Tens of thousands of soldiers received dishonorable discharges for desertion, and about 500,000 American men from 1965-73 became “draft dodgers,” with many fleeing to Canada to evade In 1970, a joint U.S-South Vietnamese operation invaded Cambodia, hoping to wipe out DRV supply bases there.
In 1976, Vietnam was unified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, though sporadic violence continued over the next 15 years, including conflicts with neighboring China and Cambodia. By 1966, large areas of South Vietnam had been designated as “free-fire zones,” from which all innocent civilians were supposed to have evacuated and only enemy remained. Oscar Lee Torbet III, discusses his Army Ranger service during Vietnam, P.T.S.D., suicide preventionHe was held at Hanoi Hilton for 216 days before being released.National Vietnam War Veterans Day joins six other military-centric national holidays.On behalf of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Veterans we are deeply honored to serve, I want toDuring the Vietnam War, Navy pilot Rich "Tito" Lannom's plane went missing. Warfare had demolished the country’s infrastructure and economy, and reconstruction proceeded slowly.
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.The United States had provided funding, armaments, and training to South Vietnam’s government and military since Vietnam’s partition into the communist North and the democratic South in 1954. Even as the enemy body count (at times exaggerated by U.S. and South Vietnamese authorities) mounted steadily, DRV and Viet Cong troops refused to stop fighting, encouraged by the fact that they could easily reoccupy lost territory with manpower and supplies delivered via the By November 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching 500,000, and U.S. casualties had reached 15,058 killed and 109,527 wounded. Congress soon passed the The bombing was not limited to Vietnam; from 1964-1973, the United States covertly dropped two million tons of bombs on neighboring, neutral Laos during the CIA-led “Secret War” in Laos. With his approval ratings dropping in an election year, Johnson called a halt to bombing in much of North Vietnam (though bombings continued in the south) and promised to dedicate the rest of his term to seeking peace rather than reelection.Johnson’s new tack, laid out in a March 1968 speech, met with a positive response from Hanoi, and peace talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam opened in Paris that May.
With an eye toward Memorial Day, the AARP has published In Col. Nadal's voice and the clarity of his memories it's easy to see the toll war takes on soldiers. As the war stretched on, some soldiers came to mistrust the government’s reasons for keeping them there, as well as Washington’s repeated claims that the war was being won. Bettmann/Getty Images for PBS This story is part of a group of stories called