Vietnam War: The Battle of Dong Ap Bia begins with an assault on Hill 937. It will ultimately become known as Hamburger Hill.

The Vietnam War was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and their allies. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, while South Vietnam was supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations. The conflict was the second of the Indochina wars and a proxy war of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and US. The Vietnam War was one of the postcolonial wars of national liberation, a theater in the Cold War, and a civil war, with civil warfare a defining feature from the outset. Direct US military involvement escalated from 1965 until its withdrawal in 1973. The fighting spilled into the Laotian and Cambodian Civil Wars, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975.

Dong Ap Bia is a mountain on the Laotian border of South Vietnam in Huế. Rising from the floor of the western A Shau Valley, it is a looming, solitary massif, unconnected to the ridges of the surrounding Annamite range. It dominates the northern valley, towering some 937 metres above sea level. Snaking down from its highest peak are a series of ridges and fingers, one of the largest extending southeast to a height of 900 metres, another reaching south to a 916-metre peak. The entire mountain is a rugged, uninviting wilderness blanketed in double- and triple-canopy jungle, dense thickets of bamboo, and waist-high elephant grass. Local Montagnard tribesmen call Ap Bia "the mountain of the crouching beast."

The Battle of Hamburger Hill was fought by US Army and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) forces against People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) forces during Operation Apache Snow of the Vietnam War. Though the heavily fortified Hill 937, a ridge of the mountain Dong Ap Bia in central Vietnam near its western border with Laos, had little strategic value, US command ordered its capture by a frontal assault, only to abandon it soon thereafter. The action caused a controversy among both the US armed services and the public back home, and marked a turning point in the U.S. involvement.