Innehållsförteckning för February 2021 från Vietnam

AT THE END OF DECEMBER 1967, a month before the communist Tet Offensive attacks throughout South Vietnam, approximately 225,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese fighters were operating in South Vietnam. They consisted of 68,000 full-time combat soldiers born in North Vietnam, 47,000 Viet Cong combat soldiers born in the South, 37,000 Southern-born Viet Cong administrative personnel who ran the communist shadow government in many parts of the country and 71,000 part-time Viet Cong guerrillas born in the South, according to estimates by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. MACV calculated that the communists committed 124,000 combat troops and guerrillas to the 1968 Tet Offensive—84,000 in the initial battles of Jan. 30-31, plus 40,000 over the next several weeks. About half of them served in North Vietnamese units, and the rest belonged to…

During the U.S. military’s peak strength in South Vietnam—543,400 personnel in April 1969—the Army supplied more than two-thirds of the American force. April 1969 was not only the peak strength of the U.S. force overall but also for all but one of the five services. The Coast Guard’s personnel total that month was 400, down from a high of 500 in June 1968. SOURCE: SELECTED MANPOWER STATISTICS, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, OASD (COMPTROLLER) DIRECTORATE FOR INFORMATION OPERATIONS AND CONTROL, MAY 15, 1974…

Jan. 1 The last commercial for cigarettes is broadcast when a Virginia Slims ad airs at 11:59 p.m. on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. A ban on cigarette ads, mandated by the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act signed by President Richard Nixon on April 1, 1970, kicked in at midnight. Jan. 12 All in the Family debuts on CBS with Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, a New York loading-dock worker who spews ethnic slurs, but also shows a kind side, as the series confronts political and cultural controversies with a bluntness that shattered the norms of TV comedies. Jan. 17 The Baltimore Colts of the American Football Conference edge out the National Football Conference’s Dallas Cowboys 16-13 in Super Bowl V, filled with interceptions and fumbles. The “Blunder Bowl”…

At approximately 4 a.m. on Jan. 21, 1968, I stood watch as assistant operations officer in the 3rd Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment’s combat operations center at the Khe Sanh Combat Base shooting the breeze with Maj. Matt Caulfield, the battalion’s operations officer. I remember handing him a C-ration cup of coffee when we heard heart-stopping words come over the radio speaker from a lieutenant on a nearby hill: “We’re being overrun!” Caulfield grabbed the radio handset and demanded, “What the hell’s going on?” The Khe Sanh base was on a plateau in the northwest corner of South Vietnam just south of the Demilitarized Zone dividing it from North Vietnam and about 6 miles from the Laotian border. The base was intended to block enemy infiltration from Laos and serve as…

Years ago I drove past the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Midway with a friend shortly after it was permanently docked in San Diego as the USS Midway Museum. During my four years in the Navy I was a swift boat maintenance and repair electrician in Vietnam and subsequently stationed on the USS Sperry, a supply ship for submarines, at San Diego’s Ballast Point. I glanced at the massive aircraft carrier and said, “Whoa, that sure is a huge ship!” During my friend’s 20-year career in the Navy he was a pilot with many landings on the flight deck of carriers. Looking at the ship, he answered, “That sure is a small airport!” Named for the decisive June 1942 Battle of Midway in the Pacific during World War II, the carrier…

“They [the South Vietnamese] are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it—the people of Vietnam—against the communists. We are prepared to continue to assist them, but I don’t think that the war can be won unless the people support the effort, and, in my opinion, in the last two months the government has gotten out of touch with the people.” —President John F. Kennedy, Sept. 2, 1963, in an interview with “CBS Evening News” anchor Walter Cronkite…

The nurses in Vietnam were among the most heroic Americans there. They made great sacrifices yet have not received the recognition and respect they deserve. Many nurses, usually women in their early 20s, volunteered to serve in Vietnam because they wanted to go where they believed they could accomplish the most good, even though they were heading into a war that was unpopular with much of the country. Many others, however, were like Susan O’Neill, who was misled by military recruiters. While in nursing school she was told that if she enlisted the military would provide money that she could use to pay for her last year of school. When O’Neill, who opposed the war, asked about Vietnam, the recruiter told her not to worry about Vietnam because there was…

Jessica Pearce Rotondi is the granddaughter of a World War II airman shot down and held prisoner by the Germans. She is also the niece of a U.S. Air Force AC-130H Spectre gunship crewman who went down with his plane in Laos during a night reconnaissance mission in 1972 and was never heard from again. Her grandfather and uncle—along with her mother and herself—are the subjects of Rotondi’s first book, What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers, a compelling account of the family’s long struggle to get answers about the fate of Uncle Jack Pearce. Rotondi, a writer and editor, also deals with the devastating impact of the 2009 death of her mother, Linda Pearce Rotondi, who took up the cause of accounting for her…

Valérie André is a medevac helicopter pioneer—and the first woman to fly a helicopter in combat. For her service in Vietnam she was decorated with the Legion of Honor, the National Order of Vietnam and the Croix de Guerre for valor in foreign operations. She is the first woman to become a general in the French military. André, born in Strasbourg in 1922, was a member of the French Resistance in World War II. During her time as a medical student after the war, she learned to fly fixed-wing aircraft at a local flying club. In 1948 she graduated from the University of Paris with a medical degree and qualified as a neurosurgeon. By that time the French were deeply involved in a war with the Viet Minh independence movement…

Amemorial honoring the military service of Native Americans opened on Veterans Day 2020 at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, unveiling a design by Vietnam veteran Harvey Pratt, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. Pratt served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1962 to 1965. He was sent to Vietnam in 1963 and stationed in Da Nang, where he worked in air rescue and air base security. After his military service, Pratt embarked on a career in law enforcement. He was a forensic artist for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation from 1972 to 2017. He is also a Southern Cheyenne peace chief, the greatest honor of the Cheyenne Nation. Pratt’s uncle, who fought in World War II and the Korean War, inspired…

Shortly before 10 p.m. on July 19, 1972, two waves of MiG-17 fighters attacked the guided missile frigate USS Biddle. Two MiGs came in the first wave. The ship’s Terrier surface-to-air missiles downed one and sent another scrambling. The three-MiG second wave, detected at about 8 miles, came in low at about 580 mph and quickly got too close to hit with a missile launch. With no working radar to direct the Biddle’s gunfire, the ship’s guns opened up with a World War II style barrage (at a low angle and high volume). During a period of just 90 seconds, 54 5-inch and 35 3-inch rounds were fired. One MiG was shot down. Another headed home. The third flew overhead without dropping any bombs. The ship fired two Terriers at…

In February 1968 the headlines out of Southeast Asia were all bad: North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive, the battles of Hue and Quang Tri, the siege of Khe Sanh. In one week, America had suffered its highest casualties of the war. And that wasn’t even the whole story. There was another military disaster in early 1968 that would remain unreported for many years. Nearby in “officially neutral” Laos, 3,000 communist troops converged on a handful of American civilians at a top-secret 5,800-foot-high mountaintop base 15 miles from the North Vietnamese border. U.S. Air Force Maj. Richard Secord first saw Phou Pha Thi—its name means “Sacred Mountain”—in 1966. “The place was right out of a travel poster,” he recalled. “The crest ran northwest to southeast straight out of a lush valley filled…

As a young boy growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, during the late 1940s and 1950s, Dr. Sheldon Kushner, a 26-year-old U.S. Air Force captain, never envisioned that he would be a trauma surgeon for civilians in South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, an experience that changed his life. He saw the horrors of war but believes his tour of duty in Vietnam made him a better doctor when he returned to the United States. The war was heating up during the time Kushner was in college and then medical school at the University of Alabama. Under the Berry Plan, a Defense Department program permitting students to complete medical school and residency before serving their military obligation on active duty, he was scheduled to enter the Air Force following his internship. After completing…

The Tailhook Convention of Navy aviators in September 2001 was the genesis of Peter Fey’s meticulously researched book about Carrier Air Wing 16’s participation in bombing missions over North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968. At the meeting the author, then a young naval aviator, met retired Navy Capt. Wynn Foster, a legendary A-4 Skyhawk pilot known within Tailhook circles as “Captain Hook.” A squadron commander in summer 1966, Foster led an attack against a North Vietnamese gasoline storage facility protected by heavy antiaircraft artillery. A 57 mm shell shattered his cockpit, severing his right arm at the shoulder. Foster managed to retain consciousness and use his left hand to maneuver the crippled aircraft to the Gulf of Tonkin where he ejected. Fortunately, the U.S. destroyer that rescued him had a…