Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States and its allies dropped over 7.5 million tons of bombs on Southeast Asia. But until recently, no one outside the U.S. military really knew where all these bombs fell. That all changed in late 2016, when the U.S. Department of Defense released its Theater History of Operations (THOR) data, a comprehensive database of U.S. bombing missions from World War I through the Vietnam War. Touted as a means of increasing the public's understanding of the U.S. military, the datasets were as rich as they were novel. And they simply begged to be mapped.
"My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Ages." - US General Curtis E. LeMay, in his book Mission With LeMay, 1965.