War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history

through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. host, James Early. Hello and welcome back to Key Battles of the Vietnam War, a 10,000-foot survey of the war

that defined a generation. I'm your host James Early, as always. And as always, I am joined by my co-host, Sean McIraver.

So we are now to our third topical episode. We're going to take a deeper dive into several

different topics over the next few weeks. We've already looked at the Air War and the Naval War,

and this time we're going to look at a topic that I love to discuss

in every single series that I do, and that is the Combat Soldiers. So the title of this episode is

the American Combat Soldier in Vietnam. Next time, we will look in depth at Vietnamese

combat soldiers and their experiences in the war. But for this week,

we're going to limit ourselves to American combat soldiers. Now, I have to throw out a disclaimer

before we get started. When I use the term soldier in this episode, I'm usually also including

U.S. Marines, although my dad would kill me if he heard me do that. I know, yes, I know that a

Marine is not a soldier. A soldier is technically a term for someone in the U.S. Army. A Marine

is an altogether different thing. However, they played similar roles in the Vietnam War.

So basically, if you want to get technical, we're talking about the American ground combatant in Vietnam.

So we're talking about people who were actually on the front lines of combat, what their life was like.

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