On the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War: Honor the dead and fight for the living
read more…: On the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War: Honor the dead and fight for the livingI graduated from Memorial High in 1965. Many of my classmates, facing the draft anyway, enrolled in the Armed Forces. Most of us had never heard of Vietnam, but that December, just when many of my classmates reported to bootcamp, President Johnson committed 195,000 soldiers to Vietnam. In 1969, the year I graduated from college, around 543,400 American men and women were serving there. By April 30, 1975, 2,709,918 Americans had served in uniform there; 58,148 died in the conflict. Another 100,000 were completely or badly disabled.