A Campus and a War: Michigan State University and Vietnam Exhibit: Aftermath

By 1972, most US military forces had withdrawn from Vietnam. In January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam, the Provisional Revolutionary Government and the United States, formally marking the end of US involvement in the conflict. Nonetheless, fighting resumed almost immediately after the signing of the accords. In early 1975, the People’s Army of Vietnam began an offensive into South Vietnam, culminating in the April 30th Fall of Saigon/Day of Liberation, which led to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and ultimately the unification of the country as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The Vietnam War’s aftermath continued long after the fighting had ended. The Vietnamese communist victory became an inspiration for many movements involved in asymmetrical armed conflicts. In the United States, defeat led to far-reaching political debates about the utility and morality of American military interventions in Latin America during the 1980s, and more recently during the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Anti-war activism during the Vietnam War became a model for later protest movements against American involvement in the Middle East in recent decades. In Vietnam, economic hardship and authoritarian politics led millions of people to flee the country and seek asylum. Their most common destination was the United States, where over one million Vietnamese settled between 1975 and the early 1990s, including Vietnamese-American communities in Michigan that are now fifty years old. As US-Vietnamese relations have thawed since the 1990s, some Vietnamese Americans have also reconnected with their relatives and places of origin in Vietnam.