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Top U.S. officials have reached out to a leading Vietnam war scholar who opposes American involvement in Afghanistan in an apparent effort to apply the lessons of the earlier conflict to the fight against the Taliban.

NATO's top commander in Afghanistan and the U.S. special envoy to the country telephoned renowned Vietnam War historian Stanley Karnow on July 27 to discuss the two conflicts.

Karnow is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who authored the seminal 1983 book, "Vietnam: A History." He says envoy Richard Holbrooke called him and passed the phone to Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

HANOI, Vietnam - More than one-third of the land in six central Vietnamese provinces remains contaminated with land mines and unexploded bombs from the Vietnam War, according to a study released Friday.

Nearly 35 years after the war's end, Vietnamese civilians are still routinely killed and maimed by leftover mines and other explosives. Vietnam estimates that more than 42,000 people have been killed in such accidents since 1975.

During the war I was a news analyst at Hanoi's American Affairs Department. From the beginning, we could tell that Robert McNamara was the mastermind. Each day, when we held a conference to discuss new developments, we always talked about McNamara first.

In the early years, he was bellicose. We called him the "hawk." He believed that if the Viet Cong could see how powerful American technology was, they would not fight. Of course, this was not the case. Much of what he and President Johnson authorized were war crimes, and we were furious.

An expert panel reported on Friday that two more diseases may be linked to exposure to Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the American military during the Vietnam War.

People exposed to the chemical appear, at least tentatively, to be more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease and ischemic heart disease, according to the report. The report was written by a 14-member committee charged by the Institute of Medicine with determining whether certain medical conditions were caused by exposure to herbicides used to clear stretches of jungle.

Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, military struggle fought in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975, involving the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF) in conflict with United States forces and the South Vietnamese army. From 1946 until 1954, the Vietnamese had struggled for their independence from France during the First Indochina War. At the end of this war, the country was temporarily divided into North and South Vietnam. North Vietnam came under the control of Vietnamese Communists who had opposed France and who aimed for a unified Vietnam under Communist rule. The South was controlled by non-Communist Vietnamese.