April, 1975. During the chaotic final days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War, as the North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon, South Vietnamese resistance crumbled.

Most American presidents have learned the wrong lessons from the American War in Vietnam, as it is called there. The most recent presidential misstep is Donald Trump’s attempt to prevent U.S ...

It was heavy with anti-military, anti-war sentiment, evoking the zeitgeist of a Vietnam-exhausted populace. “War isn’t Hell,” Hawkeye Pierce, played by Alan Alda, says in a typical line.