The war in Vietnam transformed the region of Southeast Asia as much as it did its foreign participants and marked, yet another, clash of global superpowers in the Soviet Union and the United States. It was found on the ground, in the air and - to a certain extent - at sea and the result was a communist North Vietnamese takeover, and subsequent reunification of Vietnam as a country, as American forces withdrew from the nearly two-decades-long conflict that cost tens of thousands of American lives. It would be some time before the wounds of this bitterly contested war would heal and it served to rewrite American involvement doctrine in foreign wars for the foreseeable future.
