Ho Chi Minh - HISTORY

Learn about the many names and identities of the man who would become the face of the Vietnamese nationalist movement.

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Find out more about the elaborate network of underground tunnels used as hideouts, living quarters and supply routes for the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.

In a Mail Call video, R. Lee Ermey answers a question from Charlie in Georgia who wants to know just where the term gung ho comes from; many leatherneck historians disagree about just when and how this term entered the Marine Corps vocabulary. Some historians think that Marines picked it up in the year 1900 when they were fighting in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Historians strongest theory pins the word on Lt. Col. Evans Carlson who in 1937, was a Marine observer in China studying the Chinese army. Carlson was impressed by how the Chinese troops worked together using a system of cooperation they called gung ho, which means work together. Carlson introduced this phrase to his own Marine troops but it didnt really catch on until 1943 when Randolph Scott portrayed a Marine in a movie called Gung Ho! After that, gung ho became a household word and a Marines highest compliment.

The first major U.S. campus uprising of the 1960s occurred on October 1, 1964, at the University of California at Berkeley. That day, Jack Weinberg, a Congress of Racial Equality student activist, was arrested for handing out leaflets on campus in defiance of a campus ban on political activity. Police put Weinberg in a squad car, but before it could drive away thousands of student surrounded the vehicle, keeping it immobile for the next 32 hours and making speeches from its roof. The protest marked the beginning of the Free Speech Movement, a series of demonstrations at UC-Berkeley that culminated on December 2, 1964, when 1,200 students took over Sproul Hall on campus, demanding an end to speech restrictions. At the Sproul protest, folk singer Joan Baez sang ''We Shall Overcome'' and Free Speech leader Mario Savio declared, ''There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies on the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus. And you've got to make it stop.'' California state troopers were called in to break up the sit-in, and they arrested 800 students, dozens of whom were injured by the police. A student strike then shut down the campus until the faculty senate voted to support the students' Free Speech Movement, compelling the administration to lift political restrictions. UC-Berkeley would remain a hotbed of political protest throughout the 1960s, and antiwar and civil rights protesters would employ many of the methods developed by the Free Speech Movement activists.

What happened at Kent State University on May 4, 1970? Learn about the political and social movements that set the stage for a bloody showdown between student protestors and the Ohio National Guard.

Learn about the international incident that escalated American involvement in the Vietnam War.

On November 2, 1963, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his closest adviser, his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, were killed in a U.S.-instigated military coup. Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu speaks out about the assassinations.

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