During the chaotic final days before the fall of Saigon, President Ford ordered the evacuation of Vietnamese orphans — a controversial plan that would be known as Operation Babylift. The mission began April 3, 1975. The first flight’s plane malfunctioned, leading to a crash landing that killed 78 children and 50 adults. More than 170 survived.
In all, more than 3,300 children were evacuated to the U.S. Here, crewmen of the amphibious cargo ship Durham take Vietnamese refugees from a small craft in the South China Sea. (National Archives/Navy)
Navy Hospital Corpsman D.R. Howe treats the wounds of Pfc. D.A. Crum, with H Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, during Operation Hue City on Feb. 6, 1968. U.S. and South Vietnam forces lost hundreds of troops and inflicted thousands of casualties on the North Vietnamese in a house-to-house battle lasting more than a month. One lessons-learned report on the fighting ended with this warning: “Based upon our experiences during Operation Hue City, expect the unexpected, expect chaos, and plan for all possibilities.” (National Archives/Office of the Secretary of Defense)
The parents of Marine Cpl. Russell Keck sent long letters to President Lyndon Johnson expressing anger and grief at losing their son. His draft reply, with layers of revised and rejected phrases, shows his struggle to respond. (National Archives/LBJ Library)
President Kennedy addresses a news conference in March 1961, about two months after his inauguration. When Kennedy took office, the Communist-backed Pathet Lao insurgents were about to take over Laos. In 1962, the Geneva Conference agreed to a declaration on the neutrality of Laos under a coalition government, but the Indochinese Communist Party used land it seized in Laos to build part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail would become a major conduit for Communist supplies and support, ensuring that Laos would remain a battlefront throughout the war. (National Archives/JFK Presidential Library and Museum)
Students run from gunfire that would kill four of their classmates at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970. President Nixon’s Commission on Campus Unrest concluded “the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable.” A federal grand jury indicted eight National Guardsmen but found they were not subject to criminal prosecution because they acted in self-defense. (National Archives/Kent State investigation/Justice Department)
Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam, began in 1965. Through 1968, U.S. bombers dropped 643,000 tons of bombs. The weapons killed approximately 52,000 Vietnamese civilians. Here, flying alongside a B-66 Destroyer, Air Force F-105 Thunderchief pilots bomb a military target through low clouds over the southern panhandle of North Vietnam. (National Archives/U.S. Information Agency)
Marines (and their gear) arrive near Da Nang Air Base on March 8, 1965, some of the 3,500 Marines who would join the military advisers already in country as the first ground combat troops. By the end of 1965, total U.S. military strength in South Vietnam had reached 185,000 personnel, according to an official Army history. (National Archives/Office of the Secretary of Defense)
American servicemen, all former prisoners of war, cheer as their plane takes off for home from an airfield near Hanoi on Feb. 12, 1973. In all, 591 POWs were released after the Paris Peace Agreement was signed. (National Archives/Marine Corps)
A 1965 policy paper titled “Aggression from the North” described the justification for America’s intervention in Vietnam. It portrayed the war as an invasion by the North Vietnamese with Moscow pulling the strings. Critics insisted it was a civil war instigated by independent actors in the south. (National Archives/U.S. Information Agency)
The Johnson administration began to question its strategy in Vietnam after a series of surprisingly fierce and well-coordinated attacks by Communist troops during the Tet Offensive, which launched in late January 1968. Here, Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara react during a Feb. 7, 1968, cabinet meeting. (National Archives/LBJ Library)
