Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i Vietnam

The photo on the cover of the August issue was taken in the spring of 1965, northwest of Da Nang. The first person in front is Sgt. Robert Taglione. He was my squad leader for eight months prior to Vietnam and after entering Vietnam. We were with Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment. Several battalions went to Vietnam in the spring of 1965 as the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade. The man off to the side is Sgt. Karl G. Taylor, who was my squad leader after Sgt. Taglione left to join up with another outfit. Sgt. Taglione was killed on Operation Starlite in August 1965. Sgt. Taylor was my squad leader for about three weeks or more. He went back to Vietnam for a second time. Sgt. Taylor was…

Nearly 90,000 “blue water” veterans—who served on American ships off the coast of Vietnam—may become eligible for Agent Orange disability benefits under legislation approved by the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Currently, the Department of Veterans Affairs presumes that troops who served in Vietnam on the ground or on inland rivers (brown water) between Jan. 9, 1962, and May 7, 1975, were exposed to Agent Orange or other herbicides (sprayed from 1962 to 1971), and those veterans don’t have to prove their exposure to the chemical to receive disability benefits for related diseases. Benefits have also been granted to other groups of service members if they prove their exposure to Agent Orange, including Air Force personnel who served from 1969 through 1986 on C-123 transport planes that had sprayed the herbicide…

On July 30, 1964, four speedy U.S. Navy wooden hulled boats, manned by South Vietnamese commandos advised by elite American troops, entered the Gulf of Tonkin. They carried out a late-evening attack against North Vietnam’s radar station on Hon Me Island and a garrison on Ngu Island before withdrawing shortly after midnight. The vessels used in the attack had been developed by a Norwegian company in the 1950s as a prototype patrol torpedo boat named Nasty, which became Norway’s first vessel in its Tjeld class of patrol torpedo boats. When the U.S. Navy began to support unconventional warfare operations in Indochina in 1961, it had no suitable craft for the job, as the PT boats of World War II were no longer in use. But the Nasty, with its similar…

The mission went wrong almost from the start. Two U.S. Air Force F-4C Phantoms of the 558th Tactical Fighter Squadron, call sign “Boxer,” found their primary target weathered over. They diverted north to the village of Ban Phanop, Laos, near a chokepoint where the Ho Chi Minh Trail crossed the Nam Ngo River, to sow the ford with Mk-36 mines—500-pound Mk-82 low-drag bombs with fuses in their tails. In the trailing aircraft, Boxer 22, pilot Capt. Benjamin Danielson and weapons systems officer 1st Lt. Woodrow J. “Woodie” Bergeron Jr. were on their first sortie together. Just after dropping their ordnance, the Phantom suddenly pitched up, then down. Their flight leader called over the radio: “Boxer 22, you’re hit! Eject! Eject! Eject!” It was Friday morning, Dec. 5, 1969, and Boxer…

At the end of May 1965, Seabee Team 1104, part of Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 11, was sent to a U.S. Special Forces camp near the village of Dong Xoai in Phuoc Long province, an area teeming with Viet Cong. Having just built a Special Forces camp at Ben Soi, near the Cambodian border, the 13-man Seabee team planned to reinforce the fortifications and work on other construction projects at Dong Xoai, near an important road junction about 55 miles north of Saigon. A nine-man Seabee advance team reached Dong Xoai on June 4 and linked up with 11 Green Berets of Detachment A-342, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), who had been there since May 25. Also in the camp were about 200 South Vietnamese soldiers with a howitzer battery…

Lao and Hmong soldiers who fought communist forces in Laos during the Vietnam War and are now living in the United States have won the right to be buried at national cemeteries. The Hmong Veterans’ Service Recognition Act, passed by Congress as part of a large appropriations package and signed by President Trump on March 23, permits veterans of the “Secret Army” in Laos to be buried at cemeteries administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Members of the Hmong mountain tribe in Laos and the ethnic Lao population joined the “Secret War” that the U.S. waged in Laos through undisclosed bombings, covert CIA actions and Special Forces missions in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stop communist Pathet Lao guerrillas from taking over the country. They carried out raids along…

Ernest L. Medina, an Army officer whose troops were responsible for the mass killing of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in March 1968, died on May 8 in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, at age 81. As commander of C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division (Americal), Medina was sent on a mission to pursue Viet Cong reportedly operating around My Lai. Instead, his company found unarmed civilians, who were rounded up and killed. Later court-martialed and charged with involuntary manslaughter of more than 100 civilians, Medina testified in 1971 that he never saw nor ordered “any slaughter,” but helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., whose intervention saved some of the civilians, and Lawrence Colburn, riding with Thompson, witnessed Medina shoot and kill an unarmed wounded Vietnamese girl…

Vietnam’s High Ground: Armed Struggle for the Central Highlands, 1954-1965 By J.P. Harris, University Press of Kansas, 2016 “Take the high ground” is one of the oldest and truest maxims of military operations. During the Vietnam War that strategic high ground was the Central Highlands, the 26,000 square miles that constitute the southern end of the Annamite mountain chain, forming South Vietnam’s border with Laos and part of its border with Cambodia. Mountainous and interspersed with high plateaus, the Central Highlands were a perfect staging area for North Vietnamese troops who moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and entered South Vietnam across the borders of its nominally “neutral” neighbors to the west. The sparse population consisted largely of various highland ethnic groups. Often collectively called Montagnards, they were in…

Veterans suffering from diseases related to Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide used in Vietnam during the war, may be passing on illnesses to their children and grandchildren, recent studies suggest. Data collected from thousands of Vietnam veteran families by nonprofit Birth Defect Research for Children in Orlando, Florida, has revealed a pattern of birth defects and other disabilities associated with exposure to Agent Orange. The defoliant was sprayed—primarily from aircraft—across South Vietnam to wipe out vegetation that could feed or hide communist troops. “I am absolutely convinced by the data that there’s something significant going on in the children of Vietnam veterans,” Betty Medkeci, the organization’s executive director, told TV station WNCN in Raleigh, North Carolina. “We have found impressive increases in learning, attention, immune, endocrine and skin disorders.” The…

Four Marine veterans recently traveled to a Vietnamese village to return a Buddha statue they took a half-century ago. Their unit, part of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, was on patrol in Quang Tri Province in northernmost South Vietnam in 1968 when one Marine saw the statue, the likeness of a female Buddha, in a shrine and grabbed it. That Marine died in 2009, but that statue stayed with his comrades and was even brought to reunions. The returned statue was presented to a village priest on June 2. One of the Marine veterans, Julio Martinez of San Bernardino, California, told Stars and Stripes that the trip was a cathartic experience and he felt no ill will toward the Vietnamese people: “They defended their country, and…

The 1965 Battle of Ia Drang was one of the most iconic battles of the Vietnam War. It was popularized in the 1992 book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, by retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and journalist Joseph L. Galloway, and the 2002 film adaptation, starring Mel Gibson as Moore. Yet the engagement remains one of the most misunderstood battles of the war. The battle began the morning of Nov. 14, 1965, when helicopters dropped Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), at Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley to go after North Vietnamese Army troops in the area. Shortly after arriving, Moore’s soldiers were attacked by a large NVA force, and fierce fighting followed. When American commanders saw that the enemy had countered…

Combined arms U.S. forces effectively used armor for mutual support, not only with infantry but also with the different forms of mechanized ordnance themselves. During this operation by members of 1st Battalion, 10th Cavalry Regiment, an M48 Patton tank, left, joins an M106 mortar carrier with an M30 4.2-inch mortar on a rotating turntable in the rear bed, and an M113 armored cavalry assault vehicle, as all three advance into Viet Cong-held territory. While widely viewed as a guerrilla war, the conflict in Vietnam was really a combination of guerrillas and light infantry trading shots in the bush, supersonic aircraft clashing over the North, and occasions for conventional warfare. Much of Indochina’s mountainous and heavily forested terrain did not lend itself well to armored warfare, but it did have enough…

Saigon Kids: An American Military Brat Comes of Age in 1960’s Vietnam By Les Arbuckle Mango Publishing Group, 2017 In the decade before U.S. combat forces waded ashore at Da Nang, approximately 4,000 teenagers and preteens had been living in Saigon and attending the American Community School. Most were the sons and daughters of Americans sent to South Vietnam by the military and State Department or the children of civilians working for U.S. companies with operations there. Collectively, these select young people refer to themselves as “Saigon kids.” A grown-up Saigon kid has written a new tell-all book: Saigon Kids, An American Military Brat Comes of Age in 1960’s Vietnam. In January 1963, at the adventuresome age of 13, Les Arbuckle arrived in-country with two younger brothers and their mother.…