Throughout the war, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) distributed information on the treatment of civilians to American soldiers serving in Vietnam. Officers and enlisted personnel received a wallet-sized card entitled "Nine Rules for…

This letter to President Nixon was written by the members of Company D, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry, 196th Light Infantry Brigade of the U.S. Army to complain about what they saw as an unfair burden of combat duty that they and other infantrymen…

Peers Commission investigators asked Jay Roberts, an Army journalist who accompanied photographer Ronald Haeberle on the My Lai operation, to explain why the massacre had occurred. Roberts was a veteran journalist, and My Lai was not his first…

Support for the communist Viet Cong was strong among many ordinary South Vietnamese people. This song describes one way civilians on the homefront supported V.C. against U.S.-led forces during the Vietnam War. The song was collected and published by…

Truong My Hoa, a Vietnamese woman from a "revolutionary tradition" and later a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, recalls her experiences as a young revolutionary and subsequent imprisonment by the South Vietnamese government.

Le Lieu Browne, a Vietnamese woman educated in France and married to an American journalist, recalls her mixed feelings about her experience working for the Diem regime.

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, thousands of so-called "boat people" fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, often in small overcrowded ships that were barely seaworthy. The story of Linda Thong, while horrific, is not unusual. Refugees often…

The small nation of Laos, along Vietnam's western border, became entangled in the Vietnam War. Laos was invaded by the North Vietnamese Army and covertly bombed by the U.S. After the Communist Pathet Lao emerged victorious in 1975, the country became…

Todd Gitlin was a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which by the late 1960s was the largest radical student organization in the country. Originally concerned with the problem of poverty and racism in the United States,…

Tran Luong was born in Hanoi in 1960. Like most Hanoi children, he was evacuated to the countryside during the war; between 1966 and 1972 he lived in eight different peasant villages. Here he recalls his childhood experience of the war.