Remembering Vietnam: 10 powerful images from the upcoming National Archives exhibit

By Military Times staff

Nov 2, 2017

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During the chaotic final days before the fall of Saigon, President Ford ordered the evacuation of Vietnamese orphans — a controversial plan that would be known as Operation Babylift. The mission began April 3, 1975. The first flight’s plane malfunctioned, leading to a crash landing that killed 78 children and 50 adults. More than 170 survived. In all, more than 3,300 children were evacuated to the U.S. Here, crewmen of the amphibious cargo ship Durham take Vietnamese refugees from a small craft in the South China Sea. (National Archives/Navy)

Navy Hospital Corpsman D.R. Howe treats the wounds of Pfc. D.A. Crum, with H Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, during Operation Hue City on Feb. 6, 1968. U.S. and South Vietnam forces lost hundreds of troops and inflicted thousands of casualties on the North Vietnamese in a house-to-house battle lasting more than a month. One lessons-learned report on the fighting ended with this warning: “Based upon our experiences during Operation Hue City, expect the unexpected, expect chaos, and plan for all possibilities.” (National Archives/Office of the Secretary of Defense)

President Kennedy addresses a news conference in March 1961, about two months after his inauguration. When Kennedy took office, the Communist-backed Pathet Lao insurgents were about to take over Laos. In 1962, the Geneva Conference agreed to a declaration on the neutrality of Laos under a coalition government, but the Indochinese Communist Party used land it seized in Laos to build part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail would become a major conduit for Communist supplies and support, ensuring that Laos would remain a battlefront throughout the war. (National Archives/JFK Presidential Library and Museum)

Students run from gunfire that would kill four of their classmates at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970. President Nixon’s Commission on Campus Unrest concluded “the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable.” A federal grand jury indicted eight National Guardsmen but found they were not subject to criminal prosecution because they acted in self-defense. (National Archives/Kent State investigation/Justice Department)

Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam, began in 1965. Through 1968, U.S. bombers dropped 643,000 tons of bombs. The weapons killed approximately 52,000 Vietnamese civilians. Here, flying alongside a B-66 Destroyer, Air Force F-105 Thunderchief pilots bomb a military target through low clouds over the southern panhandle of North Vietnam. (National Archives/U.S. Information Agency)

Military Times asked the National Archives officials behind “Remembering Vietnam,” an exhibit opening Nov. 10 in Washington, D.C., to share a selection of images highlighting the many aspects of the Vietnam War — on the battlefield, on the home front, and in the halls of power.

The exhibit, at the National Archives Museum’s Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery, runs through Jan. 6, 2019.

For more details, including a schedule for an attached traveling exhibit, visit www.archivesfoundation.org/vietnam. For more Veterans Month coverage from Military Times, head to www.militarytimes.com/vetsmonth.

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