March 29 · This Day in America
Two months after the Paris accords, the last U.S. combat soldiers board planes out of South Vietnam, and Hanoi releases the final acknowledged American prisoners of war. By day's end, 591 men have come home through Operation Homecoming, some after years in cells, blinking at a country they barely recognize. America's direct eight-year war is over. It cost more than 58,000 American lives and far more Vietnamese ones, and it ended without victory, without parade, without the certainty earlier wars had granted. The men who fought it often came home to silence. Decades later the nation set this date aside as National Vietnam War Veterans Day, an overdue welcome. The hard truth and the honor are held together: the war divided the country, and the people sent to fight it deserved better than the country gave them.
Source: www.army.mil
Also on this day · 1848
Late on this night the roar of Niagara simply stops. A gale has jammed millions of tons of Lake Erie ice into the head of the river, choking off the water. For about thirty hours the great falls run nearly dry. Stunned residents walk and ride horses across the bare rock of the riverbed, picking up relics from a floor no one had ever seen. Then the ice gives way and a wall of water comes thundering back. It has never happened again.
Source: www.loc.gov