Action Vietnam 1965 US Army; The Big Picture TV-654 (Patreon)

more at http://quickfound.net/

'This film begins with a scene from December 1964 in which President Lyndon Johnson awarded Captain Roger Donlon the Medal of Honor for his heroism in Vietnam. The documentary then goes on to describe the difficulties of fighting in Vietnam; how it was a "twilight war fought in shadow and stealth."'

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Việt Nam), also known as the Second Indochina War, and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America (Vietnamese: Kháng chiến chống Mỹ) or simply the American War, was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975...

The conflict emerged from the First Indochina War against the communist-led Viet Minh. Most of the funding for the French war effort was provided by the U.S After the French quit Indochina in 1954, the US assumed financial and military support for the South Vietnamese state. The Việt Cộng, also known as Front national de libération du Sud-Viêt Nam or NLF (the National Liberation Front), a South Vietnamese common front under the direction of North Vietnam, initiated a guerrilla war in the south. North Vietnam had also entered Laos in the mid-1950s in support of insurgents, setting up the Ho Chi Minh trail to supply and reinforce the Việt Cộng and increased in 1960. U.S. involvement escalated under President John F. Kennedy through the MAAG program from just under a thousand in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963. By 1963, the North Vietnamese had sent 40,000 soldiers to fight in South Vietnam. Supplies were supported by the People's Republic of China, in both arms and logistics personnel.

By 1964, there were 23,000 US advisors in South Vietnam during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. In response, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authorization to increase U.S. military presence, deploying ground combat units for the first time and increasing troop levels to 184,000... U.S. and South Vietnam forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes. The U.S. also conducted a large-scale strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam and Laos. The Tet Offensive of 1968 showed the lack of progress... The deposition of the monarch Norodom Sihanouk by the Cambodian National Assembly resulted in a PAVN invasion of the country at the request of the Khmer Rouge, escalating the Cambodian Civil War and resulting in a U.S.-RVN counterinvasion.

After 1968, Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization", saw the conflict fought by an expanded ARVN with US forces sidelined and increasingly demoralized by domestic opposition and reduced recruitment. U.S. ground forces withdrew by late 1971, and U.S. involvement became limited to air and artillery support plus military advice. The ARVN, with U.S. air support stopped the largest and first mechanized PAVN offensive to date during the Easter Offensive of 1972, resulting in mutually heavy casualties but failed to recapture all territory, leaving its military situation difficult. The Paris Peace Accords saw all US forces withdrawn and intervention prohibited by the US Congress on 15 August 1973 as a result of the Case–Church Amendment. The Peace Accords were broken almost immediately, and fighting continued for two years following the US withdrawal, with 1972 to 1974 seeing heavy fighting and constituting the war's bloodiest years for the ARVN. The 1975 Spring Offensive culminated in the capture of Saigon by the NVA in April 1975; this marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year.

The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 to 3.8 million. Some 275,000–310,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, and a further 1,626 remain missing in action...