Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, referred to the Vietnam War as a "terrible mistake" in his memoirs in 1995. Indeed, it was - with catastrophic consequences: For the United States, it meant over 58,000 dead soldiers; for South Vietnam, one million dead soldiers and two million dead civilians; and for North Vietnam, at least as many. To this day, the Vietnamese population suffers from the effects of bombings and the use of highly toxic Agent Orange. The Vietnam War is considered a nightmare for Americans, dividing the nation like nothing else since the Civil War a hundred years earlier, and its effects are still felt today. How did it come to this? What path led out of the inferno of war? What traces did the Vietnam War leave in American society? The well-known contemporary historian Rolf Stei.