By the time the U.S. called home its last troops from South Vietnam on March 29, 1973, veteran Don Ballard was working as a police officer and attending college.

Ballard’s role in the Vietnam War — as a Navy corpsman who treated hundreds of casualties during the 1968 Tet Offensive — had concluded when he left active service in 1970.

That final troop withdrawal 50 years ago Wednesday marked the end of a long and politically contentious war that had left 58,000 U.S. service members dead and another 304,000 wounded.

But like many of the other roughly 2.7 million troops who were sent to Vietnam starting in 1964, Ballard’s return to civilian life did not “end” the war for him – just as that spring withdrawal did not conclude the war’s impact on American society.

“I was wounded eight times; I got three Purple Hearts,” Ballard said in a phone interview Thursday from his home near Kansas City, Mo. “I killed six people — three of them was with my knife. And you expect me to come home and be the same Johnny-from-the-filling-station?”

Yet every war, along with its milestones and turning points, has its dénouement.

March 29 brought some sense of relief to the growing number of Americans who opposed America’s military involvement in what was essentially a civil war between South and North Vietnam.

“I think Americans tend to define the end of war as when their troops come home, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the war is over,” Gregory Daddis, a retired Army colonel and history professor at San Diego State University, where he directs the Center for War and Society, said by phone March 21.

“Americans leaving didn’t settle the fundamental question of what Vietnamese society was going to look like after U.S. troops had departed,” he said.

“And at the end of the day, we were supposed to leave behind a stable, non-communist, independent South Vietnam, and that never really came to fruition,” he said.

Not so neatly over

Negotiations between the U.S. and North Vietnam over the withdrawal of American troops had begun five years earlier. A mutually acceptable peace treaty was delayed by intractable demands by both parties, as well as stipulations by negotiators representing South Vietnam.

In May 1972, President Richard Nixon – anxious to present the American public an exit from the war with the presidential election coming in the fall – offered a major concession to North Vietnam.

The new provision would allow North Vietnam to leave its regular army troops in areas they occupied in South Vietnam, while the U.S. would withdraw all troops. The North, however, was not to advance any farther nor to reinforce the existing force in the South.

The agreement also set in motion the exchange of all prisoners of war, which would lead to the release of almost 600 American POWs over two months.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed Jan. 27, 1973, but that did not end hostilities.

“Fighting continued, quite literally, the next day,” Daddis said.

“This is where we might suggest that the war was not so neatly over after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, that the legacies and the damage that had been done because of the war lasted far longer than the signing of this agreement,” he said.

“That complicates the question of when does war end,” he said. “If family members are still dealing with the trauma of war, does that mean the war is still ongoing? If we’re still working through trying to help resettle southern Vietnamese as South Vietnam is collapsing, does that mean the war is still ongoing whether we’re participating or not?”

Saving Marines’ lives

Ballard recalled greeting the news of the final U.S. troop withdrawal with satisfaction.

“I was happy that the troops were coming home and that we were getting out of something we didn’t belong in,” he said.

He had joined the Navy in 1965, primarily with the goal of getting tuition assistance to become an orthodontist.

With his interest in the medical field, he chose to become a corpsman. He was assigned to a Marine Corps unit in Vietnam, a tour that coincided with North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive in early 1968 and some of the fiercest battles of the war.

On May 16, 1968, his Marine company was ambushed in Quang Tri province by an enemy wielding machine guns and mortars.

Ballard moved through heavy fire to treat the wounded, at one point throwing himself atop an enemy grenade that landed among the Marines. The grenade failed to immediately detonate, and Ballard tossed it back toward the enemy where it exploded.

For his actions that day, Ballard was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest award for military valor in action.

In the midst of his combat tour, Ballard did not see, nor care, about the “big picture” of the war, he said.

“As a corpsman – and I’m not speaking for all corpsmen — but as a corpsman my job was to save Marines’ lives and get them home to their loved ones in the best medical and emotional condition that I could,” he said.

“I didn’t care if the North was winning, the South was winning, the Republicans at home were winning, the Democrats were winning. My job was not so much influenced by the big picture. I concentrated on the little day-to-day activities of firefights.”

‘We’re not winning here’

Ballard began to “sour” on the war during a couple calm periods when he was recuperating in a rear hospital, he said. He came to feel that the war was dragging on because it was so profitable for people and corporations far from the actual fighting.

“My hope was that someday they’d realize that we’re not winning here — even though we killed massive amounts of people,” he said.

America was indeed eager to turn the page on Vietnam with the spring 1973 withdrawal, but the war lived on for many of its veterans.

“It affected me,” Ballard said of the combat. “Today, I still got PTSD.”

“We were 18-, 19-year-old kids over there,” he said. Many carried out their military service with the attitude that their actions in some way helped America, he said.

“We didn’t go over there because we hated anybody,” he said. “We just loved our country enough that we wanted to do our part. We wanted to pay the price to live here.

“We just didn’t think that our life was part of the price.”