Perry Watkins was a gay African American soldier who was drafted to serve in the army during the Vietnam War. He was open about his sexuality throughout his entire career. Despite this, in 1981, the army revoked his security clearance after 13 years…

Anti-war sentiment rose across the country in the midst of the Vietnam War for a variety of reasons, including pacifism, anti-imperialism, solidarity with the Vietnamese, and even a desire by some young people not to be drafted. Many anti-war…

After serving in the Navy, Joe McDonald moved to Berkeley, California, as the anti-Vietnam War movement was beginning to pick up momentum. He recorded "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die-Rag" under the name "Country Joe and the Fish"; the song gradually…

Wayne Smith grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the second of eleven children and the oldest son. When he was ten years old, his father died in a fire in their home, and the family had to move into public housing. Smith served in Vietnam as a…

Vo Nguyen Giap (b. 1912) served as Vietnam's leading military commander during three decades of war against the French, Japanese, and Americans. He was a strong supporter of Vietnamese independence and, like Ho Chi Minh, became a Communist…

From 1966-1974 Le Cao Dai directed the largest North Vietnamese jungle hospital in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. His staff of four hundred routinely cared for more than a thousands patients. Every few months they had to move all patients and…

Sylvia Lutz Holland enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps and went to Officer Candidate School at Fort Sam Houston. From 1968 to 1969 she served at the 312th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of Vietnam. Here she remembers her…

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.

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,…

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…