Series on Vietnam Starts Sunday

Ten years after Saigon fell to the Communists and the Americans fled, the shadows of the Vietnam War--the longest war Americans ever fought and the only one they ever lost--still fall over the United States and Southeast Asia.

Starting Sunday, The Times will present “Vietnam: A Decade Later,” a four-part series on the legacy of the war--for the 3.7 million U.S. servicemen who served in the war zone, for the families of the 58,022 who died there and for the hundreds of thousands of Indochinese refugees who have found sanctuary in the United States.

A special investigative report will reconstruct the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when two U.S. destroyers were said to have been fired on by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. President Lyndon B. Johnson retaliated with U.S. air attacks against North Vietnam, setting in motion the Americanization of the war. But recently declassified documents and The Times’ interviews with participants show that the U.S. ships probably were never attacked--and that the United States went to war over something that never happened.

The series will also examine the divergent lessons that U.S. policy-makers and military planners draw from the American defeat. At one extreme are those who argue that the United States must never again blunder into war in the Third World. At the other are those who argue that the United States went wrong in Vietnam not because it got involved but because it lost--and if it intervenes abroad again, it must use enough power to win.

Two Times correspondents now in Vietnam will also report on that still-embattled land. Vietnam’s armies occupy Cambodia and Laos, fight bloody battles with Khmer guerrillas along the Thai border and stand off the Chinese army on the northern frontier. And the domestic economy, burdened with supporting military ventures and the world’s fourth largest standing army, provides 60 million Vietnamese with mere subsistence.