1,500 Days

The Global War on Terror (1,486 days) has surpassed both American participation in World War II (1,345 days) and the American Civil War (1,458 days) in length. Two weeks from today, 9/11 will be be 1,500 days in the past. That means it’s time to update my interactive timeline at the top of the blog page.

The new addition to the list is, of course, the Vietnam War, which lasted 3,159 days from the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 to the date the last combat troops left the country in March 1973. Not even half-way there. Heck, comparatively, we’re not even to the part of the Vietnam war where Nixon was running things yet!

If the GWOT lasts as long as Vietnam, we should be done in early May 2010. (For comparative purposes, it took almost exactly as long for the British occupying army to lose the American Revolutionary War. The amount of time from the Battle of Lexington to the last British troops leaving New York City was 3,143 days.)