Vietnam the war that's still with us: more than three decades after the last soldiers came home, the longest war in American history still casts a long shadow.

• Author: Edidin, Peter
• Position: TIMES PAST

BACKGROUND

Thirty years after the Last American soldier Left Vietnam, the echoes of that war stilt reverberate in the U.S. During the 2004 presidential election, President Bush and Senator John Kerry had to explain their actions during the war. And today many are asking whether Iraq is becoming "another Vietnam."

Is the U.S. headed for "another Vietnam" in Iraq? It s a question posed often in the media, and it's just one example of the hold that the Vietnam War still exerts on the U.S. more than 30 years after it ended.

The longest war in American history, Vietnam divided the nation like nothing since the Civil War. More than 58,000 American soldiers died and more than 300,000 were wounded in the war, which split families, turned the old against the young, and drove a wedge of mistrust between many Americans and their leaders.

"Vietnam is still with us," according to Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard M. Nixon's Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in the late 1960s and early '70s. "It has created doubts about American judgment, about American credibility, about American power--not only at home, but throughout the world."

Unlike most wars, the war in Vietnam didn't begin with an "opening shot." Instead, the U.S. became involved gradually, beginning in 1954, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent military advisers to train and arm the South Vietnamese Army in its fight against Communist North Vietnam. (Vietnam had been partitioned earlier that year into North and South after the French were defeated in their effort to hold on to their century-old colonies in Indochina.)

Ho Chi Minh, the Communist and nationalist leader of the Vietminh independence movement, whose forces had defeated the French, wanted to turn all of Vietnam into a Communist state.

THE COLD WAR

That raised alarms in Washington at a time when the Cold War between the U.S., the Soviet Union, and their allies was heating up in Asia: In 1949, Communists led by Mao Zedong had taken power in China. A year later, the Korean War began when Communist North Korea, with Soviet and Chinese support, invaded South Korea. Three years and nearly 37,000 American lives later, that war ended in a stalemate.

American officials feared that the rest of Asia could also fall. "You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one," Eisenhower said in 1954, "and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly." This "domino theory" was essentially the foundation of American policy in Vietnam for the next two decades.

When President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he, too, saw Vietnam as a place to demonstrate America's anti-Communist resolve. "Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place," he said in a speech that year.

By the time Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, the number of U.S. military advisers in Vietnam had risen from under 700 to roughly 16,000, and fighting between South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese troops, aided by Communist guerrillas in the South known as the...