John T. McNaughton was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He was considered McNamara's heir apparent as Secretary of Defense, but died in a plane crash with his wife and son on a commercial domestic flight in July…

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,…

In 1959, at the age of seventeen, Joe McDonald joined the Navy. After his discharge three years later, he enrolled in a Los Angeles college where he became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1965, McDonald moved to Berkeley, California just as…

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…

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…

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…

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…