Tuesday, January 30, 1973. The return of PFC Ronald L. Ridgeway.

The Defense Department discovered that a North Vietnamese provided list of 555 POWs included Marine PFC Ronald L. Ridgeway of Houston, who had been listed as Killed In Action.  He would be promoted to Sergeant and medically discharged in November 1973.

His girlfriend, Lawanda Taylor, had not married since his disappearance in 1968, and they would subsequently marry.  He would go to work in the Veterans Administration.

Chae Myung-shin (채명신,; 蔡命新), commander of South Korean forces in South Vietnam.  He had served in the Imperial Japanese Army as a conscript late in World War Two, and then escaped to South Korean to avoid the Communists.   A Korean Protestant Christian from a Christian family, he died in 2013 at age 88.

On the same day, the first 125 of 37,000 South Korean troops in Vietnam left the country. The South Korean Army retained a large presence in South Vietnam right up into 1973 and had to be pressured by the US to leave, although the US also considered leaving South Korean troops in the country into 1974 given the slow progress of the ARVN in the regions the Korean troops were located.  By 1973, South Korean troops constituted the vast majority of foreign combat troops in South Vietnam

Senator John C. Stennis was shot and wounded in front of his Washington, D. C. home in a robbery attempt.

The rock band Wicked Lester rebranded itself and performed for the first time as KISS.