The Vietnam War could have been called a comedy of errors if the consequences weren’t so deadly and tragic. In 1951, while war was raging in Korea, the United States began signing defense pacts with nations in the Pacific, intending to create alliances that would contain the spread of Communism. As the Korean War was winding down, America joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, pledging to defend several nations in the region from Communist aggression. One of those nations was South Vietnam.

John F. Kennedy’s administration tried to prop up the South Vietnamese with training and assistance, but the South Vietnamese military was feeble. A month before his death, Kennedy signed a presidential directive withdrawing 1,000 American personnel, but shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson reversed course, instead opting to expand American assistance to South Vietnam.

The post-analysis of war is a complicated and process that benefits from hindsight, and the involvement of the United States in Vietnam over about a decade was no exception. Never formally declared as a “war,” the Vietnam War was not fought in clean lines or with clear missions. Viewers of the evening news listening to the “box score” of killed and wounded each night had at best a hazy notion of what was happening a world away in Southeast Asia. If anything, their leaders were both attentive to reelection and on a certain level were themselves unsure of what was truly taking place. A military draft that sent over 50,000 American soldiers to their deaths was triggered by a resolution sought by President Lyndon B. Johnson in a decision to contain communism in a distant Asian land.

Over the next few years, the American military commitment to South Vietnam grew dramatically, and the war effort became both deeper and more complex. The strategy included parallel efforts to strengthen the economic and political foundations of the South Vietnamese regime, to root out the Viet Cong (VC) guerrilla insurgency in the south, combat the more conventional North Vietnamese Army (NVA) near the Demilitarized Zone between north and south, and bomb military and industrial targets in North Vietnam itself. In public, American military officials and members of the Johnson administration stressed their tactical successes and offered rosy predictions.

Operation Speedy Express was a highly controversial military operation carried out by the U.S. Army supported by the Army of South Vietnam (ARVN) as well as regional and popular forces during the Vietnam War. It lasted from December 1968 until May 1969 and took place in the Mekong Delta's Kien Hoa and Vinh Binh provinces. The operation was a part of U.S. Army “pacification” efforts toward the Viet Cong, as American forces sought to interdict Viet Cong supply and communication lines from Cambodia and deny them the use of operational bases. Formally, the operation involved 8,000 U.S. soldiers and resulted in 242 American lives lost compared to 10,899 Viet Cong and People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) killed, according to Department of Defense records. Operation Speedy Express was considered successful by U.S. standards, as determined by the primary metric of body counts.

However, while the number of Vietnamese dead, including civilians, is unknown, it is assumed to surpass 5,000, and the high number of casualties was attributed to the indiscriminate use of firepower, which included air and artillery strikes in densely populated areas. The controversy surrounding Operation Speedy Express led to an investigation by the U.S. Army and the House Armed Services Committee. The Army was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing, but resistance to U.S.