Innehållsförteckning för August 2017 från Vietnam

Your feature on Don Luce (“The Transformation of Don Luce,” by Ted Lieverman, April 2017) stirred very mixed feelings. Anyone is free to have his/her opinion, including Don Luce, but one cannot help to notice how one-sided some views can be. Thanks for publishing this. No doubt many will not share my thankfulness. Luce claims the Americans simply did not understand the Vietnamese and made no effort to do so, which was—according to him—one of the major reasons for our lack of success. Does he really think the Communists understood their own people? If so why did over 4 million flee south at the time of partition in 1954-55? Why did over 2 million take to the seas (number of drowned unknown) to escape in 1975? Why did hundreds of…

July 24 Don January wins the PGA Championship at Columbine Country Club in Colorado after beating Don Massengale in an 18-hole playoff. Jack Nicklaus and Dan Sikes tied for third. July 23 One of the deadliest riots in U.S. history begins when Detroit police arrest partiers in a raid on an unlicensed bar in a black neighborhood and someone throws a brick at a police car, starting mass looting and arson. When calm returned on July 31, there were 43 dead and 1,189 injured. Race riots occurred throughout the country in July and August. Aug. 5 British band Pink Floyd releases its first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, considered one of the major contributions to “psychedelic rock,” music written and performed to echo the effects of drugs…

Three and a half months after the first American combat troops, two battalions of Marines, waded ashore without resistance at Da Nang, U.S. Air Force jet pilots learned they wouldn’t have it so easy. On June 20, 1965, a McDonnell F-4C Phantom II was hit by a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17 near Ta Chan in northwest North Vietnam and became the first Phantom shot down in the war. The pilots of two MiG-17s from the North Vietnamese 921st Fighter Regiment thought a force of America’s most advanced combat aircraft would arrive to rescue the downed plane’s crew. Instead, they met ghosts out of the past: four gleaming white, straight-winged, single-seated propeller planes, Douglas A-1H Skyraiders of U.S. Navy attack squadron VA-25, “The Fist of the Fleet,” off the carrier USS Midway in…

Whether the Vietnam War was ultimately winnable has long divided historians. “Revisionists,” unlike their “orthodox” counterparts, insist the war was indeed winnable, and some claim that the war had been won by the early 1970s, only to be squandered by feckless politicians in Washington. Losing Binh Dinh, written by former Defense Department analyst Kevin M. Boylan, challenges the lost victory thesis in this compelling account of the war in a strategically vital South Vietnamese province. Boylan’s thoughtful study examines the conflict in Binh Dinh province, primarily through the prism of Operation Washington Green. The fertile, riceproducing province, which abutted the South China Sea and extended west to the rugged Central Highlands, was re garded as the heartland of the Communist insurgency in that region. The U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade…

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund has received a $10 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to build an education center at the Wall. The Lilly grant is the largest single cash donation in the Memorial Fund’s history. The education center will be a 25,000-square-foot building housing interactive and multimedia exhibits. The exhibits will focus on the significance of the Vietnam era, first-person accounts of the war and consequences still being felt today. he displays include a Wall of Faces—58,315 photos of the dead or missing listed on the memorial—and a collection of 6,000 of the 400,000 items left at the Wall by visitors. Also featured will be a hall honoring countries that supported the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. “This grant from Lilly Endowment is a big step forward in…

In the early morning hours of Good Friday, March 30, 1972, a massive barrage from four North Vietnamese Army artillery regiments slammed into the newly formed 3rd Infantry Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in South Vietnam’s northernmost province. Under cover of these fires, two NVA divisions poured across the Demilitarized Zone toward the town of Quang Tri. At the same time, another NVA division attacked from the west toward Hue, Vietnam’s ancient imperial capital. The Good Friday attack was the opening of North Vietnam’s Nguyen Hue Campaign (named for an emperor in the 1700s who united the northern and southern parts of what became Vietnam), also commonly known as the Spring Offensive of 1972 or the Easter Offensive. The offensive consisted of a three-front attack that…

The words Army and Art may seem like an odd pairing, but the military’s use of combat artists stretches back to early days of the U.S. Army, including the Mexican War and the Civil War, and continues through the world wars and Vietnam into today’s conflicts. Artists were initially used to simply record battles, troop movements or fortifications but soon turned to artistic documentation of war. In Vietnam, the Army Arts and Crafts Program recruited soldiers and civilians for Combat Artist Teams. Military artists spent 60 days in Vietnam, traveling extensively, participating in patrols and sketching their experiences. Civilian artists had 30-day tours. Both soldiers and civilians then had studio time after being deployed to finish the artwork before releasing it to the Army. The works produced for the Army…

A group of troops atop an M113 is one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War. The M113 armored personnel carrier, second only to the UH-1 Iroquois “Huey” helicopter in battlefield importance, entered production in April 1960. Developed by FMC, the aluminum-hulled M113, intended to be amphibious and air transportable, was considerably lighter than its predecessor, the M59. Unfortunately, its limited freeboard (distance from the water line to the roof) of 14 inches precluded use in amphibious operations. But the M113 could cross rivers with slow currents, relying on its hydraulically tensioned tracks for propulsion. Initially propelled by a 260 horsepower Chrysler 75M V-8 gasoline engine, the M113 was soon eclipsed by the diesel-powered M113A1, introduced in April 1963. By July 1, 1968, many M113s in Vietnam were diesel-powered.…

A little more than 50 years ago, on May 7, 1967, a 26-year-old Green Beret staff sergeant let his term of enlistment expire and took his honorable discharge at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He had served five years, including a tour of duty during 1964-65 as an A Team medic in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. He left the service, he said, to pursue a career in music and movies. Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler had a good start on the music part. His song, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” came out of nowhere in January 1966 to become the No. 1 single of the year, selling some 9 million copies. The album sold 2 million. Sadler earned $500,000 in royalties in the first six months after the song hit. In the…