Under the terms of the Paris Peace Accords signed two months earlier, the last U.S. combat forces withdrew from South Vietnam. Roughly 2,500 support personnel remained to guard installations, but the departure marked the end of America's direct combat role in a war that had killed over 58,000 U.S. service members and profoundly divided the nation.
The withdrawal came 19 years after the first American military advisers arrived in Vietnam and eight years after the first combat troops landed at Da Nang in 1965. At its peak in 1969, U.S. troop levels in Vietnam exceeded 543,000. By this March morning, the remaining units boarded planes at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Air Base, watched by South Vietnamese soldiers who would soon face the North Vietnamese Army largely alone.
The same day, Hanoi released the last acknowledged American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam, part of Operation Homecoming, which had begun in February. Many returning POWs, some held for over seven years, stepped off transport planes to cheering crowds at Clark Air Base in the Philippines and later in the United States.
South Vietnam would survive just two more years without American combat support, falling to North Vietnamese forces in April 1975. The withdrawal is remembered as the formal close of America's costliest and most divisive Cold War conflict, though its political and cultural aftershocks lasted for decades.