us to settle on any terms," the chief executive said, PW relatives stood firm, telling him to fight for "peace with honor" so that their loved ones "haven't died and suffered in vain."

"Nothing means more to me," said Nixon in a firm yet emotional voice, than to have found the way to bring the men home.

The statement which Nixon read in his speech tonight simultaneously issued in Hanoi. It said:

"At 12:30 p.m. (Paris time) today, Jan. 23, 1973, The Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace, was initialed by Dr. Henry Kissinger on behalf of the United States and Special Adviser Le Duc Tho on behalf of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

"The agreement will be formally signed by the parties participating in the Paris conference in Vietnam on Jan. 27, 1973, at the International Conference Center in Paris. The ceasefire will take effect at 2400 (midnight) Greenwich Mean Time Jan. 27, 1973.

"The United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and contribute to the preservation of lasting peace in Indochina and Southeast Asian."

"Let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies," Nixon said. "Let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have abandoned our prisoners."

Nixon said Kissinger and Tho initialed the agreement at 12:30 p.m. (Paris time, 6:30 a.m. New York time) today, just before Kissinger returned to Washington to report the President.

The president thanked the American public for what he said was their patience and understanding as the U.S. negotiated the peace.

"The important thing was not to talk about peace, but to get peace," Nixon said.

Speaking about President Johnson and the vilification" he endured during his search for peace, Nixon concluded his 10-minute speech with a eulogy to LBJ:

"No one would have welcomed this peace more than he. And I know how join me in asking - for those who died, and for those who live - let us consecrate this moment by resolving together to make the peace we have achieved a peace that will last?"

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President Nixon declares an end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973 - NY Daily News

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(Originally published by the Daily News on Jan. 24. 1973. This story was written by Jeffrey Antevil.) Washington, Jan. 23 (News Bureau) President Nixon announced tonight that the United States and North Vietnam have concluded an agreement to end the longest war in America's history and bring "peace with honor" to Vietnam.

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News Article about War Recovery in Vietnam

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News Article about War Recovery in Vietnam

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What did the U.S. leave behind in that country?

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Early one morning in February 1968, when the fighting in central Vietnam had reached a new level of insanity, a group of South Korean soldiers swept into a village called Ha My, a straggly collection of bamboo huts and paddy fields about an hour outside the city of Danang. They were from a unit called Blue Dragon, which was fighting alongside the Americans, attempting to suppress the communist uprising.

For weeks, they had been herding farmers and their families into a crowded compound that the Americans called a "strategic hamlet". By taking the farmers out of their villages, they hoped they could starve the communist guerrillas of food and shelter. And for weeks, the farmers and their families had been escaping, trailing back to Ha My, loathing the captivity of the strategic hamlet, needing to farm their land. Now, the Blue Dragon soldiers had had enough.

In the hour that followed their arrival, the Koreans herded the waking villagers into small groups and then, methodically, opened fire. An hour later, they had killed 135 of them. They then burned their homes and bodies, and bulldozed the whole mess into mass graves. For years the truth lay buried, too.

Now there is a monument to that massacre, built 30 years later at the expense of Blue Dragon soldiers who came back offering genuine remorse. But there is something wrong. The monument stands proud, as big as a house, with ornate roofing that shelters two collective tombs and a large gravestone carrying the names of the adults and children who died. But there is no explanation for their deaths.

The villagers say that when the monument was first built, the back of the gravestone displayed a vivid account of what happened that day. One even has a copy of the words, which turn out to be a powerful poem recalling the fire and blood, the burning flesh, the bodies in the sand: "How painful to see fathers and mothers collapse into pieces beneath the flames ... How terrifying to see children and babies screaming and crying, reaching out, still suckling on the breasts of dead mothers ... " But, the villagers say, some South Korean diplomats paid a visit before the official opening and complained about the poem; instead of standing up to them, Vietnamese officials ordered that it be covered up with a tableau of lotus blossom. A Korean anthropologist, Heonik Kwon, who was studying Ha My at the time, recorded one villager saying this denial of the truth was like a second massacre, "killing the memory of the killing".

Why would the Vietnamese compromise like that? Why would the people who won the war allow the story of that war to be defined by the losers?

The villagers say the answer is simple: South Korea had become one of the biggest foreign investors in their economy, and had offered to pay for a local hospital if the massacre poem was concealed. So the Vietnamese authorities agreed; they could not afford to resist. And there is the heart of what has happened to Vietnam since the war ended 40 years ago, on 30 April 1975.

A month spent travelling there at the beginning of this year - talking to farmers, intellectuals, academic specialists and veteran fighters from both sides of the line - revealed numerous falsehoods and compromises that have been forced on the Vietnamese people by the powerful in pursuit of profit. The US has succeeded in promoting a false account of the cause and conduct of its war. In spite of losing the military conflict, the Americans and their allies have returned with the even more powerful weapons of finance, forcing the Vietnamese down a road they did not choose. Now, it is their leaders who are telling the biggest lie of all.

US army helicopters provide covering fire for South Vietnamese troops as they attack a Vietcong camp near the Vietnam-Cambodia border in March 1965. Photograph: AP/Horst Faas

Nguyen Hao Thu, aged 90, lives in a bright and beautiful flat in Hanoi. She chatters like a bird in fluent French and broken English, describing how, as a young woman, she saw her country crushed between two powerful enemies. First, it was the French who refused to let go of their colony at the end of the second world war. In 1946, aged 21, Thu took to the jungle and joined the guerrilla struggle, specialising in mixing acid, saltpetre and alcohol to make gunpowder: "I was very happy in the forest. With the powder in the bomb, you can - pop! - realise our dream."

And that dream was not simply nationalist, to expel the foreign invader. It was specifically communist and revolutionary. Thu recalled a childhood during which the French took away her father, a kindergarten teacher; she used to bring food to him in jail when she was just seven years old. "I hated all the people who wanted to fight and occupy Vietnam. In my mind, I became communist," she said. Her family were comfortably middle‑class, but during the 1930s, she said, their home was used as a meeting place for the underground Vietnamese Communist party. She remembered reading Marx and Lenin and how, when she was 16, the French executed one of her friends. "Sincerely, I am communist."

Le Nam Phong is nearly as old as Thu. He was 17 when he signed up as a common soldier to fight the French in 1945. He spent the next 30 years at war, rising to become a lieutenant general in the army of North Vietnam and a key figure in the eventual destruction of the US military machine. Sitting outside his comfortable home, slicing a mango on a warm evening, he remembers his own revolutionary motive: "Socialism? Yes, of course. The purpose of all the fighting was to build a socialist society, to gain freedom and independence and happiness. During the first days against France and against the US, we already had in mind the society we wanted to create - a society where men would not exploit other men; fair, independent, equal."

We already had in mind the society we wanted - one where men would not exploit other men: fair, independent, equal

This is where the US's own account of its behaviour begins to fall apart. The American version of events has it that when the French were defeated in 1954, the US army became involved in order to protect the nation of South Vietnam from the threat of a takeover by communists from North Vietnam. The reality is that the French had alienated people all over Vietnam, driving them into the arms of Ho Chi Minh's Communist party. And, more important, there were no two separate nations. In 1954, in spite of the victory of the Vietnamese army, France and its western allies hung on to power in their southern stronghold. At an international convention in Geneva, all sides then agreed that the country should be divided - temporarily - into South Vietnam and North Vietnam, until July 1956, when an election would deliver a new government for the nation as a whole.

The then US president, Dwight Eisenhower, later admitted that if that election had been allowed to take place, some 80% of the Vietnamese people would have voted for Minh and the new socialist society - and the Vietnamese we spoke to concurred. But the US would not allow it. Instead, they turned to a notorious CIA officer, Edward Lansdale, who proceeded to use a dexterous combination of bribes and violence to install a new government in Saigon, headed by the Catholic politician Ngo Dinh Diem. He was autocratic and nepotistic, but anti-communist and pro-American. In October 1955, Lansdale rigged an election in the South to make Diem president. The national elections were cancelled. The "temporary" division now became a prolonged pretence that Vietnam really was two different countries, the South as the passive victim of invasion from the North.

At first, the US, which had been funding the French war, was content to pour money into South Vietnam's army, and to send its own troops only in the guise of "advisers" - 16,300 of them. By March 1965, it was sending its own men into combat. At the peak of the fighting, in 1969, the US was using 550,000 of its own military personnel, plus 897,000 from South Vietnam's army and thousands more from South Korea and other allies. By the time the war was over, the number of dead was beyond counting, possibly as high as 3.8 million, according to a study by the Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington.

The British foreign correspondent James Cameron described US actions as "an offence to international decency, both disgusting and absurd". Writing in 1965, he looked back at the path to war: "It was clumsy and cruel and thoughtless and without consideration. Step by step, the west blundered and floundered into a dilemma they never completely comprehended and never in fact sought: from the very beginning, they argued in cliches."

The violence of those years still lives with those who suffered its grand assault. In a small house in Saigon, as many Vietnamese still call Ho Chi Minh City, a former member of the communist guerrillas remembered the US bombers roaring down on their jungle camp, and how he and his comrades hid in shallow foxholes: "We had very strong rice wine. If you drink it, it would bring tears to your eyes. We used to call it 'tears of the motherland'. It stopped us being frightened."

The US dropped more high explosives on Vietnam than the allies used on Germany and Japan together in the second world war. It also dropped napalm jelly, which stuck to its victims while it roasted their skin; white phosphorous, which burned down to the bone; fragmentation bombs, which hurled ball bearings and steel shards in all directions; and 73m litres of toxic chemicals, including 43m litres of Agent Orange, which killed vegetation and inflicted illness on those who were exposed to it.

Infamously, the US also bombed Hanoi - a city full of civilians with no air force to defend it. A woman who was eight at the time remembered wearing a leafy branch on her back as flimsy camouflage against F-111 bombers flying at twice the speed of sound. A man who worked on an anti‑aircraft battery says he went home after a night of fruitless defence to find his neighbourhood obliterated: the only sign of his son was a dismembered leg, which he identified by a scar.

On the ground, the US assault was just as powerful. In a village in the Mekong delta, a peasant farmer in her late 60s sat peacefully in her home, with its floor of baked mud. She remembered the day her mother in law, who was working in the fields nearby, made the mistake of running when a US helicopter thundered down towards her: a missile caught up with her and smashed her to pieces against a coconut tree. "We had to go to collect her. We had to pick up her teeth." The helicopter gunships killed three of her brothers as well, she said. All these years later, she added, she still has trouble sleeping, and is full of fear if she hears any sound that could possibly be a helicopter.

A US paratrooper guides a medevac helicopter down to pick up soldiers injured during a five-day patrol in Vietnam in April 1968. Photograph: AP/Art Greenspon

Many Americans now believe that the notorious massacre of villagers at My Lai was a unique or rare event, but the journalist Nick Turse found a different picture in the US National Archives in June 2001. He discovered files that recorded the findings of a secret US task force, the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. They showed that the army had substantiated more than 300 claims of massacre, murder, rape and torture by American soldiers.

Turse then visited Vietnam. In his book, Kill Anything That Moves, he describes trying to find the site of an incident from the files in which 20 women and children were said to have been killed in a hamlet in the central highlands. Following local people, he says, he stumbled across memorials to five other massacres in the same small area: "I'd thought that I was looking for a needle in a haystack; what I found was a veritable haystack of needles." He concluded that a combination of racial indifference to the life of mere "gooks", official pressure to raise the number of "kills" and the designation of rural areas as "free-fire zones" meant that "killings of civilians were widespread, routine and directly attributable to US command policies".

Those who survived were sometimes taken prisoner and subjected to harsh abuse. In 1970, a group of US congressmen visited the notorious Con Dao prison. There they found men and women shackled in "tiger cages", starved, beaten, tortured and reduced to eating insects. In spite of the uproar when this was reported, the prison stayed open.

Until a couple of years ago, journalists from one of the big newspaper groups in Saigon used to stop to buy their coffee from an amiable woman who spent each day on the pavement in front of their office. Few of them knew her name. They used to call her the Coffee Lady. She has her own small story about the war, but mostly she has a story about what has happened since peace came. This is the context in which the Vietnamese Communist party now tells its lies.

She remembers Liberation Day: the wild rejoicing because the war was over; the sheer pride that communist forces had beaten what everyone said was the biggest army in the history of the world; the hopes for a better life. There was fear, too. There were rumours of violent retribution and looting. The Coffee Lady was worried about crazy people picking up the guns she could see lying in the street. And she was sad, for a very personal reason.

A few years earlier, she had worked as a waitress on a US base at Vung Tau, on the coast near Saigon, and there she had met a soldier called Ronald. He came from New York and he flew surveillance missions over Vietnam and Cambodia. They fell in love. At short notice, he was sent back to the US, but for a while he carried on writing, and he told her that he would sponsor her to join him. Then he went quiet, and she came to understand that there was no chance he would come back for her. Scared that the new regime might be angry, she burned Ronald's letters and never heard from him again. Years later, now aged 64, grey-haired and calm, sitting quietly outside a Buddhist pagoda, she can still feel the sadness.

The Coffee Lady belonged to neither side in the conflict. She was simply a Vietnamese woman, in love with an American man and in search of a decent life. Liberation Day did not bring easier times. At first, she found work in one of the new cooperative factories. There, she sat bowed over a sewing machine for 11 hours a day, earning nothing more than a ration card that entitled her to small amounts of low-quality rice and even smaller amounts of meat. For years, she shared a tiny house with her brother, who spent his days in another textile workshop. The economy ran into a decade of depression. "Life was tough for ordinary people," she said.

The US left Vietnam in a state of physical ruin. Roads, rail lines, bridges and canals were devastated by bombing. Unexploded shells and landmines littered the countryside, often underwater in the paddy fields where peasants waded. Five million hectares of forest had been stripped of life by high explosives and Agent Orange. The new government reckoned that two-thirds of the villages in the south had been destroyed. In Saigon, the American legacy included packs of orphans roaming the streets and a heroin epidemic. Nationally, the new government estimated it was dealing with 10 million refugees; 1 million war widows; 880,000 orphans; 362,000 war invalids; and 3 million unemployed people.

The economy was in chaos. By the time Liberation Day arrived, inflation was running at up to 900%, and Vietnam - a country full of paddy fields - was having to import rice. In peace talks in Paris, the US had agreed to pay $3.5bn in reconstruction aid to mend the shattered infrastructure. It never paid a cent. Adding insult to penury, the US went on to demand that the communist government repay millions of dollars borrowed by its enemy, the old Saigon regime. Vietnam desperately needed the world to provide the trade and aid that could turnits economy around. The US did its best to make sure it got neither.

As soon as it had lost the war, the US imposed a trade embargo, cutting off the war-wrecked country not only from US exports and imports, but also from those of other nations that bowed to American pressure. In the same way, the US leaned on multilateral bodies including the IMF, the World Bank and Unesco to deny Vietnam aid. The US acknowledged that Agent Orange was likely to cause serious illness and birth defects and paid $2bn compensation - but only to its own veterans. The Vietnamese victims - more than 2 million of them - got nothing.

South Vietnamese soldiers escort terrified children after a napalm attack in June 1972. Photograph: Nick Ut/AP

It is not clear how any economic model could have survived this hostile encirclement. Inevitably, Vietnam's socialist project began to collapse. It adopted a crude Soviet policy that forced peasant farmers to hand over their crops in exchange for ration cards. With no incentive to produce, output crashed, inflation climbed back towards wartime levels, and the country once again had to import rice. In the early 1980s, the leadership was forced to allow the peasants to start selling surplus produce, and so capitalism began its return. By the late 1980s, the party was officially adopting the idea of "a market economy with socialist orientation".

It was this shift that allowed the Coffee Lady in 1988 to leave the textile factory to become a trader. Each morning, she says, she would get up at 4am to prepare coffee in time to travel across the city. By 5am, she was sitting on a small chair outside the newspaper office. Change was all around her during the 1990s. Foreign investors were allowed to come in and private businesses were encouraged - free trade, free markets, profits for some, wages for others. Behind the scenes, the government was sending signals of compromise to Washington. It stopped asking for the $3.5bn reconstruction aid or compensation for Agent Orange and war crimes. It even agreed to repay the old Saigon regime's war debt of $146m. By 1994, the US was appeased and lifted the trade embargo that had been throttling Vietnam for nearly 20 years. The World Bank, the IMF and other donors began to help. The economy started growing by up to 8.4% a year, and Vietnam was soon one of the world's biggest exporters of rice.

Crucially, throughout the 1990s, there were still strong factions within the Communist party that defended socialism against the new tide of capitalism. In spite of the economic chaos, they had succeeded in engineering a dramatic reduction of poverty. When the war ended, 70% of Vietnam's people lived below the official poverty line. By 1992, it was 58%. By 2000, it was 32%. At the same time, the government had constructed a network of primary schools in every community, and secondary schools in most; it had also built a basic structure of free healthcare. For a while, the socialist factions still had enough political muscle to direct the new capitalist vehicle. Three times during the late 1990s, the World Bank offered extra loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars if Vietnam would agree to sell its state-owned companies and cut its trade tariffs. Each deal was rejected.

Three decades after the communist victory, Vietnam was part of the global capitalist economy. The west had won after all

But from 2000, the rate of change accelerated and the political balance shifted. Reflecting persistent pressure from international donors and foreign investors, Vietnam now approved the sale of its state-owned companies. It also struck a trade deal with the US, and finally hit a peak in 2006 when it was given membership of the World Trade Organisation, which meant it could reap yet more foreign investment and aid. Three decades after the communists emerged as victors in the war, it was now a fully integrated member of the globalised capitalist economy. The west had won after all.

On the pavement in Saigon, the Coffee Lady watched all of this unfold, and yet she saw no change in her life. "I earned the same, lived in the same room," she says. "There were more things in the shops, but the prices kept going up. The country changed, but not for people like me. The people who had connections got richer." All throughout these years, she had stuck with the same brand of Vietnamese-made coffee, Trung Nguyen. While she remained poor, the man who owns that company rode the new tide of free enterprise and is now reckoned to be worth $100m.

In an office across the city sat Nguyen Cong Khe. For years, he edited Thanh Nien, the newspaper that was based in the building outside which the Coffee Lady plied her trade. During his editorship, Khe upset some powerful people, disclosing links between a Saigon gangster and senior officials, then publishing the story of a huge scandal that implicated some very well‑connected families in the theft of public funds. That was risky. Vietnam runs a clumsy system of official censorship, calling in editors every week - on Tuesdays in Hanoi and Thursdays in Saigon - to tell them what to cover and what to conceal. For his efforts, in 2008, Khe was sacked.

In November last year, Khe took another risk by using the New York Times to call on his government to allow a free press. Sitting in the office where he now runs a news website, he went further. Insisting that his name be attached to this appeal, he said what others will say only behind one hand: that the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist party have become traitors to their own cause.

"At the very outset, those who made the revolution installed a government [that] had a very good intent to develop the country and to be prosperous in the fairest way, but things went wrong somewhere. Those who joined the revolution, who swore to be transparent - eventually they betrayed their commitment and their ideology."

Khe was himself part of the revolution. As a student in the early 1970s, he agitated against the Americans and spent three years behind bars. He was a party member for years. He understands why the leadership turned to the tools of capitalism to kickstart the economy, but he has seen the dark side of the neoliberal coin - the corruption and the inequality.

You can see it on the streets. Despite its dark past, Saigon has boomed into a seething mass of commercial activity. But it is, nonetheless, a city in the developing world, with signs of poverty on every side. And then there is Dong Khoi Street - an island of self-indulgent wealth where the new elite can buy a T-shirt from Hermes for $500, a watch from Versace for $15,000, or a dining-room table with four chairs covered in gold-leaf calf skin and stuffed with goose feathers for $65,000. And on the corner, the Continental Hotel sells meals that would cost a week's pay for a worker, in a restaurant called - with one final slap in Ho Chi Minh's face - Le Bourgeois.

Khe reckoned that for every $10 assigned to any public project, $7 is going into somebody's pocket. Really? So 70% of Vietnam's state budget is being stolen? That would be a theft of staggering proportions. We spoke via a translator. He nodded, and twisted one hand in the air: "Between 50 and 70%."

Transparency International last year reported that Vietnam is perceived to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world, doing worse than 118 others and scoring only 31 out of a possible 100 good points on its index.

Nobody claims that the corruption is new. There is a well-established tradition of public officials in Vietnam selling their influence and favouring their families. But the allegation is that it has hit new levels under the current leadership. People say that the problem was boosted specifically by the privatisation of Vietnam's huge state-owned companies and the opportunities that provided some politicians and officials to appoint themselves and their families as executives. The British academic Martin Gainsborough, who spent years in Vietnam doing fieldwork for his research on development in south-east Asia, wrote: "Rather than being inspired by reformist ideals, officials have been motivated by much more venal desires ... What we often refer to as 'reform' is as much about attempts by rival political-business interests to gain control over financial and other resources."

For three months recently, an extraordinary website published detailed allegations about the behaviour of named members of the Vietnamese power elite. The site called itself Chan Dung Quyen Luc ("Portrait of Power") and backed up its claims with documents, audio and video footage. It has never been verified, but observers speculated that it was the work of a very powerful politician using inside information to try to damage rivals. It claimed to provide glimpses into a secret world of theft.

The site attacked one very senior figure, claiming that a local official had delivered a suitcase containing $1m in cash to his home, as a result of which he had agreed not to collect $150m of tax due from a property company who were involved in a "giant development". The company had then given him and the local official free villas. The site went on to finger two leading politicians, claiming that one had blocked the prosecution of a corrupt banker and was now receiving healthy backhanders; and that the second had diverted $1bn from a state company into the bank account of his sister, who was now running 20 different businesses. It also accused a senior military figure of using his son's company to sell army land for personal profit. In his case, the website displayed a letter from bank employees who claimed he was part of an "extremely large-scale corruption network", with bank accounts worth millions of dollars.

From time to time, the state acknowledges corruption and cracks down. In high-profile trials at the end of last year, four executives from former state-owned companies were sentenced to death for bribery and fraud; two others were sentenced to life in prison. Khe does not believe these trials are tackling the scale of the problem. He shrugged: "We traded millions of lives for independence and equality. When I was in prison I imagined the country would be clear of corruption after the war, but it didn't happen. The development of the country should proceed, so we don't go against those who make money legitimately. But we can't allow those who make illegitimate money to continue to make poor people poorer."

We traded millions of lives for independence and equality. I imagined corruption would end after the war, but it didn't

There he hit the most painful nerve. Despite its earlier track record of spreading economic success quite evenly, Vietnam no longer stands up for the poor as it once did. A 2012 report for the World Bank noted that "inequality is back on the agenda". Between 2004 and 2010, income for the poorest 10% of the population fell by a fifth, it found, while the richest 5% in Vietnam were now taking nearly a quarter of the income.

The worst of this inequality is in the rural areas. Millions of farmers have been driven off their land to make way for factories or roads. In the early 90s, nearly all rural households (91.8%) owned land. By 2010, nearly a quarter of them (22.5%) were landless. A relentless tide of poor peasants has poured into the cities, where they have been joined by hundreds of thousands of workers who have been made redundant as the private owners of the old state-owned companies set about cutting costs. This wave of men and women has swirled into the "informal sector" - hidden away in sweatshops in private houses or sitting trading on the pavements - and into the sprawling network of new industrial parks and export‑processing zones.

In the informal sector, there is no protection at all. In the industrial areas, protections have become noticeably weaker. Prof Angie Ngoc Tran is a specialist in the study of labour in Vietnam. In her book, Ties That Bind, she explains how the country's labour code - which was once famously progressive - has been watered down, partly as a result of lobbying by groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce. The state-sponsored unions have been weakened and have never called a strike. Tran concludes: "With the surge of capital entering Vietnam by way of foreign investment and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, the state is becoming less and less of a government acting on behalf of the people. At times, some state organs and institutions are in alliance with the capitalists."

Every worker is guaranteed a minimum wage. Originally, in 1990, this was set at a level that matched the "living wage" - meaning that it covered the essentials of life. But over the years, for fear of losing foreign capital, the government has allowed it to be cut, frozen and overtaken by inflation, with the result that by April 2013, the government's own union was protesting that wages now covered only 50% of essential costs. Most city workers, the federation said, were "destitute and physically wasted away ... They rent cheap, shabby rooms and cut daily expenses to a minimum ... suffer serious malnutrition and other health risks."

Meanwhile, healthcare and schooling are no longer free. The World Bank report noted that "incomes are beginning to matter more for determining access to basic services", and that the government was spending considerably more on hospitals for the better off than it was on communal health centres for the poor.

Vietnam is by no means a basket case. Its recovery from war is close to miraculous, particularly in cutting back poverty while developed nations such as the UK were increasing it. But the reality now is that it has ended up with the worst of two systems: the authoritarian socialist state and the unfettered ideology of neoliberalism; the two combining to strip Vietnam's people of their money and their rights while a tiny elite fills its pockets and hides behind the rhetoric of the revolution. That, finally, is the biggest lie of all. Victorious in war but defeated in peace, the claim by Vietnam's leaders to be socialist looks like empty propaganda. In the words of one former guerrilla who risked his life for this: "They are red capitalists."

Additional research by Calvin Godfrey. Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread

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Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption

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The long read : After the military victory, Vietnam's socialist model began to collapse. Cut off by US-led trade embargos and denied reconstruction aid, it plunged into poverty. Now its economy is booming - but so is inequality and corruption

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PTSD in women veterans hasn't been widely studied
mentions the "military's 'toughen up' culture"

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Academic Source #1: Psychological Effects of the Vietnam War

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Academic Source #1: Psychological Effects of the Vietnam War

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from Stanford University

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Gallup poll results

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Vietnam Women's Memorial

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originally published in 1975

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a hill ravaged by air strikes

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1967 anti-war protest

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1965 march in Berkeley, CA

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defoliation agent sprayed over jungle in Mekong

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CNN

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2012 - President Obama stands at Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C.

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April 29, 1975 - evacuees are helped onto a helicopter near the U.S. Embassy in Saigon

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May 4, 1970 - anti-war demonstrators at Kent State fired upon by National Guard

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refugees - CNN

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Suspected Viet Cong kicked by South Vietnamese soldier - CNN

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father holds body of dead son in front of South Vietnamese Army Rangers - from CNN

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While President Johnson had an imposing height of 6'3", his actions regarding the Vietnam war made him very unpopular and greatly diminished his reputation, which is why the cartoon shows a very small reflection of Johnson in the mirror. Although he campaigned on the promise that no American soldiers would be sent to Vietnam, after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder and sent the first combat troops. After that, the number of troops deployed to Vietnam only steadily increased, reaching over 500,000 in '68, while President Johnson's approval rating plunged.
(info from http://thevietnamwar.info/us-presidents-during-the-vietnam-war/)

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Yet another war film. Note this one's title.

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Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 British-American war film

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"Platoon" is a 1986 American war film, part of a trilogy about the Vietnam War

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Platoon is a 1986 American anti-war film written and directed by Oliver Stone, starring Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, and Charlie Sheen. It is the first film of a trilogy of Vietnam War films directed by Stone, followed by Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven & Earth (1993).

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The start of Operation Rolling Thunder (1965) marked the beginning of extensive bombings in Vietnam. As the bombing raids escalated, however, Americans found that the North Vietnamese simply became more motivated to fight and resist, making the bombings largely unsuccessful. This cartoon portrays what Americans probably saw as false promises concerning what the bombings would accomplish.

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Recent opinion article by Karl Marlantes, Vietnam '67

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And yet even as Vietnam continues to shape our country, its place in our national consciousness is slipping. Some 65 percent of Americans are under 45 and so unable to even remember the war. Meanwhile, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our involvement in Syria, our struggle with terrorism - these conflicts are pushing Vietnam further into the background.

All the more reason, then, for us to revisit the war and its consequences for today. This essay inaugurates a new series by The Times, Vietnam '67, that will examine how the events of 1967 and early 1968 shaped Vietnam, America and the world. Hopefully, it will generate renewed conversation around that history, now half a century past.

What readers take away from that conversation is another matter. If all we do is debate why we lost, or why we were there at all, we will miss the truly important question: What did the war do to us as Americans?

CYNICISM

Vietnam changed the way we looked at politics. We became inured to our leaders lying in the war: the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, the number of "pacified provinces" (and what did "pacified" mean, anyway?), the inflated body counts.

People talked about Johnson's "credibility gap." This was a genteel way of saying that the president was lying. Then, however, a credibility gap was considered unusual and bad. By the end of the war, it was still considered bad, but it was no longer unusual. When politicians lie today, fact checkers might point out what is true, but then everyone moves on.

We have switched from naïveté to cynicism. One could argue that they are opposites, but I think not. With naïveté you risk disillusionment, which is what happened to me and many of my generation. Cynicism, however, stops you before you start. It alienates us from "the government," a phrase that today connotes bureaucratic quagmire. It threatens democracy, because it destroys the power of the people to even want to make change.

You don't finish the world's largest highway system, build huge numbers of public schools and universities, institute the Great Society, fight a major war, and go to the moon, which we did in the 1960s - simultaneously - if you're cynical about government and politicians.

I live near Seattle, hardly Donald J. Trump territory. Most of my friends cynically deride Mr. Trump's slogan, Make America Great Again, citing all that was wrong in the olden days. Indeed, it wasn't paradise, particularly for minorities. But there's some truth to it. We were greater then. It was the war - not liberalism, not immigration, not globalization - that changed us.

RACE

In December 1968, I was on a blasted and remote jungle hilltop about a kilometer from the demilitarized zone. A chopper dropped off about three weeks of sodden mail and crumpled care packages. In that pile was a package for Ray Delgado, an 18-year-old Hispanic kid from Texas. I watched Ray tear into the aluminum foil wrapping and, smiling broadly, hold something up for me to see.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's tamales. From my mother."

"What are tamales?"

"You want to try one?" he asked.

"Sure." I looked at it, turned it over, then stuck it in my mouth and started chewing. Ray and his other Hispanic friends were barely containing themselves as I was gamely chewing away and thinking, "No wonder these Mexicans have such great teeth."

"Lieutenant," Ray finally said. "You take the corn husk off."

I was from a logging town on the Oregon coast. I'd heard of tamales, but I'd never seen one. Until I joined my company of Marines in Vietnam, I'd never even talked to a Mexican. Yes, people like me called people like Ray "Mexicans," even though they were as American as apple pie - and tamales. Racial tension where I grew up was the Swedes and Norwegians squaring off against the Finns every Saturday night in the parking lot outside the dance at the Labor Temple.

President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the military in 1948. By the time of the Vietnam War, the races were serving together. But putting everyone in the same units is very different than having them work together as a unit.

Our national memory of integration is mostly about the brave people of the civil rights movement. Imagine arming all those high school students from Birmingham, Ala. - white and black - with automatic weapons in an environment where using these weapons was as common as having lunch and they are all jacked up on testosterone. That's racial tension.

During the war there were over 200 fraggings in the American military - murders carried out by fragmentation grenades, which made it impossible to identify the killer. Almost all fraggings, at least when the perpetrator was caught, were found to be racially motivated.

And yet the more common experience in combat was cooperation and respect. If I was pinned down by enemy fire and I needed an M-79 man, I'd scream for Thompson, because he was the best. I didn't even think about what color Thompson was.

White guys had to listen to soul music and black guys had to listen to country music. We didn't fear one another. And the experience stuck with us. Hundreds of thousands of young men came home from Vietnam with different ideas about race - some for the worse, but most for the better. Racism wasn't solved in Vietnam, but I believe it was where our country finally learned that it just might be possible for us all to get along.

SERVICE

I was at a reading recently in Fayetteville, N.C., when a young couple appeared at the signing table. He was standing straight and tall in Army fatigues. She was holding a baby in one arm and hauling a toddler with the other. They both looked to be about two years out of high school. The woman started to cry. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, "My husband is shipping out again, tomorrow." I turned to him and said, "Wow, your second tour?"

"No, sir," he replied. "My seventh."

My heart sank. Is this a republic?

The Vietnam War ushered in the end of the draft, and the creation of what the Pentagon calls the "all-volunteer military." But I don't. I call it the all-recruited military. Volunteers are people who rush down to the post office to sign up after Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center gets bombed. Recruits, well, it's more complicated.

When I was growing up, almost every friend's father or uncle had served in World War II. All the women in town knew that a destroyer was smaller than a cruiser and a platoon was smaller than a company, because their husbands had all been on destroyers or in platoons. Back then it was called "the service." Today, we call it "the military."

That shift in language indicates a profound shift in the attitudes of the republic toward its armed forces. The draft was unfair. Only males got drafted. And men who could afford to go to college did not get drafted until late in the war, when the fighting had fallen off.

But getting rid of the draft did not solve unfairness.

America's elites have mostly dropped out of military service. Engraved on the walls of Woolsey Hall at Yale are the names of hundreds of Yalies who died in World Wars I and II. Thirty-five died in Vietnam, and none since.

Instead, the American working class has increasingly borne the burden of death and casualties since World War II. In a study in The University of Memphis Law Review, Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen looked at the income casualty gap, the difference between the median household incomes (in constant 2000 dollars) of communities with the highest casualties (the top 25 percent) and all the other communities. Starting from almost dead-even in World War II, the casualty gap was $5,000 in the Korean War, $8,200 in the Vietnam War, and is now more than $11,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put another way, the lowest three income deciles have suffered 50 percent more casualties than the highest three.

If these inequities continue to grow, resentment will grow with it. With growing resentment, the already wide divide between the military and civilians will also widen. This is how republics fall, with armies and parts of the country more loyal to their commander than their country.

We need to return to the spirit of the military draft, and how people felt about service to their country. The military draft was viewed by most of us the same way we view income tax. I wouldn't pay my taxes if there wasn't the threat of jail. But as a responsible citizen, I also see that paying taxes is necessary to fund the government - my government.

People would still grumble. We grumble about taxes. People would still try to pull strings to get more pleasant assignments. But everyone would serve. They'd work for "the government," and maybe start to see it as "our government." It's a lot harder to be cynical about your country if you devoted two years of your life making it a better place.

Let the armed services be just one of many ways young people can serve their country. With universal service, some boy from Seattle could find himself sharing a tamale with some Hispanic girl from El Paso. Conservatives and liberals would learn to work together for a common cause. We could return to the spirit of people of different races learning to work together in combat during the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War continues to define us, even if we have forgotten how. But it's not too late to remember, and to do something about it.

Correction: January 15, 2017

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united states defense and military forces

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Opinion | Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust

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And yet even as Vietnam continues to shape our country, its place in our national consciousness is slipping. Some 65 percent of Americans are under 45 and so unable to even remember the war. Meanwhile, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our involvement in Syria, our struggle with terrorism - these conflicts are pushing Vietnam further into the background.

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THE VIETNAM WAR | Finishing School | First Look | PBS

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Official website: http://to.pbs.org/2gMme8N | #VietnamWarPBS Karl Marlantes, a marine veteran, from THE VIETNAM WAR. One of many perspectives in The Vietnam War: An Epic Event from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Coming Fall 2017. Subscribe to the PBS channel for more clips: https://www.youtube.com/user/PBS/featured Enjoy full episodes of your favorite PBS programs at pbs.org/video.

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Newspaper Article #1: Photos from the War

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Newspaper Article #1: Photos from the War

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LIFE

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By early 1963, the number of American military personnel in Vietnam had grown from several hundred to more than 10,000 in a few short years. The ramifications of the United States' direct involvement in a conflict halfway around the globe - less than a decade after the ceasefire in another brutal war in Korea - were certainly part of the national conversation, but in '63 America's growing role in Vietnam was not even close to the all-encompassing, divisive issue it would become by the middle of the decade.

Vietnam was on people's radar, of course, but not as a constant, alarming blip. Military families were learning first-hand (before everyone else, as they always do) that this was no "police action; but for millions of Americans, Vietnam was a mystery, a riddle that no doubt would be resolved and forgotten in time: a little place far away where inscrutable strangers were fighting over . . . something.
[MORE: "Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week's Toll"]
All the more remarkable that in January of 1963, LIFE magazine published the powerful cover article, "We Wade Deeper Into Jungle War," and illustrated it with not one or two photos but with a dozen pictures - most of them in color - by the great photojournalist, Larry Burrows.

Burrows, seen at left in Vietnam in 1963, worked steadily - although not exclusively - in Southeast Asia from 1962 until his death in 1971. His work is often cited as the most searing and the most consistently excellent photography from the war, and several of his pictures ("Reaching Out," for example, featuring a wounded Marine desperately trying to comfort a stricken comrade after a fierce 1966 firefight) and photo essays (like 1965's harrowing "One Ride With Yankee Papa 13") both encompassed and defined the long, polarizing catastrophe in Vietnam.

He and three fellow photojournalists died when their helicopter was shot down during operations in Laos. Burrows was 44.

The pictures here, meanwhile, are striking not only for the clarity with which they document a scary, widening conflict, but for how graphic they are. To American eyes, long accustomed to having their news sanitized by the major media, the notion that these and similarly gruesome pictures routinely ran in a popular weekly magazine five decades ago will likely come as something of a shock. Today, a photograph of blood stains and broken glass on a street after a car bombing is about the extent of what most Americans will ever see on the nightly news, on bale shows or in their newspapers. (Raggedly severed limbs, torched corpses and viscera-covered walls evidently being deemed too upsetting to the fragile American sensibility.)

But it's worth recalling - or reminding those who weren't alive at the time - that, starting even before the January 25, 1963, issue in which the photos in this gallery appeared, and throughout the war in Vietnam, LIFE and other major, mainstream American news outlets, in print and on TV, regularly published and broadcast what today would be considered graphic, unsettling content.

That LIFE considered this a significant, indeed a groundbreaking article is evidenced by the highly unusual treatment it received on the magazine's cover. The first slide in this gallery illustrates this perfectly: rather than the customary horizontal, one-sheet image found on literally thousands of other LIFE covers, the January 25, 1963, issue featured an exceedingly rare fold-out, giving full play to Burrows' powerful portrait.
Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

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America in Vietnam, 1963: Deeper Into War

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By early 1963, the number of American military personnel in Vietnam had grown from several hundred to more than 10,000 in a few short years.

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https://historyimages.blogspot.com/2009/07/amazing-video-napalm-attack-on.html

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Pictures of Soldiers/Fighting #1: American and South Vietnamese POW

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Pictures of Soldiers/Fighting #1: American and South Vietnamese POW

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https://historyimages.blogspot.com/2012/06/some-rarely-seen-images-of-vietnam-war.html

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expectants: casualties who are expected to die
gook: negative name for the Viet Cong
lay chilly: stop all motion; freeze
little people: the enemy
mama san: what American servicemen called older Vietnamese women
spider hole: camouflaged enemy foxhole

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by Michael Lansford

Strangely enough, nowadays, as I lay in bed at night, I think of a few more insights about our war and our time there.

I have learned to write those thoughts down.

For those of us who came home, we were, and are, faced with inner demons from the evil we saw, were involved in, and had to do -- inner demons that endure, even now.

We still fight a war with our inner selves and it's something I can't explain.

In combat, we lived and fought with the Angel of Death on one side of us and our Guardian Angels on the other side -- I can't even imagine the battles they waged over us and our fates - who would live, who would not. The reasons were unknown to any of us, but their decisions always became known, and they were final.

We had to learn early on to save life and to take life, without hesitation, feelings, emotion, and completely devoid of self-worth -- ours, or anything else.

It's hard to empty your soul of everything you were raised up to believe in before your lives changed from war. Our values about life and the outside world were taken from us, and like it or not, we either adapted, changed, or we were gone.

Amazing, how young kids/men had to transform into what we still feel and endure inside us, to this day -- things we can't explain in mere words. Only another Combat Vet truly understands our inner souls.

Even our minds were emptied. No thoughts, except for how to survive just one more day, every day. Our single-most important thought was to live one day longer.

Now, years later, we still suffer and fight our demons. Some handle it better than others. Some never can and never will. It's hard to turn off war and combat, and just be home again, like nothing ever happened, yet it had and in such horrible ways. War scarred all of us inside forever.

One minute we were there, the next, we were home, and just trying to figure out who we were and had become. We didn't know how we would deal with it, much less tell anyone else -- but no one was listening anyway.

We came home to a society that called us bad things, spit on us, threatened us, even hated us. They had no clue about who we were, or what we held inside. They didn't ask, because they didn't want to know.

However society thinks -- whether we won, or lost -- isn't something we can control, or explain. However, we were looked on as losers who fought an unpopular war with no clear objective and no desire to win. If that was true, then we paid dearly for a lost cause.

If society has any doubts about what we vets gave in Our War to their "lost cause", they should all go to D.C. and visit The Wall. It has been paid for in full -- and then some.

Through every battle, mission, assault, conflict, contact, or whatever we had been involved in, we never backed down, never ran away, failed, or quit. We won at everything we had to do, no matter what the cost - even when the cost seemed too high at times. It was a high price we paid towards an end that ultimately had no end -- and at least for us, it will never end.

What we as innocent naive kids became defies description. We can never go back and start over, or be the innocents we once were. There is no on-off switch. War changes a person and it's embedded in our beings forever.

We live war's horrors day and night. Some days are better than others, some are not. The nights are the hardest. Sometimes, it seems the demons are more real now, than when we faced them in combat and yet there's no way to defeat them. We will just fight them until our time runs out and, for what it's worth, we will never lose to them - we'll just run out of time to finish the mission.

We came home physically, yet we never really came "home" and we never will. Little things remind us of war. A song, a movie, a saying, the sounds of choppers flying over, or close by (we feel them even before they can be heard). And then there's the 1,000-yard stare. That's something that stays with us always.

No one can truly understand our hearts and minds. Society couldn't handle it, but that's not their fault -- at times, neither do we.

Sometimes, I envy those that never went. They should count their blessings, because they have inside them what we as Combat Vets wish for -- Inner Peace. I can't help but wonder what it would be like to feel genuinely safe and unafraid of the dark. Most vets still fear crowds and being closed in -- there's a paranoia about most everything.

Our souls cry out for help and yet there is no sound, or anyone to hear, or know those fears. We have only each other and the ones we lost -- they will always know and watch over us.

When we left for war, none of us knew, or thought, would we be heroes and warriors, scared and remorseful, angry and revengeful, religious and sad, hateful and every other feeling a human can have, or imagine. Combat has a dramatic and immediate effect on you and your life, no matter what you may think you can, or cannot, do.

In an instant, the will to live makes your decisions for you -- there's no going back. You get cold and indifferent and all that matters is seeing the sun come up one more day and know you lived to see it.

So how will we be remembered from our war? Good, bad, evil, hurt, heartless, cowards, or even losers? Truth is, we have no say in what will be thought of us.

What we do have is our soul, heart, mind, and the knowledge that we did what we had to do -- like it or not -- just to come home again.

We will always seem different from others. How could we not? We walked a whole different path when we were young and it changed us, inside and out. Sadly, it turned out to be a one-way street ...

Vietnam '68 - '69

Other Articles by Michael Lansford:

"I am only one, but I am one. I can't do everything, but I can do something. The something I ought to do, I can do, and by the grace of God, I will." ~Everett Hale

Feel free to comment on this post. You are also invited to write about anything you feel comfortable sharing. Memoirs From Nam is YOUR blog. You are writing America's history, sharing the truth about the Vietnam veteran, and what it was like in Our War.

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Strangely enough, nowadays, as I lay in bed at night, I think of a few more insights about our war and our time there. I have learned to write those thoughts down. For those of us who came home, we were, and are, faced with inner demons from the evil we saw, were involved in, and had to do -- inner demons that endure, even now.