Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2018 i Vietnam

Some old memories are rather difficult to recall, while a few can be etched within our minds to such a degree that after 50 years they bring tears to our eyes and make us shake. Your article in the August issue (“Catkillers Over Con Thien,” by Paul X. Rutz, about Bird Dog airplane pilots who directed air and artillery strikes to protect ground troops) brought such a memory to life. We faced an identical situation in the summer of 1968 near the Laotian border. I served with Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, as a forward observer radio operator [on the ground, coordinating artillery fire and airstrikes]. We departed the helicopters cautiously early one morning. The biggest surprise came over a radio’s speaker. Hanoi Hannah welcomed…

On June 8, 1968, in an area south of Da Nang, North Vietnamese forces ambushed the 3rd Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 27th Marine Regiment. Under heavy fire, the Marine platoon leader considered withdrawing to request an airstrike against an enemy machine gun position in a bunker, but doing so would likely have further exposed the Marines and caused more casualties. Squad leader Cpl. Stephen E. Austin, 21, on his second tour of duty, convinced the platoon leader that he shouldn’t pull back, and the corporal maneuvered his squad to provide suppressing fire on the bunker. He then charged the enemy position, despite being repeatedly wounded in the effort. “As he was falling to the ground, he was able to throw his grenade up to the bunker slit to silence…

Eradicating rat infestation on Fire Support Base Maude may have been Charlie Battery’s primary focus in December 1971, but the artillery battery’s parent organization, the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, narrowly avoided everlasting infamy for what could have been a disaster during Bob Hope’s visit to Da Nang with a USO troupe for his annual Vietnam Christmas show. On Tuesday, Dec. 21, 1971, Hope led his entertainment entourage to Da Nang in another of the legendary entertainer’s morale-boosting visits to entertain the troops. It was a tradition that began in May 1941—even before the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II—and ended a half-century later at the conclusion of the 1991 Gulf War. The Bob Hope Christmas show made its first appearance on a Vietnam stage in December 1964 and…

The remains of an Air Force pilot shot down over North Vietnam in 1965 have been identified as those of Fredric M. Mellor, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced in August. Mellor, at the time a 30-year-old captain from Cranston, Rhode Island, took off from Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base on Aug. 13, 1965, in the lead aircraft of two McDonnell RF-101C Voodoo jets on a photo reconnaissance mission over Son La province in North Vietnam. Mellor’s aircraft was shot down, but he ejected and landed safely. Other RC-101s were able to raise him on the radio. However, during preparations to rescue Mellor, radio contact was lost, and neither he nor his aircraft were found after a two-day search. Initially listed as missing in action, Mellor was declared dead…

Deeply loved for its firepower, the M42 “Duster” self-propelled anti-aircraft gun arose as a replacement for the M19 self-propelled anti-aircraft gun developed in World War II. The M42 employed a slightly expanded variant of the M19 turret mounted on the M41 Walker Bulldog light tank chassis. The Duster’s 500-horsepower gasoline engine, broad tracks and light weight gave it exceptional mobility in South Vietnam’s soft soil and uneven ground. The M42’s twin 40 mm Bofors cannons fired two rounds per second each, delivering devastating firepower, and its single .30-caliber M1919A4 Browning machine gun or 7.62 mm M60 machine gun provided a close-in punch. Although the Duster’s welded steel construction and 25 mm armor protected the drive train and driver from small-arms fire and shell fragments, its open turret left the crew…

In May 1968, two small American outposts deep in enemy territory were all that remained of a massive force from the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) that had just been in one of the biggest battles of the war. The division arrived during Operation Pegasus in early April to break the North Vietnamese Army’s siege of the Khe Sanh Marine base, which had been under attack since Jan. 21. After the relief force reached the Marine base on April 8, most of the 1st Cavalry Division troops moved south to the A Shau Valley. But two battalions and associated artillery units in the division’s 2nd Brigade stayed at landing zones Snapper and Peanuts to support Marine regiments that had re-established control of the Khe Sanh base and were going on the…

Hanoi, the heart of the enemy camp, lay before me. I had fought its troops in many capacities—as a U.S. infantry company commander, Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha commander, province adviser and then Defense Department planner of actions against the North. Yet here I was, in December 1975, helping a congressional committee open talks with that very foe to account for Americans who were still missing. Seven years earlier, in 1968, I had left Vietnam on a stretcher, cared for by my “lady in white,” a Vietnamese nurse at a hospital in Long Binh. Seven months earlier, as Hanoi’s forces smashed into the Presidential Palace in Saigon at the end of April 1975, I had trashed all my Vietnamese language books, thinking I was finished with the country. A little…

The Vietnam War saw a unique combination of guerrilla and conventional warfare, both of which depended on timely intelligence for success. The United States used sophisticated and constantly evolving electronics to intercept radio communications and spot enemy positions. While North Vietnam protected its skies from American fighter jets and bombers by deploying Soviet-supplied radar, weapons and equipment, Americans pushed the envelope with airborne radar aboard specially modified aircraft. On land, America’s AN/TPS-25 ground surveillance radar and AN/MPQ-4 counterbattery radar detected troop movements and artillery. In a $1.5 billion program to stem the flow of reinforcements and materiel from the North, the U.S. started—but never finished—a barrier of old-fashioned barbed wire and mines, plus electronic sensors, near the Demilitarized Zone. It was called McNamara’s Line, after Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.…

MiG Aces of the Vietnam War By István Toperczer, Schiffer Publishing Ltd. 2015 A military flight surgeon in the Hungarian air force and an aviation journalist, István Toperczer first visited Vietnam in 1994 and since then has been engaged in documenting the activities of what was called the Air Defense Forces-Vietnamese People’s Air Force during the Vietnam War. Because of the ongoing declassification and availability of documents, this has been a work in progress, with the author releasing his first English book in the United States and his next two in Britain. Toperczer’s hefty volume from Schiffer combines his latest documentation with numerous interviews of North Vietnamese pilots, including many of the 19 credited with five or more victories in the course of the war. Aside from the new information…

In November, the Smithsonian Channel will show two new documentaries on the Vietnam War. Gun Trucks of Vietnam, premiering Nov. 11 at 9 p.m., offers previously unseen 8 mm footage filmed by soldiers on the gun trucks that protected convoys of 18-wheelers hauling equipment and supplies on dangerous roads to reach American installations. The Lost Tapes: Tet Offensive, Nov. 25 at 9 p.m., resurrects the radio and TV reports of broadcasters who covered the 1968 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong attacks on more than 150 sites in South Vietnam. Much of the footage, which includes national and local broadcasts, has not been seen in decades.…

On the morning of July 1, 1967, Chief Petty Officer Joseph Herrara of Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 11 was driving a truck near Da Nang Air Base when a lone Viet Cong soldier fired a poisonous dart that shattered a window and caused a deep gash in the chief’s arm. Realizing he was under attack, Herrara switched off the engine and got out. As he ran toward the back of the truck, a bullet struck his belt loop. He drew his pistol and made his way to a ditch across the road. He spotted the Viet Cong and fired four rounds before chasing him. The Viet Cong threw a grenade, and Herrara hit the ground, waiting for an explosion that didn’t come. He slowly rose and inspected the grenade; its…

No eulogies were ever muttered over the corpses—this was a fight to the death, with no quarter asked or given. Every single night, the enemy attacked our remote firebase in Vietnam in continuous, relentless waves. Fearlessly pressing forward while totally oblivious to their own casualties, they kept on coming. No matter how many of them we killed, more took their places and joined the attacks. These nightly assaults erupted on all sides of us, and no isolated nook or cranny of Fire Support Base Maude was safe from the repeated, fanatical attacks. Wave after wave. Attack after attack. Night after night. We ruthlessly employed every available weapon in these “close quarter” encounters. We used rifles, pistols, bayonets, machetes, entrenching tools, our 105 mm howitzers’ trail handspikes, makeshift traps—and even our…

Jim Willbanks’ superbly written, extensively researched book on Lt. Gen. James F. “Holly” Hollingsworth—known by his radio call sign “Danger Seven-Niner”—shows readers why Holly is one of only three Texas A&M heroes with statues on the university’s College Station campus. The other two are Texas legends and A&M presidents: Lawrence Sullivan “Sul” Ross (a Texas Ranger, Confederate general and governor) and James Earl Rudder (famed World War II commander of Rudder’s Rangers, one of the heroes of the D-Day assault at Normandy’s Pointe du Hoc). Rarified company; yet Hollingsworth clearly deserves the honor. Hollingsworth, born on March 24, 1918, was a “Texas-sized,” Patton-trained, aggressive combat leader who always led from the front (his six Purple Hearts attest to that). Holly excelled in World War II, the Cold War (Europe and…