The War America Lost.

• Author: PRICE, SEAN
• Position: Vietnamese War - Brief Article

Twenty-five years ago this week, the long, bloody Vietnam conflict ended. But its lessons endure.

Desperate men and women clung to the helicopter until the instant of takeoff, begging to climb aboard. But there wasn't room. The Americans got away, but these South Vietnamese civilians were left to the mercy of the North Vietnamese enemy closing in.

This scene in Saigon, South Vietnam, embarrassed many Americans back home when they saw it on their TV screens 25 years ago on April 29, 1975. It showed the world that the Vietnam War was over at last--and America's side was the loser.

In Vietnam, the U.S. had faced a determined enemy in confusing jungle warfare 10,000 miles away. Some 58,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed. And millions of Americans had come to doubt that stopping Communism so far away was worth so much blood.

In 1954, when Vietnam was a French colony, revolutionaries led by Ho Chi Minh had forced the French to leave. Ho was a Communist--one who favored a state-run economy to achieve equality. But his forces were motivated not just by Communism, but by fierce national pride.

An international conference had divided Vietnam into the Communist North and the non-Communist South, but when the South backed out of a promise to reunite the country, North Vietnam trained South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters--the Viet Cong--to destroy South Vietnam from within.

U.S. policy makers, fighting the Cold War with the Communist Soviet Union, feared that if South Vietnam fell into Communist hands, other Asian countries would fall too --like dominoes. So in the late 1950s the U.S. began sending money, arms, and military advisers to help South Vietnam. Over time, the aid grew.

In August 1964, after an alleged North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress for the power to take "all necessary steps" to defend South Vietnam. The facts are murky, and whether there ever was an attack is still disputed, but Congress gave Johnson the power he sought. In March 1965, the first U.S. combat troops went to Vietnam.

As The New York Times reported, Johnson, a Democrat, told the nation:

Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own path to change. This is the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania [in the American Revolution].

At first, Johnson's policy enjoyed strong public support. But the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam kept...