Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2016 i Vietnam

F1 Submachine Gun Round: 9x19mm Parabellum Magazine: 34-round top loading Weight: 9.48 lb. loaded with fixed bayonet Length: 8.38 inches Rate of fire: 600-400 rounds per minute Practical RoF: 120-150 rpm Max. range: 200 meters Effective range: 150 meters Australia’s F1 submachine gun is one of the most recognizable and yet least known of the weapons used in the Vietnam War. Selected to replace the popular World War II–era Owen submachine gun after field testing in 1963, the F1 shared some of the Owen’s characteristics: It had a simple blowback design and fired over an open bolt with a fixed firing pin. The F1 also employed its predecessor’s curved, detachable top-loading 34-round magazine. The magazine’s location facilitated firing from the prone position, reduced jamming and ensured more rapid loading, but…

They were some of the biggest names in movies and music in the 1960s and ’70s. And they went to Vietnam to entertain America’s armed forces. Many were in Bob Hope’s Christmas shows. Some sang and danced with other USO tours at different times of the year. The USO offered more than 5,000 performances during the war. The effect of those shows on the troops is shown in a letter posted on Ann-Margret’s website. A sailor who saw her perform on the USS Kitty Hawk in 1966 wrote: “You made us all feel appreciated and your warmth and real concern is remembered as a high point of that cruise.” Seeing stars Clockwise from top: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans in 1966, Sammy Davis Jr. in 1972, Phyllis Diller in 1967,…

The Price They Paid: Enduring Wounds of War Publishing, 2015 “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) commander of the fictional 1st Battalion, 9th Air Cavalry Regiment, famously remarks in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, and that visually stunning scene has become for most Americans the iconic image of Vietnam War helicopter combat. Those of us who were there, however, know that the movie version doesn’t even begin to tell the real story of the dominant role helicopters played in Vietnam. The truth, inevitably, is more compelling, more complicated—and extremely more dangerous— than any movie image can evoke. For U.S. ground combat infantry and artillery units in Vietnam, helicopters were overwhelmingly our only means of transport, resupply, close aerial fire…

Brilliant But Not Unbeatable in the Air Thanks to Carl O. Schuster for the detailed and informative articles on the air war in Vietnam (June and August 2016). I believe that the United States and its allies could have won after Tet 1968, in spite of our mistakes. Schuster’s brief but informative passages about the difficulties faced by North Vietnam’s leader, Le Duan, coupled with the famous Wall Street Journal article by General Vo Nguyen Giap’s former military secretary, Colonel Bui Tin, tend to prove my assertion. Second, as on the ground, the North Vietnamese fought a brilliantly integrated campaign in the air, but the United States could have eventually overwhelmed them if its political leadership had not been so dense. I also found it interesting that North Vietnam produced…

In the spring of 1966 my U.S. Army transportation truck company learned that our tractors and trailers would be leaving Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and going to Vietnam for long-haul trucking duties. We knew, of course, that we could run into the enemy, but we never imagined that we would be driving pothole-strewn roads shared with wild Vietnamese drivers. I saw accidents of all kinds when I was organizing convoys as an Army captain commanding the 64th Transportation Company. In one especially tragic incident, an Army truck driver was zigzagging left and right across the road to miss potholes, and coming in the opposite direction, also zigzagging to avoid potholes, was a fast-moving small Vietnamese bus. The head-on collision killed eight passengers. In another accident, one of our drivers was…

Crowds lined the streets of Hanoi as President Barack Obama’s motorcade left Air Force One’s landing site and made its way across the city at the start of a historic visit to a former adversary. Obama announced on May 23 that the United States was lifting the current, partial American embargo on arms sales to Vietnam, which had been in place since 1984. The move, Obama said, was not prompted by China’s maneuvers to expand its presence in the region but came as the United States and Vietnam entered a “new moment” taking them toward a normalization of ties. Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang said at a state luncheon that he was grateful for the American people’s efforts to put an end to “an unhappy chapter in the two countries’…

Marine Corporal Chuck Goggin, 1st Platoon radio operator for Lima Company, was stunned by the transmission he received on March 2, 1967, from 2nd Platoon’s reconnaissance patrol: “You wouldn’t believe what we’ve got here….There’s 500 to 1,000 packs on the ground.” Goggin thought, If there’s 500 to 1,000 packs on the ground, where are the 500 to 1,000 enemy they belong to? Lima Company, of the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, was on a search-and-destroy mission in South Vietnam’s Quang Tri province, which bordered the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Vietnams. The Marines were operating in territory dubbed “Leatherneck Square”—54 square miles of coastal plain and mountainous jungle with the northern corners at Con Thien and Gio Linh, along the DMZ, and the southern corners at Dong…