It was the bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. This outbreak, the first known bubonic plague pandemic in recorded human history, marked the first of many outbreaks of plague - a disease that claimed as many as 200 million lives throughout history.
A key element to the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the names of the men and women who died while serving with the U.S. armed forces in the Vietnam War. There are more than 58,000 names inscribed on the black granite Memorial. The list of names begins at the vertex of the walls below the year of the first casualty and continues to the end of the east wall. It resumes at the tip of the west wall, ending at the vertex, above the year of the last death.
Not until 1995 did Vietnam release its official estimate of war dead: as many as 2 million civilians on both sides and some 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war. In 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., inscribed with the names of 57,939 members of U.S. armed forces who had died or were missing as a result of the war.