The American ordeal of the Vietnam war told through the eyes of those marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors who experienced this time of escalation and innocence.

“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

A legion of young men answered President Kennedy’s 1961 exhortation by enlisting in the military, eager to do whatever their nation asked of them. Most had never heard of the small, turmoil-ridden country called South Vietnam that would change their lives forever.

Four years later as 1965 dawned on the rice paddies, mountains, and jungles of Southeast Asia, 23,300 Americans found themselves in this unfamiliar land as “advisors” to the South Vietnamese military. By the end of that year, their numbers had grown to over 184,000, with many more on the way. Their role in the conflict had also shifted, from advisors to direct combatants.

While the US military’s sheer presence in Vietnam had increased by a factor of nearly eight, the butcher’s bill increased by a factor of over thirty, with 545 Americans dying in the month of November alone compared to only eighteen just ten months before. How did this massive and often chaotic increase in America’s participation in a distant war come about? Learn for yourself in Vietnam 1965 through the eyes of twenty combat veterans who served as the tip of the spear in a US engagement that would eventually engulf nearly three million servicemembers. Their costly education and experience in this pivotal year shaped America’s efforts in the brutal Vietnam War for the next seven.