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- He was an international man of mystery who went by many names and lived in dozens of places, before returning to his own country to lead a revolution. We're talking about Ho Chi Minh, communist leader of North Vietnam who fought against the United States and won. Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in Central Vietnam in 1890. Vietnam at that time was part of French Indochina, a colonial possession of France.

The future Ho Chi Minh was a good student and, according to Confucian tradition, was given the name Nguyen Tat Thanh, which translates to "the accomplished." As a young man, Nguyen decided to see the world. So he hopped a French steamer and worked as a kitchen helper under a fake name. Specific details are sketchy, but it seems the future revolutionary knocked around for almost a decade.

While living in Paris, Ho Chi Minh worked as a photo retoucher, like Photoshop before there was Photoshop, but he was also politically active. He tried to petition US President Woodrow Wilson during the Versailles peace talks. Ho Chi Minh's request-- that Vietnam be granted independence from French rule. Wilson didn't even acknowledge the young Vietnamese national. It wasn't long after that that Ho Chi Minh joined the French Communist Party.

A few years later, he bounced in the USSR while posing as a Chinese merchant named Chen Vang. After studying communism in Moscow, he moved to Canton, China, calling himself Nguyen Ái Quoc. Are you keeping track of the number of names this guy used? Because I lost count.

He returned to his native Vietnam in 1940. He'd been gone almost 30 years. And he finally began to call himself Ho Chi Minh, or bringer of light. And what did he bring? An organization called the Viet Minh, which sought an independent Vietnam. The Viet Minh took advantage of the chaos caused by World War II, and in 1945, seized the northern city of Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh became the leader of the new democratic state of Vietnam.

But the French held on to the southern part of Vietnam, and a complicated civil war between the communist North and anti-communist South ensued. This ultimately led to US involvement in the region, as Uncle Sam put his weight behind the anti-communist forces. You may have heard of this. It's called the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam War ground on through the 1960s. Although Ho Chi Minh had stepped down from day-to-day leadership, he remained an important figure for North Vietnam, a symbol of Vietnamese unification. And he had one more name. He was called Uncle Ho. However, this friendly moniker obscures many of the negative aspects of Minh's rule. He instituted a policy called land reform, violently seizing farms from rural landowners, killing thousands in the process.

In addition, after American soldiers took the city of Hue in 1968, they discovered a mass grave of 5,700 victims massacred while Minh's forces had occupied the city. Late in his life, Uncle Ho gave a wartime message to the North Vietnamese that became a rallying cry for their cause. He said, "Nothing is as dear to the heart of the Vietnamese as independence and liberation."

Ho Chi Minh wouldn't live to see this independence, however. He died in 1969 at the age of 79. But his wish was fulfilled. The Vietnam War ended in 1976 with a US troop withdrawal and the unification of Vietnam under communist rule. After the war, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honor of the former leader. The man with no fixed name or address now has both.

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- Young people in large numbers came out and joined what became known as the Red Guards. These largely terroristic organizations were used to publicly humiliate, assault, and in some cases even murder political enemies of Mao and the Communist Party.