This Day in History: Last US withdrawal from Vietnam

On March 29, 1973, under the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords signed two months earlier, the last U.S. troops depart South Vietnam, ending nearly 10 years of US military presence in that country. The US Military Assistance Command Vietnam headquarters being decommissioned, only a Defense Attache Office and a few Marine guards at the Saigon American Embassy remained, although roughly 8,500 US civilians stayed on as technical advisers to the South Vietnamese.

US President John F. Kennedy had sent the first large force of US military personnel to Vietnam in 1961, after two decades of indirect military aid, to bolster the ineffectual autocratic regime of South Vietnam against the communist North. Three years later, with the South Vietnamese government crumbling, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered limited bombing raids on North Vietnam, and Congress authorized the use of US troops. By 1965, North Vietnamese offensives left President Johnson with two choices: escalate U.S. involvement or withdraw. Johnson ordered the former, and troop levels soon jumped to more than 300,000 as US air forces commenced the largest bombing campaign in history.

During the next few years, the extended length of the war, the high number of casualties, and the exposure of US involvement in war crimes, such as the massacre at My Lai, helped turn many in the United States against the Vietnam War. The communists’ Tet Offensive of 1968 crushed US hopes of an imminent end to the conflict and galvanized US opposition to the war. In response, Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection, citing what he perceived to be his responsibility in creating a perilous national division over Vietnam. He also authorized the beginning of peace talks.

Richard Nixon, the new U.S. president, began US troop withdrawal and “Vietnamization” of the war effort that year, but he intensified bombing. Large US troop withdrawals continued in the early 1970s as President Nixon expanded air and ground operations into Cambodia and Laos in attempts to block enemy supply routes along Vietnam’s borders.

Finally, in January 1973, representatives of the United States, North and South Vietnam, and the Vietcong signed a peace agreement in Paris, ending the direct US military involvement in the Vietnam War. Its key provisions included a cease-fire throughout Vietnam, the withdrawal of US forces, the release of prisoners of war, and the reunification of North and South Vietnam through peaceful means.