. . . in 1973 the shooting stopped in Vietnam.  The war was over after some 55,000 young Americans died for nothing, with hundreds of thousands maimed for life, physically and mentally. Who knows how many hundreds of thousands, or millions, of Vietnamese were killed or maimed.  We are still paying the costs of the Vietnam War with the lifelong VA hospital bills for all of these people, and with the decades-long suffering of all these wounded veterans. But at least we were never all forced to speak Vietnamese or become communists (the universities have done the latter voluntarily anyway).