This film examines Vietnam War events between Kennedy's assassination and Nixon's presidential election. Over half a million troops were deployed, but Ho Chi Minh's strategy was to outlast the American occupation. After early U.S. domination through Operation Thunder, three years of B52 raids, and napalm and Agent Orange drops, the Viet Cong Tet Offensive turned the tide in 1968. Television coverage of the surprise attack and nightly combat footage...

Experience America's visual heritage in this historical recording provided by the National Archives of the United States. This U.S. Navy documentary looks at the sailors operating on the rivers and in the skies above Vietnam. This historical recording may contain variations in audio and video quality based on the limitations of the original source material.

This classic episode of the U.S. Army's The Big Picture series documents the buildup to the Vietnam War, from the withdrawal of French troops to the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the intense fighting our troops engaged in to combat Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong. It presents the reasons for each stage of escalating U.S. involvement, presenting them as reluctant responses to North Vietnamese aggression and intransigence, and makes moral and strategic...

This film reviews the cultural and religious history of Vietnam, along with the development of, and U.S. involvement in, the Vietnam War. Produced for the U.S. government in 1971 by John Ford, the highly controversial film supporting the war in Vietnam was never officially released. Note: The war footage includes combat scenes, civilian massacres, anti-war protest and mistreatment of Prisoners of War (POWs). The film concludes with a quick succession...

This episode of the U.S. Army's The Big Picture television series takes viewers to remote and hazardous locales in South Vietnam to show them what the United States Army, Air Force, and Navy are doing to contain the spread of Communism. How the military operations of our Special Force units are living, operating, and helping the Vietnamese is shown in this video from the National Archives and Records Administration as motion picture star James Arness...

From 1965 to 1968, the United States conducted a series of bombing runs, dubbed Operation Rolling Thunder, on North Vietnamese targets. The strikes were intended to both demonstrate the U.S. resolve to win the Vietnam War and to force North Vietnam into peace talks. The campaign, which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later cited as ultimately unsuccessful, contributed to a decline in domestic support for the war and Lyndon B. Johnson's popularity....

President Johnson awards first Medal of Honor from the Vietnam War.

After the end of the Vietnam War, many former servicemen joined organizations that argued for increased services for veterans. Several veterans service organizations called for additional health services for soldiers who had been exposed to Agent Orange, an extremely flammable toxic chemical, during the war.

The national Vietnam War Memorial was dedicated in 1982. The design, completed by architecture student Maya Lin, featured a long black marble wall that listed the names of every U.S. solider who died in the war.

During the 1980s, many veterans of the Vietnam War began demanding that the government offer increased health care and other services to those who were exposed to Agent Orange during the war. Agent Orange was a toxic chemical compound that included materials known to cause cancer, and it was sprayed by U.S. forces over jungles in Vietnam in an attempt to kill foliage that provided cover to North Vietnamese troops. The Veterans Administration at the...