On April 22, 1971, John Kerry, representing Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), testified before the Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. Senate. The following day, April 23, 1971, Kerry and hundreds of other VVAW veterans threw medals,…

Not long after his election in 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson moved to increase American involvement in Vietnam. This policy would soon result in the defacto American take-over of the effort against the North Vietnamese Communists. In the week this cartoon…

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…

In this letter to a close friend back in the United States, Douglas McCormac, a sergeant in the Special Forces, describes the economic corruption spreading through war-torn Vietnam.

Rodney Baldra had been in country forty-two days, serving with the 5th battalion, 60th Infantry (Mechanized), 9th Infantry Division, out of Bear Cat, when he was wounded by a booby trap on 1 April 1967. He lives in Walnut Creek, California, and is a…

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…

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.

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…

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…

In September 1968, Captain Rodney R. Chastant, from Mobile, Alabama, extended his 13-month tour of duty in Vietnam with Marine Air Group 13, 1st Marine Air Wing, Da Nang. He was killed 22 October. He was 25 years old. David is his brother.