Vietnam War: Dates and Timeline

Famous American Vietnam Vets

John McCain McCain’s paternal grandfather and his father were four‑star admirals; his father rose to command all the U.S. naval forces in the Pacific. A graduate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, McCain volunteered for combat duty in Vietnam and began flying carrier‑based planes on low‑altitude bombing missions over North and South Vietnam. On October […]

Cu Chi Tunnels

Digging the Cu Chi Tunnels Communist forces began digging a network of tunnels under the jungle terrain of South Vietnam in the late 1940s, during their war of independence from French colonial authority. Tunnels were often dug by hand, only a short distance at a time. As the United States increasingly escalated its military presence […]

Khe Sanh

Defending Khe Sanh The U.S. military presence at Khe Sanh began in 1962, when Army Special Forces built a small camp near the village, located some 14 miles south of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Vietnam and 6 miles from the Laotian border on Route 9, the principal road from South Vietnam […]

Agent Orange

Operation Ranch Hand During the Vietnam War, the U.S military engaged in an aggressive program of chemical warfare codenamed Operation Ranch Hand. From 1961 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed a range of herbicides across more than 4.5 million acres of Vietnam to destroy the forest cover and food crops used by enemy North Vietnamese […]

Ho Chi Minh

Who Was Ho Chi Minh? Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cung on May 19, 1890, in a village in central Vietnam (then part of French Indochina) in Nghe province to Hoang Thi Loan, his mother, and Nguyen Sinh Sac. Ho attended the National Academy in Hue before being expelled for protesting against emperor […]

Chicago Seven

The Chicago Seven (originally eight) were political radicals accused of conspiring to incite the riots that occurred at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. During the five‑month trial, the prosecution stressed the defendants’ provocative rhetoric and subversive intentions, while the defense attributed the violence to official overreaction. The case drew national attention for the […]

Vietnamization

Nixon and the Vietnam War When President Richard M. Nixon took office in January 1969, the U.S. had been sending combat troops to fight in Vietnam since 1965, and some 31,000 American lives had been lost. However, the full‑scale U.S. military commitment seemingly had made little progress in defeating communist North Vietnam and its Viet […]

Operation Rolling Thunder

American Involvement in Vietnam Beginning in the 1950s, the U.S. provided military equipment and advisors to help the government of South Vietnam resist a communist takeover by North Vietnam and its South Vietnam‑based allies, the Viet Cong guerrilla fighters. In 1962, the American military initiated limited air operations within South Vietnam, in an effort to […]

Vietnam War Protests

Antiwar Movement Begins In August 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. By the time U.S. planes began regular bombings of North Vietnam in February 1965, some critics had begun to question the […]

My Lai Massacre

Charlie Company The small village of My Lai is located in Quang Ngai province, which was believed to be a stronghold of the communist National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong (VC) during the Vietnam War. Quang Ngai province was therefore a frequent target of U.S. and South Vietnamese bombing attacks, and the entire region […]

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

Tet Offensive

What Was the Tet Offensive? As the celebration of the lunar new year, the Tet holiday is the most important holiday on the Vietnamese calendar. In previous years, the holiday had been the occasion for an informal truce in the Vietnam War between South Vietnam and North Vietnam (and their communist allies in South Vietnam, […]