There were over 2 million Americans who served in Vietnam, and only 500,000 of those soldiers actually saw the battlefront. There were 47,244 deaths during the war, of which 8,000 were airmen, and then there were 10,446 non-combat related deaths. 153,329 soldiers were seriously injured, including 10,000 amputees. And finally there were over 2400 American POWs and missing persons in 1973. From a military perspective, I must say that the United States lost the Vietnam War with the fall of the South Vietnamese government in 1975. The opposition in The United States had become soured on the investigation of the Winter Soldier (Mai Lai) and the prosecution of the war after the loss of Saigon was unsustainable without resort to the nuclear option. Now, debating whether America was “at war” with a country it didn't recognize, or whether it was there purely in an advisory/assistant capacity to a legitimate government is really just semantics. It was very clear that the country was at war, and the war was lost because its mission was to follow the Truman doctrine of limiting the spread of communism in Asia, and that could not be