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VVAW activists went on to initiate veteran "rap groups" and help gain official recognition of the health ramifications of exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange.
Knowing American intervention would be limited, the communists avoided open confrontation and quickly returned to reestablish control in eastern Cambodia after American withdrawal.
Although the agreement initiated a cease-fire that began the next day, the United States did not withdraw all of its troops until April 30, 1975, when the South Vietnamese surrendered to North Vietnam and the city of Saigon fell to the communists.
By 1969, as U.S. public opinion went increasingly against the war, U.S. policy changed to Vietnamization, and President Richard Nixon began to withdraw U.S. troops.
The Ho Chi Minh Campaign, an April 1975 attack on Saigon, gave the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, North Vietnam) the decisive victory it had fought so long to achieve.
The conventional wisdom that prevailed in the years immediately following the fall of Saigon--and which dominates dialogue in many circles today--was that the Vietnam War was not only unnecessary, it also was unwinnable.
Part of the tragedy was that those U.S. policymakers who dogged the war, sent the poor and young into battle, never took the time to understand what it was all about. Five minutes of Vietnamese history could have taught lessons which, if learned, could have saved millions of lives.
Before the Vietnam War, psychiatric consensus held that soldiers who recovered from an episode of mental breakdown during combat would suffer no adverse long-term consequences.
Vietnam veterans who experience PTSD have a feeling of helplessness, worthlessness, dejection, anger, depression, insomnia, and a tendency to react to tense situations by using survival tactics.
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President Richard M. Nixon announces benefits for returning veterans and touts programs designed to reintegrate Vietnam veterans into society.
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Staff Sergeant T.L. Moran interrogates a member of the Vietcong, a guerrilla-warfare organization dedicated to overthrowing the American-supported government of South Vietnam.
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Kissinger also notes some of the U.S. government's significant failures, including unrealistic military predictions, inconsistent political, economic and military policies and a failure to recognize "the nature of the conflict."