Total military dead: 333,620 (1960–1974) – 392,364 (total) Total military wounded: ≈1,340,000+[11] (excluding FARK and FANK) Total military captured: ≈1,000,000+
Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, the US Congress passed a resolution that gave President Lyndon B. Johnson authority to increase military presence, without a declaration of war. Johnson ordered deployment of combat units and dramatically increased American troops to 184,000.[58] US and South Vietnamese forces relied on air supremacy and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations. The US conducted a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam[29]: 371–374 [59] and built up its forces, despite little progress. In 1968, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive; a tactical defeat, but a strategic victory, as it caused US domestic support to fade.[29]: 481 In 1969, North Vietnam declared the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam. The 1970 deposing of Cambodia's monarch, resulted in a PAVN invasion of the country, and then a US-ARVN counter-invasion, escalating Cambodia's Civil War. After Richard Nixon's inauguration in 1969, a policy of "Vietnamization" began, which saw the conflict fought by an expanded ARVN, while US forces withdrew due to domestic opposition. US ground forces had mostly withdrawn by 1972, the 1973 Paris Peace Accords saw all US forces withdrawn[60]: 457 and were broken almost immediately: fighting continued for two years. Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, while the 1975 spring offensive saw the Fall of Saigon to the PAVN, marking the end of the war. North and South Vietnam were reunified on 2 July the following year.
The war exacted enormous human cost: estimates of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 970,000 to 3 million. Some 275,000–310,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 US service members died.[A 7] Its end would precipitate the Vietnamese boat people and the larger Indochina refugee crisis, which saw millions leave Indochina, an estimated 250,000 perished at sea.[61][62] The Khmer Rouge carried out the Cambodian genocide, while conflict between them and the unified Vietnam escalated into the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. In response, China invaded Vietnam, with border conflicts lasting until 1991. Within the US, the war gave rise to Vietnam syndrome, a public aversion to American overseas military involvement,[63] which, with the Watergate scandal, contributed to the crisis of confidence that affected America throughout the 1970s.[64] The US destroyed 20% of South Vietnam's jungle and 20–50% of the mangrove forests, by spraying over 20 million U.S. gallons (75 million liters) of toxic herbicides;[65][60]: 144–145 [66] a notable example of ecocide.[67]
^Blackburn, Robert M. (1994). Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson's "More Flage": The Hiring of Korean, Filipino, and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War. McFarland. ISBN0-89950-931-2.
^ abMoyar, Mark. "Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965–1968." Encounter Books, December 2022. Chapter 17 index: "Communists provided further corroboration of the proximity of their casualty figures to American figures in a postwar disclosure of total losses from 1960 to 1975. During that period, they stated, they lost 849,018 killed plus approximately 232,000 missing and 463,000 wounded. Casualties fluctuated considerably from year to year, but a degree of accuracy can be inferred from the fact that 500,000 was 59 percent of the 849,018 total and that 59 percent of the war's days had passed by the time of Fallaci's conversation with Giap. The killed in action figure comes from "Special Subject 4: The Work of Locating and Recovering the Remains of Martyrs From Now Until 2020 And Later Years," downloaded from the Vietnamese government website datafile on 1 December 2017. The above figures on missing and wounded were calculated using Hanoi's declared casualty ratios for the period of 1945 to 1979, during which time the Communists incurred 1.1 million killed, 300,000 missing, and 600,000 wounded. Ho Khang, ed, Lich Su Khang Chien Chong My, Cuu Nuoc 1954–1975, Tap VIII: Toan Thang (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Chinh Tri Quoc Gia, 2008), 463."
^ abcdHastings, Max (2018). Vietnam an epic tragedy, 1945–1975. Harper Collins. ISBN978-0-06-240567-8.
^James F. Dunnigan; Albert A. Nofi (2000). Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War: Military Information You're Not Supposed to Know. Macmillan. ISBN978-0-312-25282-3.
^Clarke, Jeffrey J. (1988). United States Army in Vietnam: Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965–1973. Center of Military History, United States Army. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam suffered 254,256 recorded combat deaths between 1960 and 1974, with the highest number of recorded deaths being in 1972, with 39,587 combat deaths
^Aaron Ulrich (editor); Edward FeuerHerd (producer and director) (2005, 2006). Heart of Darkness: The Vietnam War Chronicles 1945–1975(Box set, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Dolby, Vision Software) (Documentary). Koch Vision. Event occurs at 321 minutes. ISBN1-4172-2920-9. Archived from the original on 29 March 2019. Retrieved 11 May 2017.
^Kueter, Dale (2007). Vietnam Sons: For Some, the War Never Ended. AuthorHouse. ISBN978-1-4259-6931-8.
^T. Lomperis, From People's War to People's Rule (1996)
^Heuveline, Patrick (2001). "The Demographic Analysis of Mortality Crises: The Case of Cambodia, 1970–1979". Forced Migration and Mortality. National Academies Press. pp. 102–104, 120, 124. ISBN978-0-309-07334-9. As best as can now be estimated, over two million Cambodians died during the 1970s because of the political events of the decade, the vast majority of them during the mere four years of the 'Khmer Rouge' regime.... Subsequent reevaluations of the demographic data situated the death toll for the [civil war] in the order of 300,000 or less.
^Sliwinski, Marek (1995). Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique [The Khmer Rouge genocide: A demographic analysis]. L'Harmattan. pp. 42–43, 48. ISBN978-2-7384-3525-5.
^Li, Xiaobing (2010). Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. University Press of Kentucky. p. 85. ISBN978-0-8131-7386-3.