The Vietnam War
A superpower is fought to a standstill by a peasant army and its own public.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 20 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
American involvement escalates from advisers to over half a million troops by 1968, with sustained bombing exceeding the tonnage dropped in the Second World War. Vietnamese deaths are estimated between one and three million; American at 58,000. Televised coverage and the draft produce mass domestic opposition. The war ends in 1975 with Saigon's fall, and it durably changes how democracies calculate the cost of long foreign wars.