The Vietnam War was not only America's longest conflict but, excluding the Civil War, its most divisive. Beginning in the aftermath of World War II and lasting into the 1970s, U.S. involvement in Vietnam, indeed throughout Southeast Asia, grew progressively from an advisory effort into a major war. Eventually, over fifty thousand Americans and millions of Asians were killed, and the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars in a failed effort to prevent a victory by Nationalist-Communist forces in Vietnam. Domestically, the war opened deep civil wounds as millions of Americans opposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam and created one of the largest mass protest movements in American history. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, as veterans and draft resisters from the Vietnam era took public roles and large numbers of immigrants from Southeast Asia came to reside in the United States, the legacy of the war still remained strong. The United States initially became involved…