Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i Vietnam

More than 40 years after the war’s end, unexploded bombs and mines remain a danger to many people in Vietnam. Each year, more than 1,500 are killed and 2,200 are maimed from explosives left from the war years. In an effort to devote more attention to the issue, the Vietnamese Ministry of National Defense announced on March 8 the creation of the Permanent Office of the National Steering Committee on Overcoming War Consequences of Unexploded Ordnance and Toxic Chemicals in Vietnam. The new organization will continue to work with groups such as the U.S. Agency for International Development on projects to clear areas of explosives. “Although the war has been over, the severe consequences of landmines, UXOs [unexploded ordnance] and toxic chemicals still exist, affecting human health and living environments…

San Mateo, California, marked an unusual anniversary this past March. In 1968, resident Linda Patterson—whose brother was serving with A Company, 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division—persuaded the city to “adopt” the unit. Two weeks later Patterson’s brother was killed, but the city kept its commitment to A Company. Local students sent letters and care packages to the troops. When Patterson flew to Vietnam to visit the unit, she found that the soldiers deeply appreciated San Mateo’s support. They had kept the letters and photos sent by the California families, she said in an interview on the website of San Francisco TV station KGO. San Mateo’s ties to the unit continued after the Vietnam War ended. The city sent care packages to A Company during its deployments to…

Tom Tompkins enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1963. Five years later, he was a Special Forces sergeant in the middle of his second tour in Vietnam. On Oct. 30, 1968, Tompkins established a six-man observation post on a rocky hilltop near the Cambodian border. The North Vietnamese Army detected Tompkins’ Green Berets and repeatedly attacked them. Despite multiple wounds and weakened from blood loss, the sergeant rallied the post’s defenders to repulse the assaults. He also called in medevacs and directed airstrikes against the enemy. His “complete disregard for personal safety…. [and] gallantry in action” earned him a Bronze Star Medal with a “V” device for valor. He would subsequently be awarded the Silver Star as well. Tompkins was a Canadian, born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and a veteran…

Despite the massive artillery and air firepower the United States deployed in its attacks on communist forces in Vietnam, most gunfights came down to infantry weapons used at often terrifyingly close quarters. Automatic weapons had increased the carnage of war since the early 20th century, but in Vietnam a proliferation of M16 assault rifles put rapid-fire guns in the hands of every grunt, whether he was fighting in a carefully prepared ambush or a chance encounter. The U.S. infantryman’s arsenal included a dazzling array of lethal devices: machine guns, grenade launchers, advanced versions of World War II bazookas, small mortars and remotely detonated land mines. Allies sometimes had their own versions of those weapons. The Australians, for example, carried the semi-automatic L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle (SLR, or as many called it,…

The M14 (“Arsenal,” by Carl Schuster, April 2018) did not use 10-round stripper clips to feed the magazines in the weapon. The rounds were actually in five-round strippers. The article indicated that the rifle utilized a long-stroke piston system. This is false. The rifle used a short-throw piston. Also, it was stated that the M14 borrowed from the M1 rifle. The only similarity was bleeding gas off the barrel to operate the gas cycle of the weapon. The M14 used a piston, and the M1 utilized gas actuating the operating rod. The M1 did not have a piston. The author indicated that the sights were a weakness of the weapon. This is incorrect. The sights were exactly copied from the M1, and never have I heard a complaint concerning either…

Anna Chennault, an intermediary between Richard Nixon and the South Vietnamese government in controversial secret communications during the 1968 presidential campaign, died March 30, 2018, in Washington at age 94. Chennault (born Chan Sheng Mai in Beijing), was a war correspondent for a Chinese news agency during World War II and married Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault of Flying Tigers fame in 1947. After the communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, Chennault promoted the interests of the noncommunist government on Taiwan, became a major fundraiser for Republicans and backed Nixon. On Nov. 2, 1968, Chennault asked South Vietnamese officials in a phone call to boycott the Paris peace talks promoted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and await a more favorable deal from Nixon after the Nov. 5 election. They agreed…

Crew: 4 Engines: Two 1,900 shaft horsepower Shvetsov ASh-82T radial engines Wingspan: 104 feet Length: 73 feet, 2 inches Maximum weight: 39,683 pounds Load: 22 troops or 5,291 pounds Maximum speed: 250 mph Cruising speed: 207 mph Maximum range: 811 miles A twin-engine Ilyushin Il-14 (NATO code name Crate), North Vietnam’s primary cargo and troop transport plane, flew over Tchepone Airfield in Laos on Oct. 25, 1961—a flight photographed by a U.S. Air Force McDonnell RF-101C Voodoo reconnaissance plane—and dropped supplies to North Vietnamese Army soldiers and Pathet Lao communist insurgents in Laos, just as Crates been doing since mid-to-late 1960. The Il-14, essentially a modified version of the Soviet Il-12 Coach cargo plane, first flew on Oct. 1, 1950, and entered production in 1954. Moscow provided Hanoi with 45…

Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor had a greater influence than any other military officer on America’s decision to go to war in Vietnam—and on the early strategy to fight that conflict. The strategic framework he helped establish, and the key assumptions upon which it was based, cast a long shadow over U.S. military operations all the way through to 1975. When Taylor retired from the military in July 1959, after serving as the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, he was one of the most well-known generals in America. The commander of the 101st Airborne Division when it jumped into Normandy on June 5-6, 1944, Taylor, along with Matthew B. Ridgway and James M. Gavin, formed a trio of legendary airborne generals. Throughout the 1950s, all three were leading voices…

The Medal of Honor. The Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, the Air Force Cross and the Navy Cross. The Silver Star. The Bronze Star with a “V” device signifying an act of valor. Those pieces of metal and colored ribbons are the treasured symbols of combat heroism in the armed forces of the United States. Only a small number of Americans have demonstrated the battlefield gallantry that merits one of those coveted medals. The rareness and prestige of valor awards, however, have been temptations for a few unscrupulous individuals willing to trade their personal honor for an undeserved medal. In Out of Step: A Soldier’s Memoir of the Vietnam War Years, Francis Hamit writes about a group of soldiers who “sullied themselves” in a scheme to get awards they did not…

In March, a 50-ton granite memorial dedicated to Vietnam veterans of the decorated 5th Marine Regiment began its six-day cross-country trip from Vermont to Camp Pendleton, California. Three flatbed trucks transported the six stone panels—honoring the unit’s 2,706 Marines and sailors killed during the conflict—from Vermont’s Rock of Ages Foundry to Pendleton’s Camp San Mateo Memorial Garden, a journey that ended on March 29, National Vietnam Veterans Day. Along the 3,000-mile route, the trio of trucks was accompanied by motorcycle riders of the Patriot Guard, a volunteer organization that forms honor guards at military funerals. The 5th Marines, the most decorated regiment in the Corps, served in Vietnam between May 1966 and April 1971. Steve Colwell, a 1st Battalion combat veteran who has been working on the project since 2014,…

The Army is testing armored multipurpose vehicles to replace its aging fleet of M113 armored personnel carriers, above left, which were introduced in 1960 and first deployed to Vietnam in 1962, serving initially with the South Vietnamese army. The M113 is considered the most widely used armored vehicle of all time. In April, BAE Systems delivered 29 infantry carriers, above right, under a $383 million contract with the Army, according to United Press International. The delivery includes five variants for testing as command vehicles, mortar carriers, medical evacuation and medical treatment platforms and general-use vehicles. A more heavily armored sixth variant is planned for combat engineer units. American and allied units extensively used the M113 for a variety of missions, both in combat and as a support vehicle behind the…

Could Ed Lansdale have won the Vietnam War if U.S. leaders had just listened to him and followed his advice? That’s the intriguing question that Max Boot’s nearly 800-page biography raises about one of the war’s most controversial and fascinating figures. And that question seems genuine—not publicity-hyping hyperbole. Lansdale, an Air Force colonel attached to the CIA, arrived in Saigon in 1954 as a burgeoning communist insurgency was spreading throughout South Vietnam while the defeated French colonial regime was packing up to leave. He had already been instrumental in engineering the defeat of another Asian communist guerrilla insurgency, the Philippines’ Hukbalahap movement. During assignments in Manila in 1945-48 and 1951-53, Lansdale—a former civilian advertising executive and self-taught counterguerrilla strategist—managed (nearly single-handedly, according to Boot) to persuade the Philippines’ leadership to…

Shortly before noon on April 30, 1975, a North Vietnamese tank rumbled through the main gate of the South Vietnamese presidential palace in Saigon, effectively ending the Vietnam War. Stunningly, North Vietnam—despite losing most of the war’s battles and suffering disproportionately higher casualties—had outlasted the mighty United States and its South Vietnamese ally. Just how a small, impoverished nation prevailed over the American “Goliath” is the subject of Pierre Asselin’s aptly titled book, Vietnam’s American War. Asselin, a professor of history and U.S. foreign relations at San Diego State University, traces the roots of the conflict between North Vietnam and the United States to the 1946-54 First Indochina War, in which Vietnam won its independence from France but was subsequently partitioned at the Geneva peace conference into a communist North…