A Brief History
On July 30, 1969, President Richard Nixon went to South Vietnam to visit the South Vietnamese President and US military commanders. You may not know that this visit to Vietnam was Nixon’s 8th visit to that country, although the first as President.
Digging Deeper
Nixon was not the first US President to visit Vietnam, as Lyndon Johnson had also gone there in 1967. In fact, John F. Kennedy had also visited Vietnam in 1951, before JFK was President.
Some misunderstandings about the Vietnam War include the number of American draftees involved. The actual portion of draftees was about one third, two thirds being volunteers. American soldiers were not all 18 and 19 year olds, as the average age of US military killed in Nam was 23.1 years old.
Vietnam now has 100 million people, far from the “tiny” country portrayed in the media. The population in 1975 was about 50 million.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Should the US have ever fought the Vietnam War?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
DK. The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History. DK, 2017.
Ward, Geoffrey and Ken Burns. The Vietnam War. Vintage, 2020.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of Richard Nixon in South Vietnam, is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.
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