Innehållsförteckning för December 2017 från Vietnam

The 1st and 2nd platoons of B Company, 9th Marine Regiment, attacked North Vietnamese Army positions on Hill 861 near Khe Sanh on April 24, 1967, and came under heavy fire as they moved into position. The Americans responded by deploying the company’s 60 mm mortars, but the difficult terrain complicated mortar placement. Lance Cpl. Dana Darnell placed his helmet between his legs and set his mortar tube’s base upon it, using his hands to steady the weapon. The Marine maintained a steady rain of fire on the enemy throughout the engagement, pausing only to gather more ammunition. Darnell, killed in action two days later, was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions on April 24. His M19 60 mm mortar had been designed to replace the M2 mortar of…

F ear struck the heart of Marine 1st Lt. Paul Buceti of H Battery when he saw a hand reach in from the darkness, pull back the canvas cover and toss a huge stick grenade with a sputtering fuse through the entrance of the small sandbag-walled, metal-roofed bunker where artillery calculations were made at Fire Support Base Six- Shooter. “I thought it was over,” Buceti remembered. The lieutenant, shirtless and barefoot, wearing just his shorts, rushed for the exit, as did the two other Marines in the bunker. Lance Cpls. Fred Roach Jr. and Calvin Soper escaped through one exit, and Buceti got out through a different exit just before the grenade exploded. When the Marines left the bunker, they were met by AK-47 assault rifle fire from North Vietnamese Army…

The Home Base Program, a clinic formed by the Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans who served after the 9/11 attacks, is extending its services to veterans who fought in Vietnam, reported The Boston Globe. The expanded program kicked off in July when Vietnam veterans were honored during a weekend of activities in conjunction with a Boston Red Sox game against the New York Yankees. There was a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial outside of Fenway Park, a fundraising “Run to Home Base” that ended at home plate and a pregame ceremony with more than 1,300 Vietnam vets and their families on the field. “For many of these guys, this is the one, last, open sore,” said Jack Hammond, executive director…

“If Abrams strongly recommends it, we will do it.” President Richard Nixon to adviser Henry Kissinger —White House Tapes, Dec. 9, 1970 That Oval Office conversation was the high point of the commander in chief’s relationship with four-star Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr., head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, which oversaw all American combat forces inside South Vietnam. By the spring of 1971 presidential confidence in the MACV leader had deteriorated and would continue to erode throughout Abrams’ tenure as the top U.S. military man in Vietnam during the final years of the war. Gruff and sometimes disheveled, Abrams was the antithesis of his predecessor, the upbeat, immaculately groomed Gen. William Westmoreland. “Abe” inspired the troops with his competence, plain talk and combat record. During World War II, he received two…

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, the National Archives is pulling photographs, documents and other items off its shelves and putting them on display for more than a year at its Washington , D.C., museum and in a traveling exhibition. The archives houses millions of Vietnam War records created or received by the U.S. government. Among the holdings are presidential and congressional documents, military personnel records, combat reports, prisoner-of-war records, hundreds of thousands of photographs, miles of film and thousands of artifacts. More than 80 of those original records, including recently declassified documents and audio tapes, are featured in the new exhibit, Remembering Vietnam: Twelve Critical Episodes in the Vietnam War, which focuses on 12 events or periods that were turning points in the war. Three theaters…

Thirty years ago, America’s irritable mood over the costly military venture in Vietnam began to lighten just a little. As the search for missing servicemen was escalating and veterans were lining up for treatment of mental trauma and exposure to Agent Orange, a Hollywood company took a major gamble: Touchstone Pictures, a distribution label of The Walt Disney Co., made a bet that the time was right for the first major motion picture combining humor and the Vietnam War. Good Morning, Vietnam, released on Dec. 23, 1987, is not a war movie in the traditional sense. Most of the movie, filmed in Thailand,takes place in the urban setting of 1965 Saigon, and there is very limited onscreen violence. It’s the story of Air Force disc jockey and Staff Sgt. Adrian…

South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After By Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Praeger, 2016 Did the Republic of Vietnam deserve to lose the war? That certainly seems to be the major theme presented by the U.S. media’s war coverage: South Vietnam’s government wasn’t “democratic enough” to merit America’s support and its armed forces didn’t fight hard enough to gain a victory in the 1955-75 war of aggression waged by North Vietnam’s ruthless and repressive Communist regime. Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, author of this outstanding book presenting accounts of South Vietnamese veterans who made it to Australia after the war, agrees that an egregious dou ble standard was applied by Western media to the two warring countries— consistently condemning the South while excusing the countless war crimes committed…