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This song highlights the experience of very young Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. It provides specific details such on key places: Puckapunyul where training took place, Townsville where they shipped off from and Vung Tai where Chinook helicopters departed to fight the Viet Cong

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New York Times: What was the Vietnam War About? 

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New York Times: What was the Vietnam War About? 

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Key question: Was America’s war in Vietnam a noble struggle against Communist aggression, a tragic intervention in a civil conflict, or an imperialist counterrevolution to crush a movement of national liberation?

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Vietnam '67

A group of South Vietnamese army soldiers and an American soldier with two captured Vietcong suspects, in Plaines des Joncs, South Vietnam. Credit... Tim Page/Corbis, via Getty Images

Was America's war in Vietnam a noble struggle against Communist aggression, a tragic intervention in a civil conflict, or an imperialist counterrevolution to crush a movement of national liberation? Those competing interpretations ignited fiery debates in the 1960s and remain unresolved today. How we name and define this most controversial of American wars is not a narrow scholarly exercise, but profoundly shapes public memory of its meaning and ongoing significance to American national identity and foreign policy.

During the war years, America's leaders insisted that military force was necessary to defend a sovereign nation - South Vietnam - from external Communist aggression. As President Lyndon B. Johnson put it in 1965, "The first reality is that North Vietnam has attacked the independent nation of South Vietnam. Its object is total conquest."

Even more disturbing, Johnson quickly added (following a script written by his predecessors Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy), the Communists in Vietnam were supported and guided by the Soviet Union and China. Therefore, the war in South Vietnam was not an isolated, local conflict, irrelevant to American national security, but rather one that was inseparable from the nation's highest priority - the Cold War struggle to contain Communism around the globe. Further raising the stakes, policymakers warned that if South Vietnam fell to Communism, neighboring countries would inevitably fall in turn, one after another, like a row of dominoes.

Three decades later, Robert McNamara, a key architect of the Vietnam War who served as defense secretary for both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, renounced those wartime claims - the very ones he and others had invoked to justify the war. In two books, "In Retrospect" (1995) and "Argument Without End" (2000), McNamara conceded that the United States had been "terribly wrong" to intervene in Vietnam. He attributed the failure to a lack of knowledge and judgment. If only he had understood the fervor of Vietnamese nationalism, he wrote, if only he had known that Hanoi was not the pawn of Beijing or Moscow, if only he had realized that the domino theory was wrong, he might have persuaded his presidential bosses to withdraw from Vietnam. Millions of lives would have been saved. If only.

In fact, however, in the 1960s, when McNamara advocated massive military escalation in Vietnam, he simply rejected or ignored any evidence that contradicted Cold War orthodoxy. It's not as if contrary views were unavailable. In the work of the scholar-journalist Bernard Fall, the pages of I. F. Stone's Weekly, speeches at university teach-ins and antiwar rallies and countless other venues, critics pointed out that after World War II the United States made a clear choice to support the French effort to re-establish its colonial rule in Indochina, and eventually assumed the bulk of France's cost for the first Indochina War. It should have been no surprise, therefore, that Vietnamese revolutionaries perceived the United States as a neocolonial power when it committed its own military forces in the next war.

Moreover, critics argued, the primary roots of opposition to the American-backed government in Saigon were indigenous and deep rooted, not just in North Vietnam, but throughout the South.

Indeed, from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s the bulk of Communist-led fighting was carried out by southern guerrillas of the National Liberation Front, known to its enemies as the Vietcong. Only after the war was well underway did large units from North Vietnam arrive on the southern front. Antiwar opponents also challenged the claim that South Vietnam was an "independent nation" established by the Geneva Accords of 1954. Those agreements called for a temporary partition of Vietnam to be shortly followed by a nationwide election to choose a single leader for a unified Vietnam. When it became clear to both Saigon and Washington that the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh would be the overwhelming victor, the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, with American support, decided to cancel the election.

Thus began a two-decade failed effort to build a permanent country called "South Vietnam." The government in Saigon was never a malleable puppet of the United States, but it was nonetheless wholly dependent on American military and economic support to survive against its enemies, including many non-Communist parties and factions in the South.

Armed with these criticisms, many opponents of American policy in the 1960s described Vietnam as a civil war - not like the relatively clear-cut North-South division of the American Civil War, but a nationwide struggle of Communist-led forces of the South and North against the American-backed government in the South. By 1966, this analysis was even embraced by some mainstream politicians, including Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran as an antiwar presidential candidate in 1968. Both men called attention to the "South Vietnamese civil war" to emphasize the strength of the southern insurgency and the failure of the Saigon government to gain the broad support of its own people.

By 1972, the idea that Vietnam posed a threat to Cold War America was so discredited, it sometimes sounded as if America's only remaining war aim was to get back its P.O.W.s (President Richard Nixon bizarrely claimed that Hanoi was using them as "negotiating pawns"). Even more mind-boggling were Nixon's historic 1972 trips to Beijing and Moscow. Many Americans wondered how Nixon could offer toasts of peace to Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev while still waging war in Vietnam. As the journalist Jonathan Schell put it, "If these great powers were not, after all, the true foe," then the war in Vietnam "really was a civil war in a small country, as its opponents had always said, and the United States had no business taking part in it."

But alongside the "civil war" interpretation, a more radical critique developed - the view that America's enemy in Vietnam was engaged in a long-term war for national liberation and independence, first from the French and then the United States. According to this position, the war was best understood not as a Cold War struggle between East and West, or a Vietnamese civil war, but as an anticolonial struggle, similar to dozens of others that erupted throughout the Third World in the wake of World War II. When the French were defeated by Vietnamese revolutionaries (despite enormous American support), the United States stepped in directly to wage a counterrevolutionary war against an enemy determined to achieve full and final independence from foreign control.

This interpretation was shared by many on the antiwar left, including Daniel Ellsberg, the once-hawkish defense analyst who turned so strongly against the war that he was willing to sabotage his career by making public 7,000 pages of classified documents about the history of the Vietnam War, the so-called Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg made his argument most succinctly in the 1974 documentary "Hearts and Minds."

"The name for a conflict in which you are opposing a revolution is counterrevolution," he said. "A war in which one side is entirely financed and equipped and supported by foreigners is not a civil war." The question used to be, he added, "might it be possible that we were on the wrong side in the Vietnamese war. We weren't on the wrong side; we are the wrong side."

In the decades since 1975, all three major interpretations have persisted. Some writers and historians have embraced President Ronald Reagan's view that the war was a "noble cause" that might have been won. That position has failed to persuade most specialists in the field, in large part because it greatly exaggerates the military and political virtues and success of the United States and the government of South Vietnam. It also falls short because it depends on counterfactual claims that victory would have been achieved if only the United States had extended its support for Diem (instead of greenlighting his overthrow), or tried a different military strategy, or done a better job winning hearts and minds. However, the war as it was actually conducted by the United States and its allies was a disaster by every measure.

In recent decades, a number of historians - particularly younger scholars trained in Vietnamese and other languages - have developed various versions of the civil war interpretation. Some of them view the period after the French defeat in 1954 as "post-colonial," a time in which long-brewing internal conflicts between competing versions of Vietnamese nationalism came to a head. As the historian Jessica Chapman of Williams College puts it, "The Vietnam War was, at its core, a civil war greatly exacerbated by foreign intervention." Others have described it as a civil war that became "internationalized."

While these scholars have greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and conflict in Vietnamese history, politics and culture, they don't, in my view, assign enough responsibility to the United States for causing and expanding the war as a neocolonial power.

Let's try a thought experiment. What if our own Civil War bore some resemblance to the Vietnamese "civil war"? For starters, we would have to imagine that in 1860 a global superpower - say Britain - had strongly promoted Southern secession, provided virtually all of the funding for the ensuing war and dedicated its vast military to the battle. We must also imagine that in every Southern state, local, pro-Union forces took up arms against the Confederacy. Despite enormous British support, Union forces prevailed. What would Americans call such a war? Most, I think, would remember it as the Second War of Independence. Perhaps African-Americans would call it the First War of Liberation. Only former Confederates and the British might recall it as a "civil war."

I would reverse Chapman's formula and say that the Vietnam War was, at its core, an American war that exacerbated Vietnamese divisions and internationalized the conflict. It is true, of course, that many Vietnamese opposed the Communist path to national liberation, but no other nationalist party or faction proved capable of gaining enough support to hold power. Without American intervention, it is hard to imagine that South Vietnam would have come into being or, if it did, that it would have endured for long.

Moreover, no other foreign nation deployed millions of troops to South Vietnam (although the United States did pressure or pay a handful of other nations, Australia and South Korea most notably, to send smaller military forces). And no other foreign nation or opponent dropped bombs (eight million tons!) on South and North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The introduction of that staggering lethality was the primary driver of a war that cost three million lives, half of them civilians.

If we continue to excuse American conduct in Vietnam as a well-intentioned, if tragic, intervention rather than a purposeful assertion of imperial power, we are less likely to challenge current war managers who have again mired us in apparently endless wars based on false or deeply misleading pretexts. Just as in the Vietnam era, American leaders have ordered troops to distant lands based on boundless abstractions ("the global war on terror" instead of the global threat of "international Communism"). And once again, their mission is to prop up governments that demonstrate no capacity to gain the necessary support of their people. Once again, the United States has waged brutal counterinsurgencies guaranteed to maim, kill or displace countless civilians. It has exacerbated international violence and provoked violent retaliation.

Our leaders, then and now, have insisted that the United States is "the greatest force for good in the world" that wants nothing for itself, only to defeat "terror" and bring peace, stability and self-determination to other lands. The evidence does not support such a claim. We need a new, cleareyed vision of our global conduct. A more critical appraisal of the past is one place to start.

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Opinion | What Was the Vietnam War About? (Published 2018)

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Vietnam '67 Was America's war in Vietnam a noble struggle against Communist aggression, a tragic intervention in a civil conflict, or an imperialist counterrevolution to crush a movement of national liberation? Those competing interpretations ignited fiery debates in the 1960s and remain unresolved today.

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Vietnamese children with skin peeling from napalm attacks 

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Vietnamese children with skin peeling from napalm attacks 

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To me, this image illustrates the horrific civilian cost of the Vietnam War. I am horrified by the severe nature of the napalm burns and question the morality of the US Army and Government that condoned the use of these abhorrent weapons

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Free Bird by band Lynyrd Skynyrd is one of the main songs in the movie Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump is a film in which an act of the film is dedicated to the Vietnam War.

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To me, this picture shows raises awareness towards the people of the USA who were against the Vietnam war. The government doesn't speak for the people.

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In this picture, I see how the war truly affected the childhood of some people. For example, the song "I was Only 19" perfectly depicts the message of this photo. How the war essentially stripped young children of their innocence and childhood.

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NY Times: I Never Expected to Protest the Vietnam War While on Active Duty

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NY Times: I Never Expected to Protest the Vietnam War While on Active Duty

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A soldier never expected that he would be a soldier, or that he would protest the Vietnam War while on active duty, or that he would sue the Army in federal court for violating his First Amendment rights. But it all happened, and it shaped his life in ways he never could have imagined.

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Protesters of the Vietnam War marching in Washington on Nov. 15, 1969. Credit... Associated Press

[At War is a newsletter about the experiences and costs of war. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Friday.]

I never expected that I would be a soldier, or that I would protest the Vietnam War while on active duty, or that I would sue the Army in federal court for violating my First Amendment rights. But it all happened, and it shaped my life in ways I never could have imagined.

I was drafted in 1968 and reluctantly volunteered for the 26th United States Army Band at Fort Wadsworth, N.Y. Veterans returning from the war told harrowing tales of what they experienced. Doubts swirled in my mind, and I began to read about Vietnam. Questions turned to shock as I realized the cruel injustices of the war. I desperately wanted to escape, but it was too late. I was stuck in the Army, part of the green machine, forced to serve a cause I could not accept.

One day I saw an article about soldiers who opposed the war and decided I would join the growing G.I. peace movement. I was looking for a way to express my moral objection, and I felt that if soldiers were demanding peace, political leaders would take notice. My activism began in April 1969 when I joined a contingent of active-duty troops at an antiwar rally in New York's Central Park.

Afterward, an organizer of the April rally asked if I would pose for an antiwar poster. I agreed, and the following week I arrived at the Manhattan studio of the great fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon. I had no idea who he was, so I wasn't nervous in his presence. He gently placed a live dove on my wrist and asked me to move my arm slowly up and down, capturing a striking image. The resulting poster that he created was not a photo of me personally but of the antiwar soldier as archetype.

That summer we learned about a G.I. antiwar petition organized by the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The plan was to collect more than a thousand signatures from service members across the military and release the names before a protest scheduled for Nov. 15 in Washington. The ad appeared on Nov. 9, 1969, two days before Veterans Day, in The New York Times. It read: "We are 1,365 active-duty servicemen. We are opposed to American involvement in the war in Vietnam." Among the names were more than 30 from the band at Fort Wadsworth. The following Saturday, a dozen of us were among the nearly quarter to half a -million people to march on Washington.

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The advertisement in The New York Times. Credit... The New York Times Archive

Back at the base, news of the petition and rally cheered fellow soldiers, but it brought a stern rebuke from the command. We were told to keep our opinions about the war to ourselves. We refused to be silent and circulated another petition in spring the next year, but we were forced to withdraw it under escalating threats of collective punishment.

The ax fell in July 1970 when Fort Hamilton Command imposed punitive reassignments, duty restrictions and make-work details. Musical performances ceased. I, a specialist at the time, was branded a "troublemaker" and ordered to report to the Army band at Fort Bliss, Tex.

My bandmates and I decided to fight back by filing a lawsuit against the Army. Civilian lawyers represented us, and later I appeared in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York seeking an injunction to prevent the Army from transferring me.

The court refused to block the order, but it took jurisdiction of the case and convened a trial. Our attorneys proved that I was transferred not for military necessity but to suppress my antiwar dissent. The court ruled in our favor and ordered that I be sent back to New York, but the Army appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which ruled against us. I ended up staying in Fort Bliss - where I continued participating in antiwar activities.

The court case had ambiguous results legally, but it was great theater. The spectacle of soldiers suing the Army made headlines and helped the antiwar cause, which was what we wanted.

I guess I should be grateful to the Army. My experience in the military taught me about war and protest and persuaded me to study, teach and work for peace. I have not strayed from that path in all the years since.
David Cortright is a guest contributor to the At War newsletter. He is a professor of peace studies at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and is co-editor of "Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War" (New Village Press, 2019).

Boston, Mass. // Nov. 14, 2019
Since 2001, improvised explosive devices, manufactured by irregular fighting forces, have inflicted unforgiving wounds on hundreds of thousands of troops, which in turn has compelled medical practitioners to rethink traditional methods of trauma care and long-term healing. On Nov. 14, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Times journalist and Marine veteran C. J. Chivers will moderate a conversation on the wounds of war with Dr. Mary Alexis Iaccarino, director of brain-health services for Home Base, an organization in Boston that provides free mental health care to veterans; Capt. Gregory Galeazzi, an Army veteran and Harvard Medical School student who was hit by an I.E.D. in Afghanistan and lost both of his legs and part of his right arm; and Dr. Dave Lounsbury, a retired Army doctor and editor of "War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq" and "Emergency War Surgery."

Footage from the Research Vessel Petrel showing what researchers believe to be the wreckage of the U.S.S. Johnston. Credit... Vulcan Inc.

That's how many feet below the surface of the Philippine Sea the vestiges of what is believed to be the U.S.S. Johnston DD-557 were found recently, a discovery that amounts to the deepest warship wreck ever located. The Fletcher-class destroyer was sunk by a squadron of Japanese warships in the Battle of Leyte Gulf on Oct. 25, 1944. It lost 186 members of its crew and 327 sailors in what was the largest naval battle of World War II. Another destroyer, the U.S.S. Hoel DD-533, also sank that day, and researchers with Vulcan Inc., a privately owned company that conducted the underwater search, are still determining to which precise warship the debris field belonged. The organization released video footage of the debris last week to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the historic battle. Read more about the discovery here. - Jake Nevins, Times Magazine editorial fellow

We'd love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to Follow us on Twitter for more from At War. atwar@nytimes.com. Or invite someone to subscribe through this link. Read more from At War here.

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I Never Expected to Protest the Vietnam War While on Active Duty

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At War is a newsletter about the experiences and costs of war. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Friday. ] I never expected that I would be a soldier, or that I would protest the Vietnam War while on active duty, or that I would sue the Army in federal court for violating my First Amendment rights.

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In this picture you. an see how the man is sufering of the death from his kid or someone he knew.

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Pham Tong mourns the death of his eight-year old daughter, Pham Thi Hai, who was killed by the Vietcong in Binh Dinh Province, Central Vietnam, Sept. 1964. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Pham Tong mourns the death of his eight-year old daughter, Pham Thi Hai, who was killed by the Vietcong in Binh Dinh Province, Central Vietnam, Sept. 1964. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

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Viet-Cong,

Enfant,

Père,

1960-1969,

Accroupi,

Adulte,

Centre du Vietnam,

D'archive,

Deuil,

Famille,

Fille de,

Guerre du Vietnam,

Hommes,

Mort - Concepts,

Personne humaine,

Pleurer,

Province de Bình Định,

Style de vie,

Trois personnes,

Vietnamien,

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Pham Tong mourns the death of his eight-year old daughter, Pham Thi...

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Pham Tong mourns the death of his eight-year old daughter, Pham Thi Hai, who was killed by the Vietcong in Binh Dinh Province, Central Vietnam, Sept. 1964. Obtenez des photos d'actualité haute résolution de qualité sur Getty Images

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In this picture you can see two kids smoking since they lost everything and is the only thing that frees their mind from this war. this shows how messed up the war was and how it affected the youth.

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This article explains what happened and from diferent perspectives. You can as well see what the problem was and even why it took time to resolve.

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Between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the U.S. presidential election in November 1964, the situation in Vietnam had changed for the worse. Beginning in September, the Khanh government was succeeded by a bewildering array of cliques and coalitions, some of which stayed in power less than a month. In the countryside even the best ARVN units seemed incapable of defeating the main forces of the Viet Cong. The communists were now deliberately targeting U.S. military personnel and bases, beginning with a mortar attack on the U.S. air base at Bien Hoa near Saigon in November.

See how the Viet Cong's successful guerrilla warfare pushed Lyndon Johnson toward the path of total war Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. See all videos for this article

Many of Johnson's advisers now began to argue for some sort of retaliation against the North. Air attacks against North Vietnam, they argued, would boost the morale of the shaky South Vietnamese and reassure them of continuing American commitment. They would also make Hanoi "pay a price" for its war against Saigon, and they might actually reduce the ability of the North to supply men and matériel for the military effort in the South. Except for Undersecretary of State George Ball, all the president's civilian aides and principal military advisers believed in the efficacy of a bombing campaign; they differed only as to how it should be conducted. The military favoured a short and sharp campaign intended to cripple the North's war-making capabilities. On the other hand, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton argued for a series of graduated air attacks that would become progressively more damaging until the North Vietnamese decided that the cost of waging war in the South was too high. Within the administration, both Ball and Vice Pres. Hubert H. Humphrey warned the president that a major bombing campaign would likely lead only to further American commitment and political problems at home. But Johnson was more concerned with the immediate need to take action in order to halt the slide in Saigon. In mid-February, without public announcement, the United States began a campaign of sustained air strikes against the North that were code-named Rolling Thunder.

Witness U.S. marines land at Da Nang and North Vietnamese troops infiltrate South Vietnam from Laos Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. See all videos for this article

The bombing campaign followed the graduated path outlined by Bundy but was steadily expanded to include more targets and more frequent attacks. It was closely directed from the White House in order to avoid provoking the Chinese or Soviets through such actions as attacking ports where Soviet ships might be docked or hitting targets near the Chinese border. Yet it was soon apparent that the bombing would have little direct impact on the struggle in South Vietnam, where the communists appeared to be gaining ground inexorably. By mid-March Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were advising the White House that the United States would have to commit its own troops for combat if it wished to forestall a communist victory. Unhappy memories of the Korean War, where U.S. troops had been bogged down in costly indecisive fighting for three years, had made Johnson and his predecessors reluctant to send soldiers to fight in Asia, but the choice now confronting the president appeared to be between committing troops or enduring outright defeat.

By June 1965 Westmoreland was predicting the likely collapse of the South Vietnamese army, and he recommended the rapid dispatch of U.S. troops to undertake offensive missions against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese anywhere in South Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, on a mission to Vietnam in early July, confirmed the need for additional forces. In late July Johnson took the final steps that would commit the United States to full-scale war in Vietnam: he authorized the dispatch of 100,000 troops immediately and an additional 100,000 in 1966. The president publicly announced his decisions at a news conference at the end of July. There was no declaration of war-not even an address to Congress-and no attempt to put the country on a war footing economically. The National Guard and military reserves were not called to active service, even though such a measure had long been part of the military's mobilization plans.

U.S. Marines; Da Nang Air Base U.S. Navy Photograph

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Vietnam War - The United States enters the war

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Vietnam War - Vietnam War - The United States enters the war: Between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the U.S. presidential election in November 1964, the situation in Vietnam had changed for the worse. Beginning in September, the Khanh government was succeeded by a bewildering array of cliques and coalitions, some of which stayed in power less than a month.

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In this picture, I see how the war

created fear and terror not only in men

but also women and kids. Young moms

and teenage girls going to war.

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Ho Chi Minh, primary leader of North Vietnam, did not come to power simply as a militia leader like many of his Communist contemporaries. Ho was an experienced politican in Vietnam, and even represented his nation at the Treaty of Versailles.

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Ho Chi Minh, primary leader of North Vietnam, did not come to power simply as a militia leader like many of his Communist contemporaries. Ho was an experienced politican in Vietnam, and even represented his nation at the Treaty of Versailles.

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Vietnamese war poster. Translation: Secure traffic, open the way to victory.

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Vietnamese war poster. Translation: Secure traffic, open the way to victory.

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I chose this picture because it represents the point of view of North Vietnamese soldiers. These posters were made to support and in some way nationalise the country.

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A protest song that came out of the Vietnam War era. It was stimulated by the unfairness of the draft.

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A movie based on a true story in wich he hosted a morning radio show on the American Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN) in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

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US air forces attacking vietnamese soldiers.

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US air forces attacking vietnamese soldiers.

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A U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command B-52 Stratofortress drops 750-pound bombs on the Vietnamese coast in October 1965.

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29 horrific images about the vietnamese war

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TIME MAGAZINE: The Vietnam War Pictures That Moved Them Most

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TIME MAGAZINE: The Vietnam War Pictures That Moved Them Most

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An article debunking photos captured during the Vietnam War to " help illuminate the “demons” of Vietnam. " They also spoke to a number of individuals who were heavily involved at that time period and asked them why a certain picture moved them the most.

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The vietnam war Pictures That Moved Them Most

While the Vietnam War raged - roughly two decades' worth of bloody and world-changing years - compelling images made their way out of the combat zones. On television screens and magazine pages around the world, photographs told a story of a fight that only got more confusing, more devastating, as it went on. As Jon Meacham describes in this week's issue of TIME, the pictures from that period can help illuminate the "demons" of Vietnam.

And, in the decades since, the most striking of those images have retained their power. Think of the War in Vietnam and the image in your mind is likely one that was first captured on film, and then in the public imagination. How those photographs made history is underscored throughout the new documentary series The Vietnam War, from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The series features a wide range of war images, both famous and forgotten.

But few people have a better grasp on the role of photography in Vietnam than the photographers themselves, and those who lived and worked alongside them. With the war once again making headlines, TIME asked a number of those individuals to select an image from the period that they found particularly significant, and to explain why that photograph moved them the most.

Here, lightly edited, are their responses.
-Lily Rothman and Alice Gabriner
Don McCullin- Contact Press Images

My picture of the U.S. corpsman carrying an injured child away from the battle in Hué is a rare occasion to show the true value of human kindness and the dignity of man. The child was found wandering the previous night between the North Vietnamese and the American firing lines. His parents had probably been killed.

They took the child into a bunker, cleaned him up and dressed his wounds under candlelight. These hard Marines suddenly became the most gentle, loving persons. It was almost a religious experience for me to record this extraordinary event.

The following morning, this corpsman took the child to the rear of the battle zone where he could be handed over for more medical attention. He carried the child as if it were his own, wrapped into a poncho, because it was quite cold. A naked limb is hanging from the poncho. Looking back today on this picture I took so long ago I can see that there is an echo here of the famous Robert Capa image of the woman whose head had been shaved at the end of WWII because she was considered to be a Nazi collaborator and had a child - whom she hugs to her chest - with a German soldier. I didn't think of Capa when I pressed the shutter, but I believe both images share an emotional impact because they involve children. Though Capa's illustrates cruelty, my corpsman illustrates humanity, almost saintliness - a man carrying a child away from the sorrow and injuries of war.

Young guerrillas wear grenades at their belts, preparing to fight the encroaching Viet Minh forces in the Red River Delta, northern Vietnam, 1954. Howard Sochurek-The LIFE Picture Collection
Tania Sochurek, widow of photographer Howard Sochurek:
The conflict in Vietnam spanned almost 20 years. Howard was a staff photographer for LIFE in the early 1950s, when he was first assigned to cover the fighting in what was then Indochina. He was there on the ground for the brutal - and historic - fall of Dien Bien Phu that marked the end of the French involvement in the region.

It's insane to think that these three young children with grenades were going off to fight the Viet Minh army. Sadly, they probably died quickly in the war. This is a photo that Howard felt was very powerful.

In 1954, Howard was again on assignment in Vietnam when he was called home to Milwaukee to be with his mother, who was terminally ill. The acclaimed photographer Robert Capa came in to take his place and cover the fighting. A short time later, Capa was killed by a land mine while out on a mission with the U.S. troops. Over the years, Howard would often tell this story and recall sadly that Capa had died covering his assignment. He was immensely proud to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for "superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad" from the Overseas Press Club in 1955.
Robert Pledge, co-founder of Contact Press Images:
Who is the enemy here? The soldier, seen from the back, facing a Vietnamese woman hugging a baby, with a half-naked boy by her side? Or is it the young woman and her two children being confronted by an American GI? Are there not always two sides to a coin?

We are in a small hamlet near Dakto late in 1967, barely two months away from the Têt Offensive. The turning point of the five-year-old war, the offensive by elusive Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces failed in military terms but constituted a political victory in the arena of international public opinion. America was losing the war at home; David was defeating Goliath.

Gilles Caron's atypical vertical image of a face-to-face encounter exposes deep cultural divide and distrust. Fear, tension and uncertainty are visible in the contained defiance of the mother and the awkward posture of the young warrior clutching his automatic rifle. Other locals and American military are nearby; the anxious glance of the child indicates as much. The contact sheets from that day reveal that the straw roofs would be set ablaze and the hamlet burnt down because of the suspicion that the villagers were harboring communist guerrilla forces by night.

In 1970, Caron would be captured by the Khmer Rouge, in neighboring Cambodia, never to be seen again. He had just turned 30.

Still images rarely give straightforward answers but they do offer illuminating clues for those who take the time to delve into them. Caron's career in photography was very short - 1966 to 1970 - but his exceptional talent, intelligence, commitment and ubiquity leave us with an unmatched visual legacy.
Philip Jones Griffiths-Magnum Photos Fenella Ferrato, daughter of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:
Philip Jones Griffiths was born in a small town in the North of Wales in 1936, before the start of the Second World War. When American GIs landed on British shores they exuded generosity to their allies, giving away candy, nylons and cigarettes. I remember him telling the story of being lined up in the playground and being handed a Mars bar by a tall GI. He was instantly suspicious. A Mars bar was a very special thing indeed. Why were these uniformed men just giving them away?

This was Philip's first glimpse into the efforts of an American army trying to win over "hearts and minds." When he got to Vietnam he instantly recognized the same tactic being used there. This image perfectly shows the seductive and corrupting influence of consumerism on the innocent civilians of Vietnam.
Katherine Holden, daughter of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:
Philip Jones Griffiths-Magnum Photos

This picture was taken by my father, Philip Jones Griffiths, in Vietnam in 1968 during the battle for Saigon. This is not a normal "war" photograph. It is not often you see "enemies" cradling each other. However, the American GIs often showed compassion toward the Viet Cong. This sprang from a soldierly admiration for their dedication and bravery - qualities difficult to discern in the average government soldier.
Hal Buell, former photography director at the Associated Press, who led their photo operations during the Vietnam War: Henri Huet-AP
This particular Viet Cong had fought for three days with his intestines in a cooking bowl strapped onto his stomach. Francis Ford Coppola was so inspired by this image that he included a scene in his 1979 film Apocalypse Now with the famous line, "Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped on him can drink from my canteen any day."

In all wars, the battlefield medic is often the stopgap between life and death. AP photographer Henri Huet, under heavy enemy fire, saw that role through his lens and captured the uncommon dedication that medic Thomas Cole displayed in this memorable photo. Cole, himself wounded, peered beneath his bandaged eye to treat the wounds of a fallen Marine. Despite his wounds, Cole continued to attend the injured in Vietnam's central highlands in January, 1966. This photo was only one of several Huet made of Cole that were published on the cover and inside pages of LIFE magazine.

A year later Huet was seriously wounded and was treated by medics until evacuated. In 1971 Huet died in a helicopter shot down over Laos.

It was Larry Burrows who had to teach me how to load my first Leica M3; I got it as a perk having just had this image run as a vertical double truck in a 5-page spread in LIFE in the fall of '65.

At the same time that Hello Dolly opened at Nha Trang airbase, a company of 173rd Airborne had walked into an ambush in Viet Cong base zone, known as the Iron Triangle. The sign had read "American who read this die."
Dirck Halstead-Getty Images
A class of prime youth shredded in seconds.

The dust-offs started coming within 30 minutes. I got a ride back to Ton San Nhut and was downtown in Room 401 of the Caravelle in another 30. Mostly, I remember carrying a badly wounded grunt whose leg came off and he almost bled out. The shot was made one-handed as we carried him out of the fire cone.

We rarely see images of Armies in full retreat.

Generally, the photographers who might have shot some of those images have long since bugged out, or have been captured or killed.

In mid-April of 1975, a small group of American journalists were invited to fly into the small provincial capital of Xuan Loc, South Vietnam, 35 miles north of Saigon, by commander Le Minh Dao. A siege by a massive North Vietnamese force was about to take place. The helicopter Dao sent to Saigon to pick us up deposited us just outside the town. Neither we, nor General Dao, had expected the tide of advancing communist forces to so quickly and completely surround the town.

General Dao, however, was full of vim and eager for the battle. Slapping a swagger stick along his leg, he quickly loaded the two journalists who had accepted his invitation, myself and UPI reporter Leon Daniel, into a Jeep and barreled into the town. At first, we thought it was deserted. Then slowly, and one by one, South Vietnamese troopers began to stick their heads out of foxholes they had dug in the streets. Dao yelled that they were prepared to fight the enemy, come what may. However, we noted with more than a little trepidation that none of them were budging from their holes as Dao led us down the dusty street. Suddenly, a mortar shell landed in the dust no more than 10 feet from us. It was followed by a barrage of incoming automatic weapon and artillery rounds.

Dao wisely called an end to his press tour. We tore back to a landing zone that we had arrived at less than an hour later. Dao called in a helicopter to evacuate us, but suddenly, the ARVN troops who had been seated alongside the road broke and ran for the incoming helos. In less time than it takes to tell, the panicked soldiers swarmed into the helicopter, which was to be our only way out. Crewmen tried to turn them back, but the helicopter lurched into the air with two soldiers hanging from the skids.

At that moment, Leon and I had a sinking feeling that we were going to be part of the fall of Xuan Loc. For us, the war looked like it was about to be over.

However, Dao had one more trick up his sleeve, and he called in his personal helicopter behind his headquarters. As we made a run for it, the General grabbed me by the arm, and said, "Tell your people that you have seen how the 18th division knows how to fight and die. Now go - and if you are invited back, don't come!"

Joe Galloway-UPI/Getty Images

I snapped this photo at [the Battle of la Drang], LZ X-Ray, on Nov. 15, 1965. At the moment I hit the button I did not recognize the GI who was dashing across the clearing to load the body of a comrade aboard the waiting Huey helicopter.
Russell Burrows, son of photographer Larry Burrows: Larry Burrows -The Life Picture Collection
Later I realized that I had shot a photo, in the heat of battle, of my childhood friend from the little town of Refugio, Texas. Vince Cantu and I went through school together right to graduation with the Refugio High School Class of 1959 - a total of 55 of us. The next time I saw Vince was on that terrible bloody ground in the la Drang. Each of us was terribly afraid that the other was going to be killed in the next minutes.

When my book about the war, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, came out in 1992, Vince Cantu was driving a city bus in Houston. His bosses read the papers and discovered they had a real hero pushing one of their buses. So they made Vince a Supervisor and all he did from then to retirement was stand in the door with a clipboard checking buses in and out.

A story with a happy ending.

The fraction of a second captured in most photographs is just that: a snapshot of a moment in time. Sometimes, even in war, that moment can tell a whole story with clarity, but it can be ambiguous too.

The photograph that ran in LIFE in late October 1966 of Gunnery Sergeant Jeremiah Purdie, bleeding and bandaged, helped down a muddy hill by fellow marines, didn't really need a caption. The written account around the photograph and a dozen others that brought Operation Prairie to LIFE's readers told of infiltrating troops and of efforts to thwart them - of hills taken and given up. The detail not given was that Gunny Purdie's commanding officer had just been killed on that hill, the radio operator "cut in half." Neither did the article mention that the CO had called in artillery fire on his own position. Purdie was being restrained from turning back to aid his CO.
David Hume Kennerly
A few frames later, Larry Burrows took another photograph: Purdie is still being held back, but in front of him is another wounded man and Purdie's arms are outstretched. The scene is as wretched as the other. Purdie, wounded for the third time in the war, was about to be flown to a hospital ship off the Vietnamese coast and leave that country for his last time. This photograph has come to be known as "Reaching Out."

My father, Larry Burrows, selected that frame himself, but it wasn't until more than four years later, after he was shot down and killed, that it was published for the first time. The composition of the photograph has been compared to the work of the old masters, but some see it more cinematically: as if you could run a film backwards and forwards to view more of the story. Exhibiting museums have found in it Christian iconography. And at least one psychiatrist treating war veterans has used it in his practice.

My father didn't know that Jeremiah Purdie had enlisted in a segregated Marine Corps 18 years earlier, that cooking in the mess and polishing shoes were the limits placed on his service. He didn't know that before Purdie's persistence finally earned him a transfer to the infantry, he had taken courses at the Marine Corps Institute, confident that the transfer would come and he would be ready. Unknowable then was also the life Purdie would live after his 20 years in the Marine Corps, or how important to him faith would become.
Bernice Schutzer Galef, widow of photographer Paul Schutzer:
At Jeremiah Purdie's packed funeral, there wasn't a man or a woman with a story to tell that didn't mention how, in some way, he had reached out.
David Burnett-Contact Press Images
Long-forgotten photographs sometimes leap out at me and I am stunned by certain moments that I documented that were so routine when I made them, but are now infused with new emotion and meaning. This picture of a haunted-looking young American GI taking refuge under a poncho from monsoon rains in the jungles outside of Da Nang while on patrol in 1972 is one of them. The soldier's eyes reveal, and you don't need a caption to explain it, that he most likely experienced hell along the way.

During the time I spent with him and his platoon they didn't come into direct contact with the enemy, but there was always a common undercurrent that ran through them, a palpable anxiety and fear about what could come their way in a split second. These men had seen buddies cut in half by shrapnel from an incoming round, or watched a friend's head explode from a bullet between the eyes that earned him a one-way ticket home in a body bag. Many had that intense blaze of realization when a comrade was suddenly, violently, unexpectedly gone, and marveled at still being left intact. Some experienced a flash of guilt when in a starkly honest millisecond they thought, "Glad it was him, not me." That big ugly candid moment was immediately pushed down, but it would creep back every now and then, especially back in the world when they gave a hug to their new child, the one their dead buddy would never have.

This image of the sheltering soldier is particularly compelling to me for what I don't know. What was his next act, and what happened after he returned from Vietnam? The photo didn't win any prizes, might not even been published, but as a flash forward it represents every soldier who returns from any war after the battles were history, guns silenced and the odds of getting killed beaten.
Catherine Leroy-Dotation Catherine Leroy Fred Ritchin, Dean Emeritus of the School at ICP:
Paul Schutzer-The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

Paul got carried away with all the emotions that happen in war, and he was right in there with the soldiers in battles. He saw everything; he saw the fatigue of the American soldiers, their fear, the prisoner's fear. There was one photo of prisoners being guarded by an American soldier about 18 years old. The captives were young children and old women and one woman is nursing her baby. Unfortunately the young soldier was later killed but this image conveyed the senselessness and horror of how the human condition was playing out. The soldiers were very sympathetic to the civilians and one medic befriended them. The last photo in the photo essay shows the medic and a child walking away together, holding hands, and the child's head is burned from napalm. It was the first time that Americans saw and learned that we were using napalm. Paul received many letters saying "thank you for what you showed us."
Released prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. Sal Veder-AP
In the days before "embeds" - this generation's enforced melding of photographer and military unit - there was a certain sense of freedom we owned as photographers, being able to go directly to where the story was. In Vietnam in the early 1970s, the only real limitation was finding a ride. But nearly until the end of the U.S. war, if a helicopter or truck had a seat available, they would take you along.
Nick UT-AP
We would often "embed" ourselves with a platoon or squad, but it was more of a gentleman's agreement than any kind of official policy, based in the main on the idea that we, the photographers, were there to tell their story, and they, the soldiers, realized that unlike them, we didn't have to be there. It was by choice. It created a sense of mutual respect that in many ways is challenged by the new "embed" ethos. That said, it was often a world of anonymous photographers spending time with anonymous soldiers. So while we would talk with the troops about what was happening that day, there were many moments where in the course of making photographs, I would just keep moving along. I usually knew the unit but looking back now, so much I wish I had noted was simply never written down. It was forever a search for a picture, and you never knew, sometimes for weeks, whether you had that picture or not. My film had to make it all the way to New York before it could be processed and edited.
Pete Souza, former White House photographer for Presidents Reagan and Obama:
One morning near the end of the unsuccessful Laos invasion of early 1971 (an attempt to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail), I wandered into a group of young soldiers who were tasked with fixing tanks and track vehicles which were regularly being rocketed by North Vietnamese troops just down the road. This soldier and I exchanged pleasantries the way you would in the dusty heat. He went back to work after reading a letter from home, and I moved on to another unit. But for that fraction of a second, in his face, his posture, was all the fatigue and despair of a young soldier who is surely wondering what in the hell he's doing there, so far from home.
(Translated from the French)
There is something both surreal and strikingly sad in this photograph by Catherine Leroy. An empty helmet - is its owner still alive? - is shown front and center, resting on the ground in the soft gray light like a discarded soup bowl or a cleaved skull. It is photographed as if forming the center of a broken compass, one without arms, pointing nowhere. In the fairly rendered background a soldier, probably wounded, is seen surrounded by comrades who, somehow, form an awkward Pietà. The violent spectacle has temporarily receded, and the reader, in this previously unpublished photograph, is given its remains, both the sacred and the partly absurd.

Leroy went from France to Vietnam in 1966 at the age of 21, with a single camera, no assignments and $150 in her pocket; she would stay until 1968. She managed to get accredited by the Associated Press, covered numerous battles, was seriously wounded by shrapnel that would remain in her body, parachuted into combat (small and thin, she was weighed down so as not to be blown away), was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese (which she used as an opportunity to produce a cover story for LIFE Magazine), and remained obsessed by the war until her death in 2006.

Consumed by a ferocious anger at the hypocrisies of politics at various levels, in her last years Leroy created a website and then a book, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam, paying homage to her colleagues 40 years after the war had ended.
Excerpted from a 2013 interview with Art Greenspon by Peter van Agtmael, a Magnum photographer who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
I had photographed POWs returning home time and again, and been in Vietnam on two tours myself, as a photographer. On that day, There were 30 or 40 photographers boarded on a flat-bed, including TV. I was photographing a different family and out of the corner of my eye saw the action and turned. I was lucky to get a break. It was a great moment for Americans! The joyousness of the reunion and the coming together of the family as a visual is outstanding because it was the end of the war. We were glad to get it over with. I'm thankful that this is my picture. I feel it's symbolic, but I'm conflicted about it, knowing what I know. The picture is there and it comes back up again. There is no way to avoid it.

My older brother Huynh Thanh My, who was killed covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, always told me that an image could stop the war and that was his goal. I was devastated when he died. I was very young. But there and then, I decided to follow in his footsteps and complete his mission. A few years later on that fateful day in 1972 on the Trang Bang road, my brother's goal was accomplished. No one was expecting people to come out of the bombed-out burning buildings, but when they did, I was ready with my Leica camera and I feel my brother guided me to capture that image. The rest is history.

This is truly an incredibly intimate picture. The caption provides pertinent information about the circumstance: the who, what and where. But I'm fascinated by the photograph because of the man behind the camera: Yoichi Okamoto. The first civilian hired as Chief White House Photographer, Okamoto also became the first one to truly document the Presidency for history. It's obvious looking at this photograph that he had unfettered access to LBJ and that everyone was comfortable with him being in the room - even when the room was the President's bedroom.

After I photographed the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which was very turbulent and contested, I wanted to photograph the future President. I worked for a little cooperative French agency, Gamma, which we had created a few years earlier. I arrived from Miami on the press plane that accompanied the candidate. We were positioned at a little airport in Sioux City. It was the morning. It was windy. Nixon left the plane.
Alice Gabriner, who edited this photo essay, is TIME's International Photo Editor. Lily Rothman is the History and Archives Editor for TIME.
I almost did not make the photo - the man with the flag and Nixon on top of the aircraft stairs. It was too much.

Art Greenspon-AP

"As the first medevac chopper hovered overhead I saw the First Sergeant with his arms in the air. I saw the medic shouldering wounded and then I saw the kid on his back in the grass. I have got to get all this in one picture, I thought. My heart was pounding. Was 1/60 fast enough? Screw it. Shoot pictures. I got three frames off, and the moment was gone.

I knew what was in the camera, but when I went to wind back the film, I couldn't. The film in my Nikon had become stuck to the pressure plate from all the moisture. My Leica was soaked, too, and I wasn't sure what kind of pictures it was producing.

The weather closed in again. I had given all of my food away so I didn't eat for two days. I wrapped my cameras in a damp towel and put them in my pack. I guarded that pack like a mother hen.

I flew out with the second chopper loaded with body bags. A kid headed out for R&R and a floor stacked with KIAs [killed in action]. War sucks."

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The Vietnam War Pictures That Moved Them Most

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TIME asked those who lived the war to select an image from the period that they found particularly significant. Here are their choices

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.

Sep 18, 2012 · Vietnam War - Soul, Gospel & Funk · Vietnam War songs in the genres of soul, doo-wop, R&B, gospel, and funk records, most of which were released by African- ...

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vietnamese song of the war - Google Search

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds. Sep 18, 2012 · Vietnam War - Soul, Gospel & Funk · Vietnam War songs in the genres of soul, doo-wop, R&B, gospel, and funk records, most of which were released by African- ...

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Website about the different strategies used by Vietcong

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Website about the different strategies used by Vietcong

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This website briefly explains the different strategies and tactics that lead to their triumph. It also shows the inside of their tunnels and images of their positions. It explains with a lot of detail how it used to work.

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Main force Vietcong units were uniformed, full-time soldiers, and were used to launch large scale offensives over a wide area. Regional forces were also full-time, but operated only within their own districts. When necessary, small regional units would unite for large scale attacks. If enemy pressure became too great, they would break down into smaller units and scatter.
Unlike the main troops, who saw themselves as professional soldiers, local Vietcong groups tended to be far less confident. For the most part, recruits were young teenagers, and while many were motivated by idealism, others had been pressured or shamed into joining. They also harbored real doubts about their ability to fight heavily armed and well-trained American soldiers.

Initially, local guerrillas were given only a basic minimum of infantry training, but if they were recruited to a main force unit, they could receive up to a month of advanced instruction. Additionally, there were dozens of hidden centers all over South Vietnam for squad and platoon leader, weapons and radio training. To ensure that the guerrillas understood why they were fighting, all training courses included political instruction.

By the mid-1960s, most main force Vietcong troops were armed with Chinese versions of the Russian AK-47 submachine gun. They also used a range of effective Soviet and Chinese light and medium machine guns, and infrequently, heavy machine guns. In particular, heavy machine guns were valued for defense against American helicopters.

For destroying armored vehicles or bunkers, the Vietcong had highly effective rocket propelled grenades and recoilless rifles. Mortars were also available in large numbers and had the advantage of being very easy to transport.

Many weapons, including booby traps and mines, were homemade in villages. The materials ranged from scavenged tin can to discarded wire, but the most important ingredients were provided by the enemy. In a year, dud American bombs could leave more than 20,000 tons of explosives scattered around the Vietnamese countryside. After air-raids, volunteers retrieved the duds and the dangerous business of creating new weapons began.

Local forces also designed primitive weapons, some designed to frighten intruders, but others were extremely dangerous. "Punji traps" -- sharp spikes hidden in pits -- could easily disable an enemy soldier. Punjis were often deliberately contaminated to increase the risk of infection.

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Main force Vietcong units were uniformed, full-time soldiers, and were used to launch large scale offensives over a wide area. Regional forces were also full-time, but operated only within their own districts. When necessary, small regional units would unite for large scale attacks.

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An article that talks about the history and back story of the Vietnam war and what are the causes. The article is really heart touching.

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The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

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CIA officer help evacuees up a ladder into a helicopter following the Fall of Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City)

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CIA officer help evacuees up a ladder into a helicopter following the Fall of Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City)

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These are the rock classics played in the 60s 70s in US radios. They were used to motivate the people to fight and join the military.

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Greatest Rock N Roll Vietnam War Music |  60S And 70S Classic Rock Songs

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A beautiful song with a deep story behind it.

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This song came out to explain the situation of the Vietnamese soldiers and it also explains that the war was not worth it.

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buffalo springfield for what its worth 1967

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Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth 1967

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I have been there. Tunnel schemes showing how they organized during the war.

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This article explains to the reader the causes of this war.

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The war happened in the jungle which gave the Vietnam soldiers an advantage as they knew their way around the jungle more then American soldier.

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This song is by American soldiers singing about them wanting the Vietnam war to finish and to return home to America

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We Gotta Get Out Of This Place - Vietnam War Veterans' Music Video

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Here all the facts and summary of Vietnam war is written.

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Vietnam War, (1954-75), a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. Called the "American War" in Vietnam (or, in full, the "War Against the Americans to Save the Nation"), the war was also part of a larger regional conflict ( see Indochina wars) and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

At the heart of the conflict was the desire of North Vietnam, which had defeated the French colonial administration of Vietnam in 1954, to unify the entire country under a single communist regime modeled after those of the Soviet Union and China. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. U.S. military advisers, present in small numbers throughout the 1950s, were introduced on a large scale beginning in 1961, and active combat units were introduced in 1965. By 1969 more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China poured weapons, supplies, and advisers into the North, which in turn provided support, political direction, and regular combat troops for the campaign in the South. The costs and casualties of the growing war proved too much for the United States to bear, and U.S. combat units were withdrawn by 1973. In 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North.

The human costs of the long conflict were harsh for all involved. Not until 1995 did Vietnam release its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of U.S. armed forces who had died or were missing as a result of the war. Over the following years, additions to the list have brought the total past 58,200. (At least 100 names on the memorial are those of servicemen who were actually Canadian citizens.) Among other countries that fought for South Vietnam on a smaller scale, South Korea suffered more than 4,000 dead, Thailand about 350, Australia more than 500, and New Zealand some three dozen.

Vietnam emerged from the war as a potent military power within Southeast Asia, but its agriculture, business, and industry were disrupted, large parts of its countryside were scarred by bombs and defoliation and laced with land mines, and its cities and towns were heavily damaged. A mass exodus in 1975 of people loyal to the South Vietnamese cause was followed by another wave in 1978 of " boat people," refugees fleeing the economic restructuring imposed by the communist regime. Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in what had been its longest and most controversial war. The two countries finally resumed formal diplomatic relations in 1995.

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Vietnam War | Facts, Summary, Years, Timeline, Casualties, Combatants, & Facts

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Vietnam War (1954-75), conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. It was part of a larger regional conflict as well as a manifestation of the Cold War.