Historians may conclude that the Vietnam war ended some time during the week beginning March 25, 1973. Certainly in the news media—and no war has had its signposts so vividly marked out by press and television—it was ending throughout that week with increasingly complex last-minute drama, right up to the conclusive pictures of “one of the last U.S. soldiers out of South Vietnam” and “the last prisoner out of North Vietnam.” The last prisoner, more than anything, was the definitive image. Other official aspects of impending peacetreaty negotiations, troop withdrawals, cease-fires, lulls, resumptions, “peace in our time” speecheswere worn thin by months of assertion and publicity. They were no longer quite powerful enough to symbolize finality. It was the last prisoner of war physically out of North Vietnam that allowed the New York Times to announce on March 30 that “the U.S. war role in Vietnam is ended.”