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→Cost of the War
==Cost of the War==
==Cost of the War==
The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,<ref>http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/modules/vietnam/index.cfm</ref> 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> and 30-50,000 Laotians.<ref>http://www.vietnamgear.com/casualties.aspx</ref> The "most comprehensive demographic survey" ever conducted on casualties during the war, as endorsed by the Associated Press, estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.<ref>Associated Press, April 3, 1995; Charles Hirschman et al., “Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate,” Population and Development Review, December 1995</ref> R.J. Rummel puts the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.<ref>http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WSJ.ART.HTM</ref>
Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. The North Vietnamese are estimated to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>
Over the course of the war, the United States suffered 46,226 battle deaths with 153,311 wounded 5,486 missing and 10,326 non-battle deaths. 3.3 million troops fought over the course of the war, with the largest number of 625,866 reached on March 27th, 1969. The North Vietnamese claimed to have lost 1 million men.<Ref>Encyclopedia of Military History, Dupuy & Dupuy, 1979, Chart Page 1221</Ref> Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.<ref>Who Lost Vietnam?, by Joseph L. Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report</ref>
{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''
{{cquote|'''They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.'''
'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. <small>---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986</small>'''}}
'''And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong. <small>---[[President Ronald Reagan]], 1986</small>'''}}
With a range of 1.1 to 1.5 million executed and 1-2 million worked or starved to death by the state in Communist Cambodia, and a mid-value estimate of about 2.8 million killed (which is in line with Cambodia's 1975 population of 6.8 million<ref>http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/deaths.htm</ref> falling to 4 million by 1979<ref>http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/labedz.pdf</ref>, and with subsequent studies estimating there were 1.39 million executions), about a million killed in South Vietnam, a mid-value total of one million deaths under Samrin's regime, nearly half a mllion killed in the Cambodian civil war and famine, and nearly 200,000 killed in Laos; the death toll from US defeat far surpassed that exacted by the war itself.
==Controversies about the War==
==Controversies about the War==