Sixty years ago, the United States had 16,000 military personnel in Vietnam propping up the increasingly brutal South Vietnamese regime headed by Ngô Đình Diệm. Within six years the number of U.S. troops would escalate to over a half million, resulting in almost 60,000 U.S. combat deaths and more than a million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian deaths.
WRL Southwest formed as a chapter and then as a regional office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, during the Vietnam War. We wanted to be a voice for peace, pacifism and nonviolence in the area, which hosted the Kirtland Air Force Base and the two atomic weapons laboratories: Sandia in Albuquerque and Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, where the first nuclear weapons were researched and designed....
