19711776 Club
Nixon sets a February 1 deadline to bring home another 45,000 troops from Vietnam
The order extends Vietnamization, the plan to shift the ground war onto South Vietnam's own army.
By the autumn of 1971, public opposition to the Vietnam War had been building for years, fed by the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, the invasion of Cambodia, and the leak of the Pentagon Papers. On November 12, President Richard Nixon set February 1, 1972, as the deadline for removing another 45,000 American troops from Vietnam. It was one more step in Vietnamization, the policy of training and equipping South Vietnam's army to fight while American combat troops came home. Whether that army could hold without them was still the open question…
