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In this address, Nixon is trying to bring peace to America and inform Americans of why they are involved in the war

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It has been 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War, and the country once known for strife and crushing poverty has emerged as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

Foreign investors flooded into Vietnam in the early 1990's, betting that the communist nation's "doi moi" economic reforms could make it the next Asian tiger economy. But by the late 1990's, the investors were pulling out almost as fast as they had come in. Doi moi, which means "renewal", was seen as too slow moving, and investors turned their attention to neighboring China.

Yet, in the past five years, Vietnam's cautious policy on reforms has quietly yielded results. Annual GDP growth has averaged nearly 7 percent a year. Poverty, which once plagued two-thirds of the population, has been cut in half. Average income for Vietnamese has doubled in the last 10 years.

Klaus Rohland, country representative for the World Bank, says those numbers are impressive by any standard.

"Vietnam is a major success story. As of 1992 until now, they have grown on average, by more than 6 percent," he said. "Last year they grew by like 7.5, 7.8 percent. And that is way above average growth. And it's probably, with the exception of China, the best performing economy in the world.

For all its success, Vietnam remains a poor country. Average income may have doubled, but it is still only about $600 a year - far behind wealthier neighbors like Thailand and Malaysia. Still, the mood is optimistic.

In Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the sound of construction has become almost constant. Property prices have jumped by more than half in the past three years, as just about everyone seems to be renovating houses and building new office buildings. Real estate experts say office space in Ho Chi Minh City now costs the same as in suburban Tokyo or Paris.

Much of Vietnam's newfound prosperity comes from commodities exports like oil and agricultural products. The International Monetary Fund says Vietnam is the world's largest pepper exporter, and the second-largest exporter of rice, coffee and cocoa. Tourist arrivals reached three million visitors last year. That is only about a quarter of the tourists that Thailand welcomes, but is still up 50 percent from just three years previously. Nguyen Thanh Huong runs a souvenir shop in Hanoi's busy Hang Gai Street.

"Around late winter and early spring, there are many tourists Vietnam. Business is very good and I have a lot of customers," he said.

Economists say Vietnam still has a long way to go before its economy can match its more developed neighbors. Its expected entry into the World Trade Organization later this year could help. But first the government must further reform its banking and investment sectors - which now lend most of their funds to money-losing state-owned companies instead of private entrepreneurs.

Still, even foreign investors are beginning to regain confidence in Vietnam. This year's foreign direct investment is up by 30 percent. As the Communist Party touts its 30-year-old victory in the Vietnam War this week, Vietnam's economy gives the country something else to celebrate.

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голос америки

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Vietnam Enjoying Economic Recovery 30 Years After War

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It has been 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War, and the country once known for strife and crushing poverty has emerged as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Foreign investors flooded into Vietnam in the early 1990's, betting that the communist nation's "doi moi" economic reforms could make it the next Asian tiger economy.

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coming home: vietnam veterans in american society

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coming home: vietnam veterans in american society

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Coming Home: Vietnam Veterans in American Society - Dictionary definition of Coming Home: Vietnam Veterans in American Society | Encyclopedia.com: FREE online dictionary

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Definition of Coming Home: Vietnam Veterans in American Society - Our online dictionary has Coming Home: Vietnam Veterans in American Society information from Vietnam War Reference Library dictionary. Encyclopedia.com: English, psychology and medical dictionaries

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Hump- to march or hike carrying a rucksack
Baby San – GI reference to village children (male and female)
Bouncing Betty Mines: The German S-mine (Schrapnellmine in German) is the best-known version of a class of mines known as bounding mines. When triggered, these mines launch into the air and then detonate at about waist height.
Dinky Dau:  Slang for crazy or completely nuts
Foo Gas:  (sometimes contracted to fougasse and may be spelled foo gas) is a type of mine which uses an explosive charge to project burning liquid onto a target
Frag:  fragmentation grenade.  Also refers to the murder of fellow soldiers in retaliation for an action or order that resulted in somebody getting hurt or killed.  This usually happened by tossing a live grenade into a latrine or barracks occupied by the individual.

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Song

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Ballad of the Green Berets - [HD] - - - SSGT Barry SADLER

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Song

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Song

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Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fortunate Son (Official Lyric Video)

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This cartoon shows the United States' gradual involvement in Vietnam war until it leads to their doom. As they continue to engage in war affairs, it will lead to other serious ones too

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The president was saying in the cartoon, "Our position hasn't changed at all." They are riding an escalator while he is telling the man (the public) that their position hasn't changed. Although, he was hiding a lot of information from the public about the United States' involvement in the war.

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Vietnam - At War Blog - The New York Times

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The first Democratic presidential debate once again raised the issue of military service during the Vietnam War. Senator Bernie Sanders was asked how he could be commander-in-chief, given that he applied for conscientious objector status during that war. (Though his application was rejected he was not drafted and did not serve.)

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Newspaper Article

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Newspaper Article

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Newspaper Article 2017

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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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Newspaper Article 2017

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In January 1967, when the First and 25th Infantry Divisions of the United States Army began Operation Cedar Falls, their all-out offensive against the Communist strongholds of the "Iron Triangle" northwest of Saigon, Vo Thi Mo, 20, was ready.

Born in Cu Chi, in the middle of the Cedar Falls battle zone, Ms. Mo had been in the fight against American troops and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam - the South Vietnamese force, known as ARVN - since the age of 13, when she helped to build the extensive tunnel system that southern Communist forces, known as the National Liberation Front (and to its enemies as the Vietcong), used as barracks, command center and communications network.

By 1967 she was a "deputy of hamlet combat," and 50 years ago this month she led three commando squads against a battalion of the 25th Division.

"I had never been at any military school," said Ms. Mo, now 70 and still living in a small house in Cu Chi. "As a girl, I was so scared when I cocked a gun for the first time. But, you know, I learned a lot on the battlefields."

That poorly equipped, poorly supplied Communist forces were able to resist a sustained mechanized onslaught was a testament to the resilience, adaptability and tenacity of fighters like Ms. Mo. Their ability to survive, at a terrible cost, and learn from the experience helped shape their strategy for the rest of the war.

To understand the experiences of Vietnamese on both sides of the war, I've studied hundreds of Vietcong reports and communications, soldiers' diaries and letters, captured by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and archived at Texas Tech University. I've also conducted dozens of interviews in Vietnam in which former soldiers like Ms. Mo reflected on the war, and Cedar Falls in particular. Besides Ms. Mo, the other interviewees spoke on condition that their initials, but not their names, would be published.

Even a half-century later, Col. Q.T.N., an 81-year-old former regiment commander and one of the few survivors of a division that was considered among the most hardened units of the Vietcong, shuddered as he recalled Cedar Falls in an interview at his home in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City.

After bomb and rocket attacks from B-52s, jet fighters, helicopters and heavy artillery secured the area, American tanks and troops came in "to search for and destroy us," Colonel Q.T.N. said. "The lands of Cu Chi, Ben Cat and Ben Suc" - villages at the perimeter of the Iron Triangle - "were razed as if they were some evils peeled off the skins of our body. Therefore, we called the operation Peeling the Shell of the Earth."

He added: "Although they could not eliminate our leadership, they destroyed our bases, especially war supplies. To be honest, they created many difficulties for us and established a secure perimeter for themselves in the northwest of Saigon."

Hai Nguyen is a doctoral candidate in history at Texas Tech University and a research associate at the Texas Tech Ethics Center.

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Opinion | As the Earth Shook, They Stood Firm

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In January 1967, when the First and 25th Infantry Divisions of the United States Army began Operation Cedar Falls, their all-out offensive against the Communist strongholds of the "Iron Triangle" northwest of Saigon, Vo Thi Mo, 20, was ready.

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Video

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(Img: Library of Congress) After V-J Day and Japan surrenders, American military forces were demobilized and sent back to the United States. In New York, crowds celebrate Navy Day as sailors from across the globe return home.

Sponsored Content:

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Video: V-J Day Celebrations Across the US as Japan Surrenders

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(Img: Library of Congress) After V-J Day and Japan surrenders, American military forces were demobilized and sent back to the United States. In New York, crowds celebrate Navy Day as sailors from across the globe return home.

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Academic Source

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The Vietnam War: Facts & Info About the Most Controversial U.S. Conflict

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All the facts and information you need to understand the Vietnam War, America’s most controversial conflict, which began in 1954.

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Video

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Vietnam War Exclusive Videos & Features - HISTORY.com

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Check out exclusive Vietnam War videos and features. Browse the latest Vietnam War videos and more on HISTORY.com.

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Academic Source

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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.