99 Fun Facts About Vietnam War

Vietnam was divided at which line of latitude after the 1954 Geneva Conference?

The 17th parallel was meant to be a temporary line until nationwide elections in 1956, but the vote was never held and the truce line hardened into a border between two rival states.

Which 1954 battle ended French rule in Indochina?

Dien Bien Phu fell after a siege of nearly two months: the Viet Minh manhandled heavy artillery up the steep slopes around the valley and dug the guns in so well that French counter-fire could barely touch them.

Which Viet Minh general commanded the 1954 siege that defeated the French?

Võ Nguyên Giáp was a history teacher with no formal military training; the self-taught general built a small guerrilla band into the army that beat France, then led it against the United States.

Who led South Vietnam from 1954 until his overthrow and death in a 1963 coup?

Ngo Dinh Diem was toppled and killed by his own generals in November 1963 after Washington signalled it would not stand in their way; President Kennedy was assassinated three weeks later.

South Vietnam's 1963 political crisis began when protesters in Hue were shot after defying a ban by flying what?

The Buddhist flag was banned on the eve of a major Buddhist festival, shortly after papal flags had flown freely in Hue to honour the city's Catholic archbishop, the president's own brother.

Which US destroyer fought North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin on 2 August 1964?

USS Maddox was on an intelligence-gathering patrol when three North Vietnamese boats attacked; with help from carrier jets it drove them off, yet within a week Congress had authorised military action.

What did later investigation conclude about the reported second Tonkin attack on 4 August 1964?

It never happened: the two destroyers spent the night firing at radar contacts, but a study by the NSA's own historian, made public in 2005, concluded that no North Vietnamese boats were there.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave sweeping war powers to which president?

Lyndon B. Johnson got the resolution through the House unanimously and the Senate with only two votes against, then used it to wage war for years without any formal declaration.

Operation Rolling Thunder was what kind of campaign?

A sustained bombing of North Vietnam, Rolling Thunder began with strikes limited to the south of the country and crept gradually north, running from March 1965 into late 1968 without forcing Hanoi to give in.

Which country became the most heavily bombed in history as the US tried to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail?

Two million tons fell on it between 1964 and 1973, roughly what the US dropped on Europe and Asia in all of World War II.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran from North to South Vietnam mainly through which country?

The communists called it the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route after the Annamite mountains.

The 1965 Battle of Ia Drang, later filmed as We Were Soldiers, was the first large-scale test of what tactic?

Helicopter air assault put Hal Moore's battalion of the 7th Cavalry into Landing Zone X-Ray, where it was attacked within hours by North Vietnamese regulars in the first major battle between the two armies.

Which US commander in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 measured progress in his war of attrition by enemy 'body count'?

William Westmoreland asked for some 200,000 more troops after the Tet attacks of early 1968 had shaken confidence in his reports of progress; within months he was moved to Washington as Army chief of staff.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 was named after what?

The Lunar New Year holiday had brought an informal truce in earlier years, so many of South Vietnam's troops were on leave when more than 100 towns and cities came under attack.

Which Saigon building did Viet Cong sappers breach on the first night of the Tet Offensive?

The US Embassy compound was breached by a Viet Cong sapper team that fought in its grounds for about six hours but never got inside the main building; every attacker was killed or captured.

Roughly how many communist troops took part in the Tet Offensive?

The offensive was a tactical defeat for them, with more than 45,000 killed.

Eddie Adams's Pulitzer-winning photograph 'Saigon Execution' shows a Viet Cong prisoner shot by whom?

The chief of the National Police, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, fired the shot in a Saigon street; photographer Eddie Adams later wrote that the general had killed the prisoner, but he had killed the general with his camera.

The Marine base besieged for 77 days in early 1968 was at which location?

Khe Sanh was defended with some 100,000 tons of bombs dropped on the hills around it, yet by July 1968, three months after the siege was lifted, the US had closed the base and pulled out.

Where was the Viet Cong base at Cu Chi, on the edge of Saigon, hidden from American forces?

In a network of tunnels: the Cu Chi complex held hospitals and living quarters, so the US and its allies trained 'tunnel rats' to crawl in after the guerrillas.

The My Lai massacre of March 1968 took place in which South Vietnamese province?

Charlie Company was expecting to find a Viet Cong battalion that was not there.

Which helicopter pilot intervened to stop the killing at My Lai and was later decorated for it?

Hugh Thompson Jr. landed his helicopter between the soldiers and fleeing villagers and told his crew to fire on the Americans if the killing went on; the Army gave him the Soldier's Medal 30 years later.

Of the 26 soldiers charged over the My Lai massacre, who was the only one convicted?

William Calley, a platoon leader, was given a life sentence for murdering 22 villagers, but it was cut on appeal and he spent only about three years confined, under house arrest, before being paroled in 1974.

What name did the White House give the policy of handing the ground war to Saigon's army as US troops left?

Vietnamization cut US troop numbers from more than half a million in 1969 to about 69,000 in 1972, but that year's Easter Offensive showed how heavily Saigon's army still leaned on American air power.

Which phrase did the US president elected in 1968 use for the Americans he claimed supported the war?

The silent majority was asked, in a televised address on 3 November 1969, to back a gradual end to the war instead of the immediate pull-out demanded by nationwide Moratorium protests three weeks earlier.

The Kent State shootings of May 1970 followed protests over the war expanding into which country?

Cambodia had been entered by US and South Vietnamese troops days earlier; at Kent State, Ohio National Guardsmen fired more than 60 rounds in 13 seconds, and the deaths swelled a student strike that shut campuses nationwide.

Which band rushed out the protest single 'Ohio' within weeks of the Kent State shootings?

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded 'Ohio' on 21 May 1970, days after Neil Young saw Life magazine's photographs of the shootings and wrote the song; it was on sale by early June.

Who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971?

Daniel Ellsberg was tried for espionage and theft, but the judge threw the case out in 1973 after it emerged that a White House team, the 'plumbers', had burgled his psychiatrist's office.

Which defense secretary commissioned the secret study that became the Pentagon Papers?

Robert McNamara ordered the study in 1967, saying he wanted a written record for historians; a leak made it public within four years, yet it stayed officially classified until 2011.

The first Vietnam draft lottery, in December 1969, ranked young American men for call-up according to what?

Their birthday decided it: 366 capsules, one for each date, were drawn from a glass jar, and September 14 came out first, putting men born that day at the front of the line.

Agent Orange was sprayed on forests and crops under which operation?

Ranch Hand aircraft sprayed some 20 million gallons of herbicides over about a decade; the dioxin in Agent Orange was later tied to cancers, and the US now presumes many veterans' illnesses stem from exposure.

Besides Dow Chemical, which other well-known company produced Agent Orange?

Monsanto was one of seven makers of the herbicide that agreed in 1984 to pay $180 million to settle a class action by Vietnam veterans out of court.

What was 'Hanoi Hilton' the sardonic nickname for?

A prison for US POWs, Hoa Lo had been built by the French around 1900 to hold Vietnamese political prisoners; John McCain spent part of his five and a half years as a captive there.

Which Hollywood actress was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun during a 1972 visit to Hanoi?

Jane Fonda was in Hanoi as an anti-war campaigner, and the picture earned her the lasting nickname 'Hanoi Jane'; she has since called posing on the gun a mistake she will regret to her dying day.

The December 1972 'Christmas bombing' of Hanoi and Haiphong relied on which heavy bomber?

B-52 Stratofortress crews flew eleven days of raids, ordered to break a deadlock in the peace talks; negotiations resumed on 8 January and a deal was signed before the month was out.

Which American shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with Hanoi's negotiator Le Duc Tho, who turned it down?

Henry Kissinger accepted but stayed away from the Oslo ceremony, while Le Duc Tho refused, saying there was still no real peace in Vietnam; two members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest.

The 1973 Paris Peace Accords sent US forces home but allowed whose troops to stay in the South?

North Vietnam's troops already in the South were allowed to stay where they stood, a concession Saigon's president rejected for months; he accepted the deal only when Washington threatened to cut off its support.

Operation Frequent Wind, the last-ditch American exit from Saigon in April 1975, holds what record?

Largest helicopter evacuation ever: once shelling had closed Saigon's airport to planes, helicopters lifted about 7,000 people to US ships offshore in less than 24 hours.

What song, played on Armed Forces Radio, was the secret signal that the Saigon evacuation had begun?

White Christmas was to follow an announcer's line that the temperature in Saigon was '105 degrees and rising'; the pairing told Americans across the city to head for their evacuation points at once.

Why were some helicopters pushed off US Navy ships during the evacuation of Saigon?

To make room for more to land, sailors shoved South Vietnamese helicopters into the sea as pilots kept arriving with their families; USS Midway even cleared its deck so a major could land a small Cessna.

North Vietnamese tanks ended the war on 30 April 1975 by crashing through the gates of which Saigon building?

The Presidential Palace was where South Vietnam's last president, Duong Van Minh, told the arriving officers he was waiting to hand over power; one replied that he had nothing left to hand over.

Who left Saigon in 1911 as a ship's kitchen helper?

Ho Chi Minh sailed under the alias Van Ba, visited Africa, the United States and Britain, and is said to have worked in hotel kitchens before turning to politics in Paris; he came home in 1941.

Vietnam's 1945 declaration of independence opens by quoting which American?

Thomas Jefferson's line that all men are created equal opens the text, which then quotes France's Declaration of the Rights of Man before accusing the French of trampling on both ideals in Vietnam.

What job did the young Ho Chi Minh hold on the Newhaven–Dieppe ferry in 1913?

The story that he trained under Escoffier at London's Carlton Hotel has never been documented.

The term 'Viet Cong' is a contraction of a phrase meaning what?

Vietnamese communist is the literal meaning of Viet Nam Cong San; the short form was spread by anti-communist writers as a put-down, while the guerrillas called themselves the National Liberation Front.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington was designed by whom?

Maya Lin was a 21-year-old Yale student whose entry beat more than 1,400 others in a blind competition; once the winner was known, detractors attacked her design as a 'black gash of shame'.

In what order are the names listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial?

Chronological by date of casualty, the list begins at the centre, runs out along the right-hand wall and resumes at the far end of the left, so the war's first and last dead sit side by side.

Which pair of US allies both kept their troops out of the fighting in Vietnam?

Canada and the United Kingdom both stayed out: Harold Wilson refused repeated American requests for British troops, while Canada sat on the international truce commissions and took in American draft resisters.

Approximately how many US service members died in the Vietnam War?

58,000 is the round figure: the Defense Department's official count is 58,220 dead, and names are still occasionally added to the memorial wall in Washington, which opened in 1982 with 57,939.

Who won the 1972 US presidential election against a rival who promised immediate withdrawal from Vietnam?

Richard Nixon carried 49 of the 50 states against George McGovern, yet he resigned less than two years later over the cover-up of a break-in carried out during that same campaign.

Which future game show host served in Vietnam as an Army disc jockey on the Dawn Buster radio show?

Pat Sajak signed on each morning with the same shouted greeting Adrian Cronauer made famous, more than a decade before he took over Wheel of Fortune.

Which country stood in for Vietnam when Stanley Kubrick shot Full Metal Jacket in a derelict gasworks?

England doubled for Vietnam: the ruined city of Hue was the disused Beckton Gas Works in East London, dressed with 200 palm trees imported from Spain.

Which conference detail did delegates to the Paris peace talks on Vietnam argue over before negotiating?

The shape of the table mattered because a round one would seat the Viet Cong as Saigon's equals; the compromise was a circular table ringed by separate square ones.

What is the nickname of the US Navy fighter school founded in 1969 after poor dogfight results over Vietnam?

Top Gun grew out of a 1968 Navy study into the failings of its air-to-air missiles against North Vietnamese fighters, and a 1986 film made the school a household name.

Operation Popeye, a secret US program, tried to stop North Vietnamese supply trucks by doing what?

Seeding clouds to make rain was meant to stretch the monsoon by 30 to 45 days a year, turning dirt supply roads to mud and setting off landslides.

Which heavyweight boxing champion was stripped of his title in 1967 for refusing the draft during the Vietnam War?

Muhammad Ali was convicted of draft evasion and kept out of the ring for more than three years; the Supreme Court threw out the verdict 8–0 in 1971, months after his comeback.

Which US president pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders unconditionally on his first full day in office?

Jimmy Carter kept a campaign promise the day after his inauguration, but the pardon covered only draft evaders and left out those who had deserted.

Which lighter brand did a 1965 CBS report show US Marines using to set village huts alight in Vietnam?

Zippo lighters doubled as soldiers' diaries: troops had them engraved with personal mottos, and the surviving originals became sought-after collectors' items.

Which Peter, Paul and Mary song title became US troops' nickname for the AC-47 gunship in Vietnam?

Puff the Magic Dragon was a C-47 transport, the military DC-3, refitted with three miniguns firing out of its left side; its radio call sign was simply Puff.

Which country's founding declaration supplied the opening sentence of Vietnam's own proclamation in 1945?

The United States gave the speech its first line, on the equality of all men; an American OSS officer, Archimedes Patti, said Ho read him a draft days earlier and that he offered corrections to that sentence.

Which CBS anchorman told viewers in February 1968 that the Vietnam War was heading for a stalemate?

Walter Cronkite had just returned from a reporting trip made in the wake of the Tet Offensive, and an opinion poll later named him the country's most trusted man.

Which Creedence Clearwater Revival single of 1969 attacked the way the well-connected escaped the Vietnam draft?

Fortunate Son took John Fogerty about 20 minutes to write, with David Eisenhower, the grandson of a president, in mind.

Which 1986 Best Picture winner did Oliver Stone base on his own time as an infantryman in Vietnam?

Platoon was the first Hollywood film written and directed by a Vietnam veteran, and Stone gave himself a cameo as an officer in its final battle.

Which Joseph Conrad novella did Francis Ford Coppola transplant to the Vietnam War for the 1979 film Apocalypse Now?

Heart of Darkness is set in the Congo of the late 19th century, and the film keeps the name Kurtz for the renegade colonel played by Marlon Brando.

What nickname did US soldiers give Dong Ap Bia, the A Shau Valley ridge they stormed and then abandoned in 1969?

Hamburger Hill got its name from troops who said the fight ground men up like meat; the Army left the summit within weeks, and senators attacked the generals over it.

Which district outside Saigon hid the vast tunnel network that served as a Viet Cong base for the Tet Offensive?

Cu Chi's tunnels held hospitals, weapon stores and sleeping quarters, and one stretch was later widened so that visitors could crawl through it.

Near which South Vietnamese coastal city did 3,500 US Marines land in March 1965, opening the American ground war?

Da Nang drew the Marines because its air base needed guarding, and that base grew into one of the busiest airfields in the world.

Which Bell helicopter, officially the UH-1 Iroquois, became the workhorse and enduring symbol of the Vietnam War?

The Huey took its nickname from its original designation, HU-1, and the name stuck even after the Army renumbered the aircraft UH-1 in 1962.

What slang term did US troops in Vietnam coin for attacking their own officers, usually with a grenade?

Fragging took its name from the fragmentation grenade, which let a killing pass as an accident or enemy action; some 900 explosive attacks were logged from 1969 to 1972.

Which nickname did US troops in Vietnam commonly use for the Viet Cong?

Charlie came from Victor Charlie, the way radio operators spelled out VC, and troops stretched the name to cover North Vietnamese regulars as well.

Which future US senator and presidential nominee was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and held for over five years?

John McCain refused an early release that his captors offered once his father, an admiral, took command of all US forces in the Vietnam theater.

Which future secretary of state commanded a Swift boat in Vietnam, then testified against the war before the Senate?

John Kerry was wounded three times in combat, then told the Fulbright hearings that US policy in Vietnam was itself the cause of war crimes.

Which future US vice president enlisted after Harvard and served in Vietnam in 1971 as an Army journalist?

Al Gore enlisted so that his draft status could not be turned against his father, an anti-war senator who lost his seat before Gore shipped out.

What word did captured Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton blink in Morse code during a 1966 North Vietnamese TV interview?

Torture, spelled out with his eyelids while he feigned trouble with the studio lights, gave US naval intelligence its first confirmation of how captives were being treated.

Which comedian's 1970 NBC special, filmed before troops in Vietnam, drew one of the highest US ratings ever?

Bob Hope made 57 USO tours between 1941 and 1991, though in Vietnam he had trouble persuading other performers to join him.

Which civil rights leader denounced the Vietnam War from the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church in April 1967?

Martin Luther King Jr. gave the speech exactly one year before his assassination, and the NAACP and leading newspapers called it a mistake.

Which freelance reporter exposed the My Lai massacre in 1969 and won a Pulitzer Prize for the story?

Seymour Hersh saw the story rejected by Life and Look, so a small anti-war news service sold it to 35 newspapers instead.

Which novelist and Vietnam veteran wrote The Things They Carried, a 1990 collection of stories about foot soldiers?

Tim O'Brien made himself the book's protagonist and dedicated it to the fictional men of Alpha Company, blurring the line between memoir and invention.

Which US president restored full diplomatic relations with Vietnam two decades after the fall of Saigon?

Bill Clinton had lifted the US trade embargo on Vietnam the year before, and he made a historic visit to the country himself in November 2000.

Which general, later the namesake of the Army's M1 battle tank, took command of US forces in Vietnam in 1968?

Creighton Abrams was rated by George Patton as his one peer among tank commanders, and he ran the war until 1972 before becoming Army chief of staff.

Which elite Army unit was the subject of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler's ballad, the top Billboard single of 1966?

The Green Berets were Sadler's own outfit: he began the song while training as a Special Forces medic, and it held number one for five weeks.

Which Puccini opera is retold in Miss Saigon, the 1989 musical set around the fall of South Vietnam?

Madama Butterfly's geisha and naval lieutenant became a Saigon bar girl and a US Marine, and the musical grew out of a magazine photograph its composer came across by chance.

Which river's delta in southern Vietnam was patrolled by the assault boats of the US brown-water navy?

The Mekong delta was home to the Mobile Riverine Force, which paired Navy assault boats with an Army infantry brigade and operated from a floating base.

Which Asian ally sent some 320,000 troops to fight in Vietnam over the war, a foreign force second only to the US?

South Korea was repaid with billions of dollars in US grants, loans and contracts, money that helped several of its biggest conglomerates take off.

Which country's D Company held off a far larger Viet Cong force in a rubber plantation at Long Tan in August 1966?

Australia's D Company, 108 men counting a three-man New Zealand artillery observer party, fought through a monsoon downpour that cut visibility to about 50 metres and turned the ground to mud.

Which country launched a surprise invasion of Vietnam in February 1979, less than four years after Saigon fell?

China struck to teach its former ally a lesson for toppling a friendly regime next door, then pulled its troops back after about a month.

Which harbor city declared itself a port of first asylum for Vietnamese boat people and kept camps open until 2000?

Hong Kong held more than 64,000 boat people at the peak in 1991, and its last camp, at Pillar Point, shut only in May 2000.

Which neutral European country openly granted asylum to several hundred American deserters during the Vietnam War?

Sweden took in around 800 deserters and draft dodgers and welcomed them publicly, which soured its relations with Washington.

What did US helicopter loudspeakers play over the jungle at night to scare Viet Cong fighters into deserting?

Recorded ghostly voices, the heart of Operation Wandering Soul, played on a belief that the unburied dead wander in pain forever, but fighters who saw through the trick simply shot at the sound.

Which airline, covertly owned by the CIA, flew cargo and agents across Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War?

Air America grew into the largest air carrier in the region despite its secret owner, and it shut down in 1976, a year after Saigon fell.

Which Cold War idea did Eisenhower describe in 1954, warning that losing Indochina would start a chain reaction?

The domino theory pictured countries toppling one after another, and successive US administrations used it to justify intervening far from home.

Which change did the 26th Amendment make in 1971, pushed along by anger at 18-year-olds being drafted for Vietnam?

It lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, after campaigners pointed out that draftees could be sent to war yet had no say at the ballot box.

What did Mary Beth Tinker and fellow Iowa students wear to school in 1965 to protest against the Vietnam War?

Black armbands got Mary Beth and two others suspended, and in 1969 the Supreme Court ruled that students keep their free-speech rights at school.

What name did New Yorker television critic Michael Arlen coin for the Vietnam War as Americans watched it at home?

The living-room war was also the title of Arlen's first book, a 1969 collection of his television columns, and the phrase became a staple of writing on the conflict.

Agent Orange, the herbicide sprayed over South Vietnam's forests, took its name from what?

A stripe on its drums, painted orange, identified the blend inside each 55-gallon container, which was sprayed to strip away jungle cover from 1962 to 1971.

Which CIA-designed campaign of the Vietnam War set out to destroy the Viet Cong's political infrastructure?

The Phoenix Program counted 81,740 suspects as neutralized, roughly a third of them killed, and critics branded it an assassination campaign.

What was the formal name of the Viet Cong's umbrella organization, established in December 1960?

The National Liberation Front was founded at a village in Tay Ninh Province on North Vietnam's initiative, to stir up insurgency in the South.

Which general was president of South Vietnam from 1967 until he resigned days before the fall of Saigon?

Nguyen Van Thieu had taken power as head of a military junta in 1965, and after leaving for Taipei he eventually settled near Boston.

On which US carrier did a South Vietnamese major land a two-seat Cessna carrying his wife and five children?

USS Midway's crew learned of the plan from a note the pilot dropped on a low pass, and he put the little plane down on the center line with no tailhook to stop it.

Which Saigon building's gates did a North Vietnamese tank crash through on the final morning of the war?

Independence Palace was the seat of South Vietnam's president, and after the war it became known as Reunification Hall.