On March 29, 1973, the last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam. Today, we commemorate the anniversary of that date as Vietnam War Veterans Day.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the Vietnam Veterans Day Coalition of States Council presented a letter to him and U.S. legislators requesting that the bill to establish March 29 as Vietnam War Veterans Day be one of the first passed and signed into law during the 115th Congress. On March 28, 2017, President Trump signed the Vietnam War Veterans Act of 2017, officially recognizing the 29th of March as National Vietnam War Veterans Day. According to the Act, the day is among other important dates when Americans are especially called on to display our nation’s flag.

The Vietnam War is probably the most controversial in American history. U.S. troops were sent to hold off communist North Vietnam in its efforts to topple the nominally pro-Western South Vietnamese government. The war was waged to prevent communism from spreading throughout the region — and it partly did stem the tide. But it also revealed large rifts in our society between working and middle-class Americans and the anti-American left wing that are even more pronounced today.

The young Americans drafted to serve in Vietnam understood that they were observing the same duty to their country that their fathers, grandfathers and generations before them had honored. When their country called, they answered.

aBut something had changed during the 1960s. Part of it had to do with American leadership. The historical record shows that neither President Kennedy nor President Johnson had a plan to win the war. Instead, their decisions to escalate the conflict were driven by public opinion, some of it was a genuine response to the failures of U.S. political and military officials.

Much of that public opinion however was influenced by the very enemies America was fighting — the communist regimes in Moscow and Beijing. While working and middle-class boys were fighting a communist insurgency, many young men their age, well-connected and wealthy enough to stay out of harm’s way, promoted communist causes on college campuses.

Nearly 60,000 Americans sent to fight thousands of miles from where they were born were killed abroad. More than 1600 Americans who served in Southeast Asia are still missing in action. And those who came home were often scapegoated for the failures of those who sent them to war. And they were cursed by the countrymen whose liberties they’d fought to protect. These young soldiers had survived a foreign war only to find themselves in the middle of a culture war at home, with them portrayed as the enemy.

What we see more clearly now is that the stakes were, and remain, high. The fight over the fate of our country — whether we will continue to honor the path of freedom and individual liberties laid down by our Founding Fathers, or instead drift into the viciously anti-humanist nightmare of collectivism that is communism. The veterans who returned from Vietnam nearly half a century ago were the first to engage in the life and death struggle for the future of our country. After they served abroad, they served again at home.

Vietnam War Veterans deserve our love and respect for their sacrifices abroad — and our admiration and awe for their continued dedication to American values here at home in the face of a vocal and extremist minority intent on destroying the foundations of our great nation — faith, family, community, and the Constitution.

We at America’s Future are grateful beyond words to those who served our nation and continue to serve. We thank and honor them on the occasion of this day of remembrance and every day.