Vietnam War

Historians usually judge the Vietnam War to be one of the most important conflicts of the twentieth century. At first glance, though, the significance of the conflict in Vietnam is sometimes difficult to ascertain. The war in Vietnam was, in many ways, small— involving only limited action by a world superpower on distant battlefields of the Third World. During the nine years of official American involvement in the Vietnam War over two million Vietnamese and 58,219 Americans lost their lives. Such numbers truly represent a great tragedy, but pale in comparison to the millions of casualties of the two World Wars. In fact more Americans die every year in traffic accidents than died during the entire Vietnam War.

The importance of a conflict is gauged not only on casualty figures and geographic-spread, but also on the impact that conflict has on the wider world. Using, such a scale the conflict in Vietnam ranks as possibly the most important American event of the twentieth century. The Vietnam War took place during, and became intertwined with, the turbulent 1960s. The volatile mixture of Vietnam, the counterculture, and the Civil Rights Movement led to a near breakdown in the American body politic. In 1968, amid a spate of riots and assassinations, many observers thought that the United States was on the brink of a second American Revolution. The societal tension was so high that the US slowly backed out of a war that it felt it could no longer win. In the years that have passed since the end of American involvement in the Vietnam War it has become clear that the conflict formed a watershed in American, and certainly Vietnamese, history. Indeed the impact of the Vietnam War was felt worldwide—from the "Killing Fields" of Cambodia and the ethnic cleansing of among tribesmen in Laos, to social upheaval in Europe and societal discord in Australia over that nation's controversial role in the combat in Vietnam.

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