Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i Vietnam

A bill to add 74 U.S. sailors killed in 1969 on USS Frank E. Evans to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, “the Wall,” in Washington failed in a Senate vote on May 14. “They deserve to be on that wall, so anything else other than that is just a slap in the face,” veteran Steve Kraus, 73, who survived the disaster, told CQ Roll Call. “It’s a fact. They belong on that wall.” On June 3, 1969, the Evans, a U.S. Navy destroyer, collided with the Royal Australian Navy’s light aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne in the South China Sea. The seismic crash sliced the destroyer in two and left 74 American sailors dead. Their names were not eligible to be included on the national memorial due to Defense Department regulations defining…

I enlisted in the Navy on Feb. 5, 1968, three days after my 19th birthday. Shortly before completing basic training at Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago, I received my first set of orders and was about to become a crew member on USS Krishna, a landing craft repair ship. It was then in dry dock at the base in Yokosuka, Japan. I had long been interested in the Land of the Rising Sun, so my four-year military commitment was off to a great start. When renovations on the Krishna were complete, we got underway at a less-than-blistering 9 knots—about 11 mph. On Sept. 24, we dropped anchors in An Thoi, a South Vietnamese fishing village on the southern tip of Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Thailand.…

During the Vietnam War, there was a compulsory draft of American physicians. One of the few alternatives to service in Vietnam was a position in the Public Health Service. The limited number of such appointments made them highly competitive—especially for doctors who wanted to join the clinical associate program at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Successful candidates, sometimes derogatorily described as “Yellow Berets,” trained there under leading laboratory scientists and provided care to patients at the campus research hospital. Among the roughly 200 trainees who entered the clinical associate program in 1968, four physicians with little or no prior research experience—Joseph Goldstein, Michael Brown, Harold Varmus, and Robert Lefkowitz—went on to distinguished careers crowned by Nobel Prizes, the highest honor in science. Medal Winners: How the Vietnam…

In April 1966, after serving nearly eight months as a forward observer in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), Larry Hunter was reassigned to a 105 mm artillery battery. “I have a lot less worries about getting shot at,” wrote the battle-hardened lieutenant in a letter home. “Now that I’m away from the infantry, I’ll tell you that an artillery forward observer is one of the most dangerous positions over here (as if you didn’t already know).” Hunter recalls the dangers and the difficulties he experienced as an “FO” in Vietnam in his thoughtful memoir, Fire Mission! Fire Mission! Born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, Hunter graduated from Florence State (now the University of North Alabama) in 1965 and earned a commission through the school’s ROTC program. Hunter then attended the…

There are several ways to answer this question, depending on how one interprets the terms “lose” and “war.” All of the arguments have merit, and readers may choose which one seems most persuasive to them. The conventional view remains that the United States lost the Vietnam War because our opponent, North Vietnam, conquered the side we backed, South Vietnam, which surrendered in April 1975. Although the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong sustained enormous casualties—upward of a million killed by wounds, disease and malnutrition—the communists eventually prevailed. Others argue the United States did not lose the war because all U.S. combat forces had departed South Vietnam by the beginning of 1973, more than two years before the final North Vietnamese victory. In this view, the war was a political failure—the United…

Shortly after 10 a.m. April 3, 1965, Pham Ngoc Lan brought his MiG-17 to fire on Navy Lt. Cmdr. Spence Thomas’ Vought F-8E Crusader as the American jet pulled away from attacking an anti-aircraft artillery position. Approaching undetected, Pham opened fire at a range of 200-300 yards. As the shells hit, Thomas lit his afterburner and climbed away. Pham’s wingman and two other nearby MiGs tried unsuccessfully to down three additional Crusaders. Thomas landed his severely damaged fighter at Da Nang in northern South Vietnam. Although the North Vietnamese won this first F-8 vs. MiG engagement, Crusaders by the end of the war had earned the title “MiG Masters,” achieving a 19-3 kill ratio over opponents. The F-8, which entered production in 1955, was the Navy’s first fighter to use…

To ignore Murphy’s Law—“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”—while conducting flight operations on an aircraft carrier is a capital offense. As 30-ton jets hurtle off the bow, controlled-crash landings are made on the stern and exhausts blaze, the slightest misstep or malfunction can be fatal. In October 1966, the USS Oriskany in the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast met disaster when a burning magnesium flare was tossed into a locker filled with flares and rocket warheads. Misfortune befell the USS Forrestal, also in the Gulf, in July 1967, when a rocket under the wing of a parked fighter burst on a crowded flight deck. In January 1969, a rocket aboard the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise off the coast of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was subjected to the…

The list of the Vietnam War’s iconic aircraft—with the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II fighter-bomber, Bell’s UH-1 “Huey” helicopter and the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber usually near the top—doesn’t often include Lockheed’s four-engine jet transport, the C-141 Starlifter. But that cargo hauler, which may seem to some as merely a truck with wings, also has powerful, extraordinarily emotional stories to tell from its time in-country, which stretched from the earliest days of the war until the last. C-141s were designed in response to an Air Force request for a global transport. Previous generations of propeller driven aircraft, such as the Lockheed C-130 Hercules, did not have the range, speed or payload capacity required to meet global threats. Air Force Lt. Gen. William Tunner was a driving force behind the new…

I don’t think the author (Mindy Farmer, “May 4, 1970,” June 2020) really emphasizes the absolute hate by the leftist, antimilitary protesters. The rocks and brickbats being thrown were not inconsequential. They were very dangerous and extremely provoking. I don’t think the troops should have shot the idiots who were protesting as they also got a good kid who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The thugs throwing rocks were not exercising constitutional guarantees as they were not peaceful. They should have been punished, but the school administrators didn’t have spines, and they got away with unlawful, disruptive and anti American conduct which has set the new “standard” since. Edwin L. Kennedy Jr. New Market, Alabama I read with great distraction the May 4, 1970,…

In May 1950, President Harry S. Truman agreed to provide financial aid and military equipment to French forces fighting a communist-led movement attempting to end France’s control over Vietnam. In August, he sent in 35 men to serve as advisers to the French—the first members of the U.S. military in Vietnam. In the following years Truman and successor Dwight D. Eisenhower added more advisers, and by the end of 1959 about 760 U.S. military advisers were in Vietnam. The number of advisers continued to grow under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The first ground combat units arrived March 8, 1965. The first troop withdrawals occurred in June 1969 during President Richard Nixon’s administration. The last U.S. troops in Vietnam left on March 29, 1973. Bennie Adkins, a…

July 4 The American Top 40 countdown with Los Angeles announcer Casey Kasem debuts on 50 stations. At No. 40 is “The End of Our Road,” by Marvin Gaye. No. 1 is “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” by Three Dog Night. July 29 Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler, is released. In his best-seller Toffler says that the shock of rapid technological and social change is overwhelming people, leading to disorientation and stress. The book also brought the phrase “information overload” into common usage. Aug. 6 Congress passes legislation that replaces the U.S. Post Office Department with the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency, rather than a Cabinet department. President Richard Nixon signed the legislation on Aug. 12. Aug. 12 The brutally violent Soldier Blue premiers with Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss as…

In 1952, in Tonkin, the French-ruled region in the northernmost part of today’s Vietnam, a small garrison found itself surrounded by an army of Vietnamese independence fighters, the communist-led Viet Minh. The garrison at Gia Hoi, manned by French officers and members of the local Tai mountain tribes, was an isolated outpost in the rugged hills between the Red and Black rivers. The soldiers at Gia Hoi awoke on Oct. 15, 1952, to find an entire regiment of Viet Minh regulars massed for an assault. In an extraordinary achievement of logistics and concealment, Viet Minh Commander-in-Chief Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap had put 30,000 soldiers and 20,000 porters on the east bank of the upper Red River north of Yen Bai and quietly moved them across the river on Oct. 11.…

Helicopters began proving their worth over Korea in the 1950s, but it was over Indochina that a new generation of rotary winged aircraft became an indispensable military asset. Vertical takeoff and landing capabilities allowed soldiers to be rushed to the jungles, valleys and hilltops. The copters were equally adept at extracting troops when the operation was completed. Their ability to evacuate the wounded and swiftly convey them to a medical facility was the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of casualties. As the war expanded, specialized helicopters were developed for a variety of tasks. Cargo carriers brought artillery, ammunition and other heavy equipment to remote fire support bases. When communist-manned 12.7 mm machine guns (known and dreaded by the helicopter crews as “.51-calibers”) became a threat to…