The Vietnam War marks one of the darker chapters in American
history. Given American history, that's quite the achievement!
Despite the notoriety of Vietnam, most people don't know just how weird, crazy, and ugly things got. Here, then, are insane things you never knew about the Vietnam War!
1
61% of U.S troops killed in Vietnam were younger than 21 years old. Many had been drafted
2
Vietnam actually kept the American Embassy in Saigon and gave it back to the USA when they returned in 1995, the USA decided to demolish it themselves in 1998.
3
Vietnam War medics formed the core of early EMS. Their training and experience were needed, as many first responders in the 60s were undertrained funeral home workers. So, those wounded in combat actually had a better chance of survival than those getting into car accidents in the US.
4
LBJ had an affair spanning decades with Alice Glass, a humanitarian who eventually ended it when the president escalated military action in Vietnam.
5
During the Vietnam war, many American soldiers stationed in Japan went AWOL and fled to Sweden. Swedish PM Palme was vehemently against the war and promised that he would grant asylum to deserters.
6
3000 orphans were evacuated from Vietnam in 1975 during Operation Babylift. It was later discovered that hundreds of them had parents or falsified documents. One of the planes crashed almost immediately after takeoff
7
The dap (handshake) originated during the Vietnam War as a way for black GIs to communicate.
8
The U.S. Navy dropped a "Toilet Bomb" - code named: Sani-Flush - on North Vietnam
9
In 1967, hippies attempted a ritual to levitate the Pentagon in the air to end the Vietnam War.
10
In 1969, the US held a televised draft lottery for the Vietnam War, in which blue capsules were pulled from a container at random containing birthdates that would determine who the first round of eligible men to go off to war would be
11
During the Vietnam War, the American navy laid thousands of sea mines in the waters off North Vietnam. In August of 1972, a solar storm caused 4,000 of them to spontaneously explode in just a few weeks.
12
Hanoi Hannah was a radio host for the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. Hannah would broadcast exact locations of US Army units, and address soldiers directly, in an attempt to denounce and frighten the US Military.
13
In 1989, the American Homecoming Act helped children born from U.S soldiers in Vietnam come to the U.S with their families. They based this only on the child's appearance. It was controversial since it didn't apply to the kids of U.S soldiers in other countries.
14
Noble Craig, after losing both of his legs and one of his arms while fighting in the Vietnam War, became an actor and starred in horror films as various limbless monsters such as the "Snake Man" and the "Vomit Creature"
15
The US provided Laos with funds and concrete to expand an airport that could serve as a base for US fighter jets during the Vietnam War. But as the funds and concrete arrived before any contract was signed, Laos decided instead to build a memorial to soldiers who died in World War II.
16
The Phoenix Program in the Vietnam War was a CIA, US special forces, and South Vietnamese campaign designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong via infiltration, torture, capture, interrogation, and assassination. Phoenix "neutralized" 81,740 people suspected of VC membership.
17
The founding father of modern Vietnam is Ho Chi Minh that led Vietnam's communist revolution against French colonial rule, and then took on the US, had long had an admiration for the US and repeatedly sought the country's help in the decades before the Vietnam War.
18
Instead of rotating units into and out of Vietnam, the US military replaced individual members. The replacements were subjected to abuse from their peers, leading to an increase in the number of psychiatric casualties who were removed from the battlefield
19
The U.S. military has used superstition and pretended to be vampires and ghosts to scare enemies away. They dispersed scary horoscopes in Germany, staged vampire attacks in the Philippines, and in Vietnam blasted ghost tapes that consisted of spooky music and eerie voices. Only vampires worked.
20
In 1953 President Eisenhower explicitly cited American access to minerals (tin, tungsten) as a reason for involvement in Southeast Asia and the ongoing war in Vietnam.
21
The CIA disguised seismometers as tiger poop to track Vietnamese troop movements during the Vietnam War.
22
PFC Dan Bullock was the youngest U.S. serviceman killed in action during the Vietnam War. He falsified his birth certificate and enlisted when he was 14, and died when he was 15
23
The final evacuation of Saigon, Vietnam was signaled by playing "White Christmas" on Armed Forces Radio
24
The SS Columbia Eagle Mutiny was when two anti-war protestors forced most of the crew of a ship into lifeboats and had the remainder sail the ship to Cambodia. All to keep a load of napalm from reaching Vietnam. Of the two men involved one served a prison sentence and the other disappeared.
25
The CIA paid Vietnam War spies by ordering them items from the Sears catalog because the spies operated in areas that had a barter economy and didn't rely on cash
