| A | B |
|---|
| Geneva Accords | This temporarily divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. |
| Tonkin Gulf Resolution | This granted the U.S. president broad military powers in Vietnam. |
| Operation Rolling Thunder | This was the first extensive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. |
| Dien Bien Phu | When this fell to Vietnamese forces in 1959, the French began to leave Vietnam. |
| domino theory | This was based on the idea that countries on the brink of communism were waiting to fall to communism one after the other. |
| Ho Chi Minh Trail | This allowed Communists in North Vietnam to supply military arms to the government opposition group in South Vietnam. |
| Ngo Dinh Diem | This anti-Communist South Vietnam president canceled elections that were supposed to unify Vietnam. |
| strategic hamlet program | This South Vietnamese policy was intended to combat the growing popularity and presence of an anti-government group in the South's countryside. |
| Vietminh | This group, formed by Vietnamese Communists and other nationalist groups in 1941, declared independence from foreign rule as its single goal. |
| Vietcong | This was a South Vietnamese opposition group that carried out thousands of assassinations of South Vietnamese government officials. |
| Ho Chi Minh | He led the Indochinese Communist Party and fought French, Japanese, and U.S. forces for the independence of Vietnam. |
| credibility gap | Television, the worsening state of the U.S. economy, and the Fulbright hearings helped to increase this. |
| Agent Orange | The U.S. military used planes to spray this leaf-killing toxic chemical which devastated the landscape of Vietnam. |
| Dean Rusk | As secretary of state in the Johnson administration, he argued for U.S. escalation in Vietnam, claiming that abandoning the South Vietnamese would cause "disaster to peace." |
| Robert McNamara | As secretary of defense in the Johnson administration, he admitted he "would have thought differently at the start" of the conflict in Vietnam if he had been aware of the Vietcong's resilience. |
| napalm | To expose Vietcong tunnels and hideouts, U.S. planes dropped this gasoline-based bomb that set fire to the jungles of Vietnam. |
| search and destroy missions | Conducted by U.S. soldiers, these resulted in the uprooting of Vietnamese villagers with suspected ties to the Vietcong, the killing of their livestock, and the burning of their villages. |
| William Westmoreland | As the U.S. commander in South Vietnam, this general introduced the concept of the body count in the belief that as the number of Vietcong casualties rose, the Vietcong would eventually surrender. |
| Henry Kissinger | He served as the top U.S. negotiator in Vietnam. |
| Tonkin Gulf Resolution | Angry with Nixon's secret orders to bomb and invade Cambodia, Congress repealed this. |
| silent majority | In an attempt to win support for his war policies, Nixon made a special appeal to this group. |
| invasion of Cambodia | Upon hearing of this, U.S. college students went on the first general student strike in the nation's history. |
| Khmer Rouge | This Communist group seized power in Cambodia after the U.S. invasion of that country unleashed a brutal civil war. |
| My Lai massacre | This murder of more than 200 innocent Vietnamese villagers by U.S. troops shocked Americans when it was finally revealed to the public. |
| War Powers Act | This requires a president to inform Congress within 48 hours if U.S. forces are sent into a hostile area without a declaration of war. |
| Pentagon Papers | Publication of this revealed, among other things, that the Johnson administration had lied to the public about its intentions in Vietnam. |
| Vietnamization | This called for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops in Vietnam. |
