Last US Troops Leave Vietnam: A War Finally Ends

The last American combat troops walked onto transport planes in Saigon on March 29, 1973, ending direct U.S. military involvement in a war that had killed 58,220 Americans, an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians, and more than 1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers. The withdrawal fulfilled the terms of the Paris Peace Accords, signed two months earlier, which both sides understood would not hold. The United States had been fighting in Vietnam in some capacity since 1955, when military advisors arrived to support the South Vietnamese government. Direct combat involvement escalated dramatically under Lyndon Johnson, who committed ground troops in 1965 after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. At its peak in 1968, more than 536,000 American soldiers were deployed. The Tet Offensive of January 1968, though a military defeat for the Viet Cong, shattered American public confidence that the war was winnable. Richard Nixon campaigned on a promise to end the war and implemented "Vietnamization," gradually transferring combat responsibility to South Vietnamese forces while withdrawing American troops. The strategy was paired with devastating escalations, including the secret bombing of Cambodia and the mining of Haiphong harbor. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, which established a ceasefire and prisoner exchange but left North Vietnamese forces in place throughout the South. Nixon quietly left behind 8,500 American "advisors" and a promise of military support that Congress subsequently revoked. North Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion in early 1975, and Saigon fell on April 30. The last Americans were evacuated by helicopter from the embassy roof, an image that became the defining symbol of the war's end. Vietnam was reunified under communist rule, and the United States spent the next generation debating what the war had meant and whether it could have been won.