Legacies of the War

In January of 1973 the Paris Accords were signed and the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam. Two years later, North Vietnamese troops captured the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon to end the war. Once the war ended, the Communist leaders of North Vietnam reunited the two halves of the country to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The government then seized control of all farmland and business activities and placed new limitations on the rights of the Vietnamese people. These changes made life very hard in Vietnam, and millions of Vietnamese fled the country to look for a better way of life.

Some of the people who fled the country after North Vietnam's victory in 1975 had supported the South Vietnamese government or its American allies. They worried that the country's new leaders would consider them enemies and take revenge on them. Others left Vietnam because they held religious or political views that would make it difficult for them to live under Communist rule. These people worried that they would be persecuted (harassed or attacked because of their beliefs) by the new government. Finally, some people fled because they believed that Vietnam would suffer widespread poverty as it struggled to recover from the destruction of the war. In an excerpt from the book Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American Lives, a South Vietnamese businessman named Phuong Hoang recalled his decision to flee Vietnam after the Communist takeover in 1975.

In the United States, meanwhile, memories of the Vietnam conflict haunted the country for many years. Lawmakers, historians, and ordinary citizens all argued about the reasons for America's defeat and the reasons for the deep divisions that appeared in the country during the war. After a while, most Americans seemed to want to pretend that the war never took place. This attitude made America's Vietnam War veterans feel neglected and forgotten. But people's feelings finally began to change in the 1980s. Americans continued to disagree about U.S. actions and attitudes in Vietnam, but they showed a greater willingness to move on and look to the future together. Veterans, meanwhile, finally began to receive recognition for the sacrifices they made in service to their country.

An important part of the healing process was the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1982. Today, the memorial is the country's best known tribute to the American soldiers who fought and died in the Vietnam War. This monument—also known as "The Wall"—features the name of every American man and woman who died in the war. Thousands of people have left cards, letters, souvenirs, and other mementoes at the Wall over the years in memory of those whose names are etched there. In one such letter, published in Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a woman named Linda Phillips Palo mourns the deaths of three of her best friends in Vietnam.