-General Giap, North Vietnam (memoirs)
"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi (Operation Linebacker II, December 1972). You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media were definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!"
29 April, 1975
After an American withdrawl from Vietnam the North Vietnamese forces, Commanded by General Giap, defeated the South Vietnamese forces and Saigon fell on 29 April, 1975...on 30 April, 1975 the South Vietnamese surrendered to the communist forces of the North. American forces had defeated the North Vietnamese forces in every major engagement fought.
58,148 KIA
304,000 WIA
2,338 MIA
766 POWs (114 DIED IN CAPTIVITY)
1,411 MISSOURI SERVICEMEN'S NAMES ARE LISTED ON THE VIETNAM WALL
2,509,000 SERVED
75,000 VIETNAM VETS WERE SEVERLY DISABLED
Peak troop strength in Vietnam: 543,482 (April 30, 1969)
3,403,100 (including 514,300 offshore) personnel served in the Southeast Asia Theater (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, flight crews based in Thailand, and sailors in adjacent South China sea waters).
The average infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II saw about 40 days of combat in four years. The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about 240 days of combat in one year, thanks to the mobility of the helicopter.
Two-thirds of the men who served in Vietnam were volunteers, two-thirds who served in World War II were draftees.
Lyndon B. Johnson, address to nation, March 31, 1968.
Our objective in South Vietnam has never been the annihilation of the enemy. It has been to bring about a recognition in Hanoi that its objective - taking over the South by force - could not be achieved.
Richard M. Nixon, 1969
Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.
Dalton Trumbo, Introduction, Johnny Got His Gun, 1970.
Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
Henry Kissinger, Oct. 1972
We believe that peace is at hand.
Richard Nixon in a letter to President Thieu, Jan. 1973
You have my assurance that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.
Marshall McLuhan, 1975
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
Myra MacPherson, 1984
Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.
Richard M. Nixon, 1985
No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
Sleep in peace my brothers. In your sacrifice, you have given us our freedom. We will not forget you.