January 27, 1973: The Paris Peace Accords end formal U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War.
Representatives from North and South Vietnam, the communist-aligned South Vietnamese provisional government, and the United States concluded peace negotiations at the end of January 1973 with the “Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam.” The path toward what would become these peace settlements had opened with hesitance and much discord five years, while American planes continued to rain tons of bombs over North Vietnamese infrastructure, industry, and civilian populations.
In 1968, polls revealed that the majority of Americans agreed, for the first time, that deploying troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. In 1968, negotiations in Paris stalled. And negotations continued to stall as President Nixon took office, and still continued to inch forward in infinitesimal steps when in early 1970 Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ of the North Vietnamese Communist Party commenced the secret meetings that produced the primary body of what would become the peace agreements. These were the talks for which both men would be awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize (Kissinger accepted and dedicated his controversial award to the never-ending “quest for peace;” Thọ declined his).
The Agreement declared on the day of signing, January 27, 1973, a ceasefire to be observed throughout South Vietnam and in the same hour, a decree that the United States would “stop all its military activities against the territory of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam by ground, air and naval forces.” Apart from -provisions regarding military ceasefires and bodies of authority responsible for their supervision, terms touched less immediately and less candidly on political issues, such as: reunification at some future time between North and South Vietnam, and a reaffirmation of the 1954 Geneva Accords. And the agreements concluded that the United States and Democratic Republic of Vietnam would normalize diplomatic relations, as independent states with full mutual respect for the rules of sovereignty, and that in accordance with its “traditional policy” the former would lend a hand and aid for “healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction.”
Bitter bloody conflict continued on even as the United States washed its hands of Vietnam and its protracted-aborted conquest. Neither party held strictly to the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords after January 1973. By the time of the Paris Peace Accords, 50,000 Americans had died, the last of which was Colonel William B. Nolde, whose name would be inscribed in American history as the “last official combat casualty” of the war. Meanwhile, the number of South Vietnamese casualties in 1973 nearly doubled those of preceding years; civilians continued to die in the midst of war; villages still burned, and not until after over two more years of fighting following the signing of the peace accords did Saigon fall to North Vietnamese and Việt Cộng forces.
“Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam” - Text