Russian roulette and the Vietnam Was has become eponymous in the popular mind due to the success of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter (1978). Without giving too much away for readers that might be unfamiliar with the film, one of its most famous scenes involves the main characters, all American soldiers during the Vietnam War, taken prisoners and being forced to play Russian roulette by their captors. This scene has no basis in reality. Although it's always hard to prove a negative, Russian roulette was not prevalent at all during the war, neither by North or South Vietnamese soldiers or by American soldiers. There are no documented cases of American soldiers being forced to play Russian roulette while being prisoners of war.

Instead, Michael Cimino intended the deadly game to be a metaphor for America's involvement in South Vietnam. Cimino is quoted as saying that the "Russian roulette is a metaphor for what America was doing with its young people, sending them to a war in a foreign place." The metaphor is therefore a way of showing the ruthless, random, and ultimately deadly experience of the Vietnam War for a young American soldier, or at least how Cimino himself thought that the experience of a young soldier in the Vietnam War must have been like. This of course lends to interesting questions about how popular culture shapes the historical memory of a certain event, in this case the Vietnam War. There are many implausible and inaccurate depictions in Cimino's film, but so are the majority of films related to the Vietnam War. Whether it's the Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now or as in this case, a game of Russian roulette by American POWs, they make up a broader, popular image of the Vietnam War as senseless of a war as the game itself.