Vietnam War

South Vietnamese residents flee Saigon, as North Vietnamese forces enter the city.

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War or The American War (in Vietnam), was fought principally between North Vietnamese Communist troops and South Vietnamese forces supported by American soldiers. The war was basically a fight over whether South Vietnam should have a Communist government, part of the ongoing Cold War between the US and the Soviets.

The war was in progress more or less continuously since the surrender of Japan, which occupied Vietnam during World War II, in 1945. Ho Chi Minh, an operative of the Comintern (the Soviet organization charged with promoting Marxist-Leninist revolution around the world), led the movement for a unified, Communist Vietnam from 1941 on. He served as the dictator of North Vietnam until the late fifties, though he remained the figurehead president. He remained a popular icon of the New Left around the world, despite heading a totalitarian dictatorship and supporting the slaughter of millions of people.

Prelude

During World War II the Japanese occupied Vietnam and disarmed the French. With the vacuum caused by the defeat of Japan, an opportunity arose for the Communists to declare the "independence" of Vietnam in 1945. No nation recognized the new regime and the French returned and swept it away, with remnants hiding in the mountains. The United States backed France and its puppet emperor Bao Dai. Ho began a campaign to fight a weakened France and seize independence through force. France's economy was shattered by the war and so by 1953, 80% of the money and material used by Bao Dai's troops came from the United States. Nonetheless, in early 1954 French were defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu over many months when the fortress was overrun by a well-forged Vietnamese fighting force. More than 500,000 Vietnamese died in this conflict with France (the First Indochina War). The survival rate for French soldiers in Communist POW camps was comparable to the rates of survival in the Dachau concentration camp during the Holocaust. The French sued for peace at talks in Geneva, the upshot of which was the creation of four independent countries in their former colony of Indochina: Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was run by Ho Chi Minh as a totalitarian Communist dictatorship, while the South was run based on the Western model. Neither side respected the legitimacy of the other; as a consequence, the division was widely regarded as temporary. A British diplomat suggested that free elections be held in the North and South to determine the future of a unified Vietnam. Contrary to commonly repeated myths; it was North Vietnam, not South Vietnam, that was the most extreme and steadfast in its efforts to prevent any such election from taking place. Nevertheless, it is true that South Vietnam consistently opposed all such arguments, claiming that the majority of South Vietnamese wanted independence, but that those North Vietnamese who wanted conquest should not be allowed to veto their just demands. The United States was willing to accept free elections and a reunified Vietnam, Communist-led and hostile to China. Indeed, US officials favored such a default outcome; they listed it in secret communications never intended for public consumption (but released in the Pentagon Papers) under the heading "advantages." The US gradually intervened, due to the insistence of the North on a campaign of military aggression, as part of its wider Cold War strategy of containment.

Unwilling to accept or even consider free elections, and with the South's economy growing rapidly and its prospects looking brighter by the day, Ho Chi Minh was up against a wall. A unity government was established in Laos, and the US was firmly committed to defending South Vietnam from conquest. Huge numbers of North Vietnamese desperately fled to the South for freedom. Cambodia was neutral and united behind the rule of Sihanouk. Despite repeated diplomatic efforts by the US to bring about a peaceful regional settlement; Hanoi became increasingly convinced that the revolution could be spread throughout Indochina only by force.

From 1956 to 1959, the North Vietnamese Communists (who would ultimately kill at least a million of their own people) embarked on a ruthless "land reform" in which upwards of 50,000 people were slaughtered in a series of violent killings and purges by the state. In addition to these executions, untold tens of thousands were worked to death in concentration camps. Although most scholars estimate the deaths were in the tens if not scores of thousands; President Nixon claimed that, based on US intelligence (which may have been faulty), up to 500,000 had been executed and 500,000 worked to death in these three years alone. Domestic repression escalated dramatically, and the only free paper in North Vietnam was shut down after writing: 'If somebody tells me to keep my mouth shut in case the Americans and Diem should make capital out of what I say, I reply: "Diem has a very good case when he refuses to hold joint consultations with us on the ground that there is no freedom in North Vietnam."'

In 1959, Hanoi's politburo received a series of reports indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically out-pacing the North. "By Tet of 1959," William Colby writes in his book, Lost Victory, "it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North."

In response, the North decided to rapidly escalate the campaign to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia using the Ho Chi Minh trail. To "hide" the fact that "there had been an invasion from the North," as one North Vietnamese commander openly admitted, seemingly indigenous forces were deployed in the initial phases of the conflict. Originally part of the Vietminh and honorary branches of the North Vietnamese army; groups of Cambodian (the Khmer Rouge), Laotian (the Pathet Lao), and South Vietnamese (the Vietcong) Communists were dispatched by the North to overthrow the governments of their respective countries. Thousands of North Vietnamese troops overtly aided them by providing arms and training, and by invading and occupying large chunks of Cambodia and Laos to assist them. By 1961 northern Communists were assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials each month. By 1962 that figure had grown to one thousand per month.

The atrocities escalated rapidly with no end in sight. By 1965, the guerilla war was largely over, and the army of North Vietnam was using conventional warfare to try and overrun Cambodia and South Vietnam. The US began sending military advisors to South Vietnam in 1950. By 1965, it reluctantly decided to commit combat troops to prevent a Communist takeover.

The War

The Kennedy administration, which had repeatedly intervened to halt right-wing coups, acquiesced in 1963 to the overthrow of South Vietnam's Diem by a coalition of generals. President Nixon would later characterize this decision as a catastrophic betrayal of an ally that contributed to the ultimate disintegration of South Vietnam. The casus beli for the United States intervention was an alleged attack on a US ship by North Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The US responded with a massive bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder. Although a swift victory over North Vietnam would have taken a matter of months, the risk of Chinese intervention was considered too great to accept. Thus, Vietnam was fought to avoid "another Korea".

President Johnson, a tormented but deeply sincere and good man, could not bear the burden of the war. His incoherent war policy, combined with the lies and deceptions he employed to sell it, resulted in a loss of public faith in his honesty. He began to doubt himself, while his wildly incompetent administration, exemplified by Robert McNamara, began to have doubts about the morality of US policy. Many of them would join the anti-war movement.

Richard Nixon was subsequently elected President on a pledge to end the war by prosecuting it. His shrewd diplomacy, backed with the immense intellect of his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, hoped to negotiate an end to the war through a show of force.

In 1970, North Vietnamese troops invaded and attempted to overrun the entire country of Cambodia at the request of the Khmer Rouge, who had surrounded the capital and hoped one small push would be enough to overthrow the weak Lon Nol regime. Nixon responded forcefully with an incursion and bombing campaign to force the North Vietnamese out. Justifying his actions, he stated:

"Cambodia, a small country of 7 million people, has been a neutral nation since the Geneva agreement of 1954 - an agreement, incidentally, which was signed by the Government of North Vietnam.

American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people. We have maintained a skeleton diplomatic mission of fewer than 15 in Cambodia's capital, and that only since last August. For the previous 4 years, from 1965 to 1969, we did not have any diplomatic mission whatever in Cambodia. And for the past 5 years, we have provided no military assistance whatever and no economic assistance to Cambodia.

North Vietnam, however, has not respected that neutrality.

For the past 5 years - as indicated on this map that you see here - North Vietnam has occupied military sanctuaries all along the Cambodian frontier with South Vietnam. Some of these extend up to 20 miles into Cambodia. The sanctuaries are in red and, as you note, they are on both sides of the border. They are used for hit and run attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.

These Communist occupied territories contain major base camps, training sites, logistics facilities, weapons and ammunition factories, airstrips, and prisoner-of-war compounds.

For 5 years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation. Even after the Vietnamese Communists began to expand these sanctuaries 4 weeks ago, we counseled patience to our South Vietnamese allies and imposed restraints on our own commanders.

In contrast to our policy, the enemy in the past 2 weeks has stepped up his guerrilla actions and he is concentrating his main forces in these sanctuaries that you see on this map where they are building up to launch massive attacks on our forces and those of South Vietnam.

North Vietnam in the last 2 weeks has stripped away all pretense of respecting the sovereignty or the neutrality of Cambodia. Thousands of their soldiers are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh. Coming from these sanctuaries, as you see here, they have moved into Cambodia and are encircling the capital."

When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations. Between 1969 and 1972, he withdrew 515,000 American troops, ended American ground combat in 1971 and reduced American casualties by nearly 90%. According to Kissinger, "a breakthrough occurred in 1972 because the administration's strategic design finally came together in its retaliation for the North Vietnamese spring offensive. When the U.S. mined North Vietnam's harbors, Hanoi found itself isolated because, as a result of the opening to China in 1971 and the summit in 1972, Beijing and the Soviet Union stood aside. Hanoi's offensive was defeated on the ground entirely by South Vietnamese forces assisted by U.S. air power. Faced with a military setback and diplomatic isolation, Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's principal negotiator, abandoned Hanoi's 1969 terms in October 1972. He accepted conditions publicly put forward by Nixon in January 1972 -- and decried as unachievable in the U.S. domestic debate. The terms of the resulting Paris peace agreement were an unconditional cease-fire and release of prisoners; continuation of the existing South Vietnamese government; continued U.S. economic and military help for it; no further infiltration of North Vietnamese forces; withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces; and withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia."

Nixon brought about the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, and dramatically lessened the scale of the bloodshed in Indochina. For a time, it seemed peace might be within our reach. Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in 1972.

Meanwhile, in 1973, the Khmer Rouge fell under the control of its most fanatical members, led by Pol Pot. They were beyond the control of Hanoi and sought to completely annihilate Cambodian society and restart from scratch. When they besieged the capital again in 1973, Nixon bombed 20,000 of them to their graves, saving Cambodia from a Communist takeover. However, the overthrow of Sihanouk and the violent madness of the Khmer Rouge left the country in chaos, and the situation remained delicate.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win." Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself. The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed Ford's call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for weeks by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story". The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos.

Aftermath

An estimated 180,000 Indochinese died in the renewed Communist offensive to conquer South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia after the American withdrawal. Professor R.J. Rummel calculates that Communist Vietnam directly killed 1.8 million people from 1954 to 1987 in democide alone (not counting war casualties or the "boat people").

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, commonly known as the Khmer Rouge, on April 17, 1975. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge enacted a genocidal policy that would kill over one-fifth of all Cambodians, or more than a million people. Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1.1 million Cambodians found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has been determined by the investigators to have been execution by the former Khmer Rouge regime. Because no more than roughly half and as little as a third of those killed by the Khmer Rouge were executed (the rest having died from other causes like state-created famine, the deliberate withholding of basic necessities by the state, the refusal by the state to allow foreign aid, the abolishing of medicine and hospitals by the state, systematic overwork and slave labor by the state, and brutal mistreatment by the state), the Documentation Center of Cambodia estimates that the former regime killed or otherwise caused the unnecessary deaths of, between 2 and 3 million Cambodians. A UN investigation reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed. Demographic estimates went as high as 4 million killed by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1978. Even the Khmer Rouge acknowledged that 2 million had been killed—though they attributed those deaths to a subsequent Vietnamese invasion. By late 1979, UN and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million Cambodians faced death by starvation due to “the near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of ousted Prime Minister Pol Pot,” who were saved by American and international aid. After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the Khmer Rouge. According to R.J. Rummel; the Vietnamese invasion and occupation, puppet regime in Cambodia (led by former Khmer Rouge officials turned “moderates”), ongoing guerilla warfare, and ensuing famine had killed another 1.2 million Cambodians by 1987 (Samrin's regime alone killed between 500,000 and 1,500,000 Cambodians). The bloodshed from 1970 (when North Vietnam first invaded and attempted to overrun Cambodia) to 1987 affected Cambodia so severely that its actual population in 1987 was 5 million short of what had been predicted in 1970. Cambodia's civil war from 1978-1994 killed an estimated 225,000 individuals directly, with an additional 250,000 dying from war-related famine.

In response, China invaded Vietnam in 1979. The two countries fought a brief border war, known as the Third Indochina War, which cost over 200,000 casualties, including tens of thousands of deaths. According to figures from the UN Commission of Refugees, mass expulsions by Communist Vietnam led to the deaths by drowning of 200-400,000 South Vietnamese “boat people,” while more than 600,000 South Vietnamese were killed after the Communist take-over. Indeed, nearly 100,000 South Vietnamese were killed within the first 90 days of the Communist takeover.

The Pathet Lao overthrew the Royalist Government of Laos in December 1975. They established a Communist dictatorship known as the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, exterminating an estimated over 100,000 Hmong tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps, and mass rape. The Communists killed over 184,000 people in Laos altogether.

More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.

Failure of US campaign to help the South

Military, political, and social historians have ever after debated why the United States was unable to defeat the North Vietnamese.

James Q. Wilson wrote: "First, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson both wanted to avoid losing Vietnam without waging a major war in Asia."

Another factor was careerism of the officer corps. The number of officers in the US army grew disproportionately from the end of WWII, with a 1-in-15 ratio dropping to 1 in 6. Competition for promotions was handled badly by General Westmoreland, who permitted a six month tour of duty for officers. This was hardly enough time to learn how to engage the enemy successfully, and gave rise to resentment among the largely working-class enlisted men.^{[Citation Needed]}

America at first operated on the assumption that victory by body count was possible and would eventually bring the North Vietnamese to the peace table. There were in fact peace negotiations following Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, but these succeeded mostly in giving the United States its prisoners back and time to withdraw from the fight. It was simply impossible for the North Vietnamese leadership, which had been fighting in some form for 30 years, to imagine the indefinite existence of South Vietnam apart from unification under their rule.

Cost of the War

The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese, 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians and 30-50,000 Laotians. 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. R.J. Rummel puts the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.

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. Such a casualty rate, if applied to the United States, would have meant 13 million Americans killed and 3.9 million missing in action.

“

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. ---President Ronald Reagan, 1986

”

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 falling to 4 million by 1979, 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

Max Boot wrote:

Numerous bits of conventional wisdom have accreted around the Vietnam War. It is commonly held that Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist above all, not a true communist, and that his victory was inevitable. That Ngo Dinh Diem was an unpopular and repressive reactionary. That the United States had no vital strategic interest in defending South Vietnam. That the ‘domino theory’ was a myth. That the U.S. was right not to invade North Vietnam or Laos for fear of triggering Chinese intervention. Mark Moyar, a young, bold, and iconoclastic historian, takes a sledge hammer to these hoary beliefs. [His boox] is ‘revisionist’ in the best sense of the word.” [3]

Jeffrey Record contends that the military was relegated, as a result of its constitutional position, to the role of an accomplice in what Records states was the most strategically reckless American enterprise of the 20th century. He charge President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara with harshly suppressing their military advisers, with Johnson believing that his hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff were out to destroy his Great Society by their wild-eyed schemes.

Media Bias

Charges of western media bias in favor of the Communist side have often been made by critics, who see such alleged bias as being crucial in turning military victories by America into a loss of the war, much by means of propaganda. Underlying the importance of such is the often quoted exchange between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu. During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Colonel Harry told Tu, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."

The success of the propaganda war has seemed enigmatic to many. “If there is to be an inquiry related to the Vietnam War, it should be into the reasons why enemy propaganda was so widespread in this country, and why the enemy was able to condition the public to such an extent that the best educated segments of our population (that is, media and university elite) gave credence to the most incredible allegations.” (Final Report - Chief of Military History - U.S. Government)

British "Encounter" journalist Robert Elegant stated,

For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and television screens - never before Vietnam had the collective policy of the media sought, by graphic and unremitting distortion, the victory of the enemies of the correspondents own side.

Some journalists have admitted that their reporting was decidedly biased, and had profound effects on history. West German correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto confessed, "Having covered the Viet Nam war over a period of five years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there." In relation to not reporting the true nature of the Hanoi regime and its actions resulting from the American withdrawal, he asked,

What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by U.S. officials that a Communist victory would result in a massacre?... Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive?...However, the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi's repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non-Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won "without the Western press."

CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite regularly carried news reports from its Moscow Bureau Chief, Bernard Redmont. When peace negotiations commenced with North Vietnam in Paris, Redmont became CBS News Paris Bureau Chief. What Redmont never reported during the ten year conflict was, Redmont had been a KGB operative since the 1930s, and member of the notorious Silvermaster group. Redmont was the only journalist to whom his fellow Comintern party member, and North Vietnamese chief negotiator, Mai Van Bo, granted an interview to bring the Communist point of view into American living rooms in what has been called, "the living room war."

The most manifest example of such biased reporting is held to be the portrayal of the TET offensive, in which western media was charged with inspiring and aiding the propaganda war of the communists.

Truong Nhu Tang stated years later,

The Tet Offensive proved catastrophic to our plans. It is a major irony of the Vietnam War that our propaganda transformed this debacle into a brilliant victory. The truth was that Tet cost us half our forces. Our losses were so immense that we were unable to replace them with new recruits. (Truong Nhu Tang - Minister of Justice - Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government - The New York Review, October 21, 1982)

In addition to his biased reporting, FBI documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act by Yahoo news, evidence that legendary CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite collaborated with anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s, going so far as to offer advice on how to raise the public profile of protests and even promising that CBS News would rent a helicopter to take liberal Senator Edmund Muskie to and from the site of an anti-war rally.

Many US reporters admired the Khmer Rouge, while prominent intellectuals openly denied the Cambodian genocide. During the genocide, human rights abuses in Chile and South Korea got more coverage than Cambodia. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."

Vietnam War in Popular Culture

The war and its aftermath were the inspiration for several films, including The Green Berets, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, and We Were Soldiers.

The TV series Tour of Duty was about a U.S. Army platoon in country around the time of the Tet Offensive. The series Magnum, P.I, Night Court, Airwolf, and Area 88 all had Vietnam veterans as main or major characters. In the military drama series JAG, the main character's father was a US Navy pilot lost over North Vietnam, and the main character's desire to find out what happened to him is the focus of a major story arc over the first few seasons.

Further reading

• Prados, John. Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975 (2009) 704 pages
• Jennings, Phillip. America's victory in Vietnam 244 pages "A well-researched, brisk review of the central myths of the Vietnam War, set in historical context." (James S. Robbins, Washington Times)

External links

• Vietnam War Bibliography by Richard Jensen
• Larry Berman, Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2007). [4]
• SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975.
• "Secrecy, Freedom and Empire: Lessons for Today from Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers".
• Vietnam War.
• Capt. Marshal Hanson, U.S.N.R (Ret.) Capt. Scott Beaton, Vietnam (Fact vs Fiction)