On April 30, North Vietnamese army tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, emphatically punctuating the end of the nation’s three-decade civil war. Led by the charismatic Ho Chi Minh, the struggle had been launched at the end of World War II as a rebellion against French colonial rule. At first Ho’s rebel group, the Vietminh, had harbored no strong ideological leanings except an overwhelming thirst for independence. Ho even made serious overtures toward obtaining American support. When they failed, though, he turned to China and the Soviet Union, and the results bore out the proverb “Who would sup with the devil must have a long spoon.” What had been a fluid political situation soon froze in the deep chill of the Cold War, and the insurrection turned into a protracted conflict between the communist-backed North and the capitalist-backed South—a proxy fight of the sort that would plague the world for nearly half a century.

Back in January 1973 the war seemed to have ended with a Korea type of peace, as the Americans agreed to withdraw their forces and the communists ceased hostilities. But President Richard Nixon, who had built his career on unmasking Soviet spies, made the unaccountable mistake of treating communists as trustworthy—beguiled perhaps by his recent glad-handing in Moscow and Peking. The North Vietnamese treated the cease-fire as a mere time-out to let them regroup while the Americans left. After more than a year of sporadic fighting, the Northern army launched a massive offensive in December 1974, and the inexpert and demoralized Southern army instantly crumbled.

The communists had won the same way the colonists won our Revolutionary War and the Confederacy tried to win its struggle for independence: by outlasting an invader until apathy and public pressure forced a withdrawal. America’s intervention, begun with high hopes and near-unanimous public backing in 1965, had succeeded only in subjecting Vietnam to ten years of the misery of war as a prelude to the misery of communism—at the cost of fifty-eight thousand American lives.

Elsewhere in Southeast Asia the dominoes had already started to fall. Two weeks earlier Cambodia succumbed to the genocidal, Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge, who would kill off somewhere between one-sixth and one-half of their six million countrymen before the Soviet-backed Vietnamese expelled them in 1979 and installed their own government. In August Laos fell to communist control as well.

While Southeast Asians struggled to survive, Americans struggled to extract useful lessons from the country’s most divisive and humiliating debacle since the Civil War. On many university campuses the communist victory was attributed to the strong Vietnamese sense of nationalism. In this view the homegrown Northern government had greater popular legitimacy than the European-installed Southern one. Others diagnosed the cause as a failure of national will: Instead of hitting hard with everything it had, the United States had lost by pursuing the war halfheartedly. Almost as many Americans had died in three years in Korea, it was pointed out, as in eight years in Vietnam. (In the Korean War, America had also taken care not to lose the peace; U.S. troops remain in South Korea to this day.)

In the end, geography may have been the most important factor. Korea is a peninsula that can be defended along a single and relatively short frontier. Vietnam, by contrast, has hundreds of miles of border along which the communists could establish bases and transport supplies. Since the United States was not prepared politically or militarily to carry a full-scale war into neighboring countries, it was never able to root them out.

As sorted out by later American governments, the lessons of Vietnam amount to a set of rules for sending troops abroad: Be sure you can win quickly, secure public approval in advance, and use overwhelming force. Where these conditions cannot be satisfied, restrict your support to money and arms and let the locals fight it out. Ultimately, as Vietnam faded into memory, the Cold War was won not by America’s armed forces but by something that had looked equally battered in the mid-1970s: America’s economy, whose relentless pressure made the basic untenability of communism ever more apparent as time went by.

At ten o’clock on the evening of April 29, the engineer John Luther Jones pulled his Illinois Central train into Memphis after a 190-mile run from Canton, Mississippi. It was a passenger express from New Orleans that was known, like many fast trains, as the Cannonball. The thirty-six-year-old Jones—nicknamed Casey for his hometown of Cayce, Kentucky—expected to stay over in Memphis along with his fireman, Sim Webb, before making the return trip the following night (though in Webb’s version of the tale, recorded several decades after the fact, he and Jones arrived in Memphis on the morning of April 29 and spent the day resting). When they learned that the scheduled engineer for the southbound Cannonball was ill, however, Jones and Webb agreed to take over the run.

The two weary trainmen left Memphis with the six-car Cannonball at 12:50 A.M., an hour and a half late. Jones prided himself on meeting scheduled times, a trait that had led to nine suspensions for unsafe practices in his ten years on the job. Sure enough, by the time his train approached Vaughan, Mississippi, fourteen miles north of Canton, he had made up all but two minutes of the delay.

Things were backed up at Vaughan. Two freight trains, number 72 northbound and number 83 southbound, were squeezed nose to nose on a siding to let a series of passenger trains through. The siding ran parallel to the main track, joining it with switches at each end. Unfortunately, the siding was not quite long enough to hold both 72 and 83; four cars had to be left sticking out at one end or the other.

In a maneuver called sawing, 72 and 83 were supposed to clear the north switch, leaving the extra cars protruding at the south end; wait for the Cannonball to move through the switch and stop; and then creep a few hundred feet north, clearing the south switch for the Cannonball to continue its run. However, before the north switch could be cleared, an air hose broke on 72, rendering it immobile. As Jones barreled down on the Vaughan station at more than a mile a minute, he did not know that four cars from train 83 lay dead ahead of him.

The broken air hose should have made no difference. Having been warned in advance of the sawing maneuver, Jones was supposed to reduce his speed to twenty-five or thirty miles per hour anyway, but he did not. At thirty-two hundred feet before the switch, a flagman frantically waved his lantern, but Jones took no notice. Five hundred feet later his train set off a “torpedo,” a small container of gunpowder strapped to the rails as a signal. On hearing the explosion, Jones finally realized he was in trouble and tried desperately to slow the train. He knew there was far too little space to stop it completely.

As Webb, at Jones’s command, jumped off to save himself, Jones stayed in the cab to meet certain death, squeezing the throttle in one hand and the brakes in the other. He managed to slow the Cannonball from seventy miles per hour to less than fifty before it slammed into the train ahead. The caboose and a freight car from 83 were demolished, and two freight cars were damaged, as was the Cannonball’s locomotive. Jones’s mangled body was found by its back driving wheel, but the passengers escaped with nothing worse than a few bruises.

One of the Cannonball’s passengers predicted in the next day’s paper that the crash would “be talked about in roundhouses, lunchrooms, and cabooses for the next six months.” Instead, memory of the lurid but not unusual incident has endured for a century, thanks to a snappy song that became one of the country’s most popular and enduring anthems (and most protean; one scholar counted forty-five versions). “Casey Jones” seems to have originated with an Illinois Central laborer named Wallace Saunders (or Wallis Sanders), who adapted an old railroad song called “Jimmie Jones” to fit the facts of the case. In 1903 T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton published the most familiar version, which for some reason transfers the action to a Western line and gratuitously portrays Jones’s wife as an adulteress.

Yet as the railroad historian John H. White, Jr., points out, despite his violent death, Jones was no hero. Not only did he cause the accident with his flagrant disregard of safety procedures, but he saved no lives by staying in his cab. Once the throttle was closed and the air brake put in emergency, Jones could do no more except wait for the inevitable collision. He might just as well have jumped along with Webb—except that would have left him as merely a careless engineer who destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, instead of a folk legend.

On April 14 HMS Nautilus arrived in Boston with a letter for Gen. Thomas Gage, governor of Massachusetts and commander in chief of the British army in North America. It had been written in late January by Britain’s colonial secretary, Lord William Dartmouth, to express concerns that the rebel element in Massachusetts was getting out of control. Since taking office in May 1774, Gage had been wary of cracking down too hard on dissent, fearing that his force would be inadequate should the colony rise in open rebellion. But Dartmouth had seen enough of Gage’s timidity; the time had come to act.

In fact, Gage had already taken steps to suppress the rebels. In September his troops had seized a large amount of powder from a storehouse in Charlestown, and as recently as April 8 a raid on Fort Pownall, at the mouth of the Penobscot River in Maine (then a part of Massachusetts), had taken sixteen cannon, nearly five hundred cannonballs, and much other valuable matériel out of rebel hands. Gage had also concentrated more than three thousand troops in Boston, sent men and arms to protect Tories elsewhere in the province, arranged to mobilize Canadians and Indians, mapped areas of likely conflict, built a network of spies, and thoroughly marched and drilled his men.

These defensive measures were not enough for Dartmouth, who directed Gage “to arrest and imprison the principal actors & abettors in the Provincial Congress (whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason & rebellion).” Unfortunately, the provincial congress adjourned the day after the letter arrived.

Anticipating this possibility, Dartmouth told Gage that “there are other Cases that must occur, in which affording the Assistance of the Military will probably become unavoidable.” Such a confrontation “would become a Test of the People’s resolution to resist”—a test, he was confident, that the ill-trained and undisciplined colonists were bound to fail. Being closer to the scene, Gage was less confident about the redcoats’ supremacy in the field. Yet virtually every line of Dartmouth’s letter bespoke mounting impatience with Gage’s cautious policies.

Gage lost no time putting Dartmouth’s orders into effect. On April 18 he sent the following orders to Lt. Col. Francis Smith of the 10th Regiment: “A Quantity of Ammunition and Provision together [with] numbers of Cannon and small Arms having been collected at Concord for the avowed purpose of supporting a Rebellion against His Majtys Government, you will march with the Corps of Grenadiers and Light Infantry put under your Command with the utmost Expedition and Secrecy to Concord; where you will seize and destroy all the Artillery and Ammunition Provisions Tents & all other Military Stores you can find. . . .” Smith’s troops—seven to eight hundred strong, with an additional fourteen hundred to join them later on—left Boston that night for what promised to be an uneventful thirty-mile march through Lexington to the storehouse at Concord and back. They staggered home a day later with some seventy dead and two hundred wounded.

Suddenly and bloodily the resistance had turned into a war. Even worse than the casualties, however, was the knowledge that His Majesty’s men were facing not a disorderly pack of farmboys but a brave and dedicated foe. Lord Hugh Percy was a British officer whose timely arrival at Lexington with the relief column headed off a wholesale slaughter of the redcoats. The previous year, in a letter to his father in England, he had scoffed at the American “cowards” who “whenever we appear . . . are frightened out of their wits.” To a cousin he wrote, “I cannot but despise them compleately.”

After Lexington and Concord, Percy saw things differently: “Whosoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about. . . .” He added this respectful and prescient warning: “You may depend upon it, that, as the Rebels have now had time to prepare, they are determined to go thro’ with it, nor will the insurrection here turn out so despicable as it is perhaps imagined at home.”