Fifty years ago today, the last American servicemen and diplomats evacuated South Vietnam as North Vietnamese military units closed in on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. Operation Frequent Wind, as it was called, airlifted more than 7,000 people out of Saigon between April 29 and 30, 1975.

The video and images of those days — with helicopters pushed overboard U.S. vessels to make way for other aircraft teeming with evacuees, while North Vietnamese forces overran the South Vietnamese presidential palace and U.S. Embassy — left an indelible mark on the memory of many who had already come to view Vietnam as a futile and wasteful war. As its story drifts further into a past that fewer and fewer Americans know or remember, we would do well to consider how that fateful conflict affected our military and society in ways still felt today.

A Responsibility of the Few

As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and University of Pennsylvania professor William A. McDougall notes in his new collection of essays Gems of American History, about 40 percent of draft-age men served in the military during the Vietnam era (1965-1975), but only 10 percent of draft-age men served in Vietnam, and only about 1 percent of all draft-age men saw serious combat there. Since then, the trend of American wars disconnected from the electorate has only intensified. Less than one percent of the U.S. population served in the twenty-year Global War on Terror. Half of Americans don’t even know someone who served in Iraq.

Many Vietnam veterans were only drafted to fight in a war increasingly unpopular with the American electorate, but suffered the added indignity of being maligned by those who dodged the draft or were shielded by their status as students. Though many journalists and historians now claim such stories are either highly embellished or never happened, McDougall recounts that outside a military base in Oakland, California, while preparing for his unit’s departure to Asia, protestors from Berkeley gathered and accused the soldiers of being “baby-killers.” Soldiers who returned were met with scorn and derision, friends and family embarrassed by their loved ones’ service. It was not until 1982 when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was inaugurated that the nation held a parade to offer token appreciation for war service.

Thankfully, we do much better in our treatment of GWOT veterans, given the expected social norm of thanking them for their service, honoring them at public events, and supporting veteran-owned businesses and organizations. That said, service in the armed forces is now a niche category in public life — a 2023 poll found that a majority of American adults would not be willing to serve in the military were the United States to enter into a major war. The share of the U.S. population with military experience has declined from about 18 percent in 1980 to about 6 percent in 2022, and the share of members of both houses of Congress with military experience has dropped from a high of about 75 percent in 1973 to less than 18 percent today. Military service has become more of a family business than a burden shared across society, and is increasingly regional, with the South providing a disproportionate number of recruits.

A Military Demoralized by Defeat

The administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson limited Vietnam tours of duty to one year (six months for officers), which meant that there was little motivation for soldiers to fight fiercely and win. “That is the way to motivate soldiers to take no risks, invest no emotional capital in their country’s cause, and indeed resent the fact that they had to be there a single day,” argues McDougall. As soon as soldiers gained combat experience, they were sent home and replaced by green, untested rookies. Soldiers approaching their departure date in turn became more risk-averse. That same strategy — also employed during recent U.S. military efforts in which deployments typically lasted somewhere between seven to fifteen months — could not help but persuade many soldiers they were engaged in a meaningless “forever war.”

The most prized commodity for many American G.I.’s was marijuana. “What really troubled me was the realization that a significant portion of the U.S. military in Vietnam was habitually stoned.” A 1971 report by the Department of Defense found that half of the soldiers in Vietnam had smoked marijuana, while about a third had used LSD, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, cocaine, or heroin.

Many of these veterans, writes McDougall, were never discharged from their addiction, and my father, as a U.S. Army draftee and Army medic, spent part of his eight years in active duty and the reserves working with drug addict veterans. Today, about one in ten veterans are diagnosed with a substance abuse problem, which is a little higher than the national average; about seven percent of veterans have struggled with PTSD (also higher than the rate among American civilians).

This demoralization and sense of defeat undoubtedly contributed to the U.S. Army failing to reach its recruitment goals in 2022 and 2023 by nearly 25 percent (three of America’s four major military services failed to recruit enough servicemembers in 2023). Though the military has regained some of that ground in the last 24 months, an increasing disenchantment and disinterest in military service from younger generations presents an enduring problem for recruiters. Add to that the sobering fact that three-quarters of Americans aged 17 to 25 are ineligible for service because of physical and mental health issues, high school dropout rates, criminal records, and substance abuse, and it’s obvious we have a crisis.

An Altruism That Breeds Cynicism

When the United States first entered Vietnam to support the South Vietnamese, its motives seemed noble, and it held significant public support. America was helping a democratic government resist a neighboring totalitarian regime; it was pushing back against the spread of communism across the globe. We were going to spread principles of liberty, self-government, and capitalism to the developing world.

“If anything, its motives were shockingly altruistic, a product of hubris but also of misguided ideals,” writes McDougall. But in time most Americans came to believe the South Vietnamese government was inept and corrupt, and that our military was compromised by such disasters as the My Lai massacre, Agent Orange defoliation efforts, and the dropping of three times as many bombs on Vietnam as Allied Forces used against Nazi Germany in World War II. This did nothing but erode trust in U.S. institutions.

The comparison to more recent U.S. military efforts is easily identifiable. Our motives after 9-11 were similarly altruistic, seeking to free and empower millions who suffered under the brutality of oppressive regimes. Yet similar to our presence in Vietnam, as the years dragged on, it became increasingly difficult to interpret what “mission accomplished” looked like, despite the claims of senior military leaders claiming the enemy was almost defeated.

Mission failure, however, was viscerally felt in August 2021 when American civilians and troops flooded Kabul International Airport as part of evacuation efforts in the face of the Taliban’s resurgence, imagery that was startlingly similar to what Americans witnessed on their television sets in 1975. As we mark the half-centennial of that terrible day, it’s worth asking: what lessons have we learned?