President John F. Kennedy, 1961

Endless treks thru steaming hot jungles with eighty lbs. on your back...the sweat first filling then burning your eyes...leaches..snakes...wild animals...lizards...traps...
three inch ants...mosquito's...pungi pits...jungle rot... wait- a -minute vines...moonsoons...pitch black nights...death...destruction...fear...doubt...helplessness...triple canopy jungles...elephant grass...day in...day out...its always the same....nothing ever changes....except you......

In 1961, South Vietnam signed a military and economic aid treaty with the United States leading to the arrival (1961) of U.S. support troops and the formation (1962) of the U.S. Military Assistance Command. Mounting dissatisfaction with the ineffectiveness and corruption of Diem's government culminated (Nov., 1963) in a military coup engineered by Duong Van Minh; Diem was executed. No one was able to establish control in South Vietnam until June, 1965, when Nguyen Cao Ky became premier, but U.S. military aid to South Vietnam increased, especially after the U.S. Senate passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution (Aug. 7, 1964) at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Michael Herr, 1977

In early 1965, the United States began air raids on North Vietnam and on Communist-controlled areas in the South; by 1966 there were 190,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam. North Vietnam, meanwhile, was receiving armaments and technical assistance from the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. Despite massive U.S. military aid, heavy bombing, the growing U.S. troop commitment (which reached nearly 550,000 in 1969), and some political stability in South Vietnam after the election (1967) of Nguyen Van Thieu as president, the United States and South Vietnam were unable to defeat the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. Optimistic U.S. military reports were discredited in Feb., 1968, by the costly and devastating Tet offensive of the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong, involving attacks on more than 100 towns and cities and a month-long battle for Hue in South Vietnam.

Even as the war continued, peace talks in Paris progressed, with Henry Kissinger as U.S. negotiator. A break in negotiations followed by U.S. saturation bombing of North Vietnam did not derail the talks, and a peace agreement was reached, signed on Jan. 27, 1973, by the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the NLF's provisional revolutionary government. The accord provided for the end of hostilities, the withdrawal of U.S. and allied troops (several Southeast Asia Treaty Organization countries had sent token forces), the return of prisoners of war, and the formation of a four-nation international control commission to ensure peace.

 

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now....

 

Richard M. Nixon, 1985

The US Air Force launches Operation Ranch Hand to deny the Vietcong theuse of the road and trails. Using a defoliating herbicide named Agent Orange,over 10% of the vegetation in Vietnam is destroyed during the course ofthe war. The defoliant also causes severe disabilities among Vietnam veterans.

"The first casualty of war is truth."
(Author Unknown)

"This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart. "

Sen. Frank Church, May 1970

The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular war in which Americans ever fought. And there is no reckoning the cost. The toll in suffering, sorrow, in rancorous national turmoil can never be tabulated. No one wants ever to see America so divided again. And for many of the more than two million American veterans of the war, the wounds of Vietnam will never heal.

Fifty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives. The losses to the Vietnamese people were appalling. The financial cost to the United States comes to something over $150 billion dollars. Direct American involvement began in 1955 with the arrival of the first advisors. The first combat troops arrived in 1965 and we fought the war until the cease-fire of January 1973. To a whole new generation of young Americans today, it seems a story from the olden times.

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.

Philip Caputo, 1982

On Friday, May 1, a day after Nixons televised address, students at Kent State University organized a demonstration to protest the invasion of Cambodia, which included burying the United States Constitution in front of the Victory Bell on the university Commons. The following Monday, May 4, an estimated crowd of 2,000-3,000 gathered on the Commons to continue their protest. Shortly after noon, members of the Ohio National Guard, which had been dispatched that weekend to control acts of civil disobedience, encountered the crowd...

The length of the war, the high number of U.S. casualties, and the exposure of U.S. involvement in war crimes such as the massacre at My Lai helped to turn many in the United States against the war. Politically, the movement was led by Senators James William Fulbright, Robert F. Kennedy, Eugene J. M c Carthy, and George S. M c Govern; there were also huge public demonstrations in Washington, D.C., as well as in many other cities in the United States and on college campuses.

"Expressions of protest across the country took every conceivable form and were carried out under every conceivable banner, slogan and cry . There were strikes, boycotts, and shutdowns; there were marches, rallies, and campuswide convocations; there were flag-lowerings, black armbands, memorial services, vigils, and symbolic funerals; there were special seminars, teach-ins, workshops, and research projects. There were students talking to residents in their homes and where they worked, and there were invitations to the public to come to the campus to talk"

THE KENT STATE MASSACRE

THE TEN THOUSAND YARD STARE