We mark 50 years since the end of the U.S. war on Vietnam with the acclaimed Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops took control of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon as video of U.S. personnel being airlifted out of the city were broadcast around the world. Some 3 million Vietnamese people were killed in the U.S. war, along with about 58,000 U.S. soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of Lao, Hmong and Cambodians also died, and the impact of the war is still being felt in Vietnam and the region.
Nguyen says while the Vietnam War was deeply divisive in the United States during the 1960s and '70s, American interference in Southeast Asia goes back to President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, when he rejected Vietnamese demands for independence from France. "And from that mistake, we've had a series of mistakes over the past century, mostly revolving around the fact that the United States did not recognize Vietnamese self-determination," says Nguyen.
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