After U.S. Forces left Indochina, South Vietnam's army had held out against the Communists for two years. However, when Washington, forced by a record budget deficit, withdrew aid in 1975, the end had come. In March, Communist forces took Hue and Da Nang. President Thieu fled on April 21 and on April 29, the 1,000 Americans in Vietnam were ordered by U.S officials to gather at the U.S. embassy in Saigon for evacuation. The next day, the Communists marched in and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. The two Vietnams had become one.

Between 1965 and 1975, approximately one million Communist and 200,000 South Vietnamese had been killed, together with another million civilians; many more were maimed. The years of fighting left the country riddled with unexploded landmines and water-filled craters breeding malaria-carrying mosquitoes. In addition, the Americans had sprayed poisonous herbicides to deprive the Communists of both crops and cover, but the chemicals not only disrupted Vietnam's ecology, it also caused illness and birth defects. Reconstruction of the nation, hindered by an American embargo and Communist policies, would take generations.

Also devastated by U.S. bombing were Cambodia and Laos, where indigenous Communists gained control in April and August, respectively. Determined to remake their country from scratch and inspired by China's disastrous Great Leap Forward (initiated by Mao Zedong), the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's new rulers, evacuated the cities. By 1979, some 2 million civilians had been slaughtered in a quest for ethnic and political purity.

Announced: the discovery of more than 8,000 life-sized terracotta warriors and more than 10,000 articles of gold, jade, silk and iron in the burial site of Ch'in emperor Shih Huang-ti, near Xi'an, China.