S1, E3: Although it began in the 1960s, many of the most dramatic and controversial events of the war in Vietnam occurred in the 1970s. The incursion into Cambodia, the shooting death of four students at Kent State University, the My Lai massacre court martial, the Paris peace talks, the release of the Pentagon Papers, the “Christmas bombing,” the final peace agreement with the North Vietnamese and the release of hundreds of American P.O.W.s, all occurred in the first few years of the decade. But the trauma didn’t end with the withdrawal of American forces. The fall of Saigon and the rest of South Vietnam, graphically illustrated by unforgettable images of panicked evacuation, represents one of the low points of American history. This episode poignantly completes the story begun in The War in Vietnam episode in The Sixties.
