Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2019 i Vietnam

Loved your article about Dong Xoai (“Swarming Over the Walls,” by Dana Benner, October 2018). I was with the 197th Aviation Company, and we also were involved in the battle. Capt. Bill Fraker was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for going in under heavy fire to rescue Seabee Dan McLaughlin and two Vietnamese soldiers. Premier Nguyen Cao Ky presented the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Palm to Capt. Fraker for that mission. George Berenbrok Essex, Md. Your October issue was especially meaningful for me. I saw (in the Farewell section) a picture of Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, whom I knew as Maj. Trainor in 1963. He was an instructor in the Navy ROTC unit at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I remember him counseling me after the…

One of the most momentous events of the Vietnam War, the communists’ 1968 Tet Offensive, is mired in controversy over whether the press inaccurately portrayed a U.S. victory as a defeat and turned the public against the war. There is a widespread belief, fostered by a multitude of articles and books, that the media treated the attacks as a disaster for American and South Vietnamese troops. But those charges against the press are often phrased in generalities that aren’t backed with actual quotes from news reports and don’t reflect the media consensus on the attacks. The communist forces—mostly Viet Cong, but including substantial numbers of North Vietnamese—were heavily outnumbered and even more heavily outgunned when the offensive began on Jan. 30 and 31, 1968. To have even a chance of…

Brotherhood in Combat: How African Americans Found Equality in Korea and Vietnam By Jeremy P. Maxwell University of Oklahoma Press, 2018 African-American activist and legendary orator Frederick Douglass, speaking at the National Hall in Philadelphia on July 6, 1863, implored blacks to view military service as a means of advancing the struggle for equal rights. From then on, black soldiers, sailors and Marines served in the armed forces and fought overseas hoping to effect change at home. Brotherhood in Combat, an insightful work from Irish scholar Jeremy P. Maxwell, chronicles the long, painful push for racial equality and the pivotal role war played in ending segregation in the military. President Harry S. Truman, prompted in part by political considerations, issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, effectively prohibiting segregation…

Plans for an educational center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., have been scrapped because its supporters weren’t able to raise enough money for the $130 million project, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the organization that constructed and maintains the Wall, announced on Sept. 21, 2018. When the memorial fund’s directors terminated the project, they had cash or commitments totaling only $45 million. “The funding simply has not materialized,” said memorial fund Chairman John Dibble. In an interview with Vietnam magazine (April 2015), Jan Scruggs the Vietnam veteran who had initiated the Wall memorial in 1979 and saw it completed in 1982, said fundraising for the education center had been difficult for several reasons. Other new projects on the National Mall, such as the museum of African-American history…

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen told two members of the Washington state Legislature, who have met with the prime minister several times on trade issues and other matters, that his government would resume working with the U.S. government in searches for the remains of missing Americans who were in Cambodia during the war. In September 2017, after Sen arrested opposition-party leaders and refused to take back Cambodian citizens deported from the United States for criminal convictions, the U.S. State Department stopped issuing visas to senior Cambodian Foreign Ministry officials and their families. Sen countered by suspending a Cambodian program that helped U.S. teams account for Americans missing in action. Washington state Sen. Doug Ericksen and Rep. Vincent Buys, both Republicans, wrote a letter to Sen on Oct. 2 asking him…

In May 1966, the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) moved two hamlets from inside Camp Radcliff in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands to locations outside the huge camp, which had a circumference of more than 25 miles and had engulfed hamlets that were there before the base was established in August 1965. The two hamlets, An Dan and Tan Tao, part of the village of An Khe, were moved so no Vietnamese homes would be inside the barbed wire-enclosed base. For many hamlet residents the move meant leaving behind deceased loved ones who had been buried next to their homes. The 1st Cavalry Division constructed roads in the village and assisted with the movement of furniture and transportation of building materials. The villagers were given money to purchase supplies for constructing new…

Decades after the final U.S. troop withdrawals, images of Vietnam are still vividly imprinted in the memories of veterans: where they lived, where they worked, where they were wounded. Some scenes from the past are pleasantly nostalgic, while others are painful, or best forgotten. Many veterans, however, have gone back for fresh images of those places. One is Vietnam magazine contributor Rick Fredericksen, a Marine newsman with American Forces Vietnam Network in 1969-70. He returned to the city he knew as Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh City— in February 2018 during the country’s annual Lunar New Year’s celebration, known as Tet. It was the 50th anniversary of the communists’ 1968 Tet Offensive in Saigon. Fredericksen took with him two very different cameras, the Asahi Pentax he purchased at a military Post…

Top U.S. military commanders during the Vietnam War seriously considered the use of nuclear or chemical weapons if enemy forces were about overpower the Marine base at Khe Sanh—a largely unknown proposition that has been put in the spotlight by new books from two prominent authors. Mark Bowden in Hue 1968 and Michael Beschloss in Presidents of War home in on a cable sent on Feb. 3, 1968, by Gen. William Westmoreland, the top military leader in South Vietnam, to Gen. Earl Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time, the Khe Sanh base in northern South Vietnam, near the Demilitarized Zone, had been under siege since Jan. 21, 1968. Westmoreland wrote that “should the situation in the DMZ area change dramatically, we should be prepared to…

Crew: 6 or 7 Engine: Four T56-A-7 turboprops, 4,050 horsepower each Wingspan: 132 ft., 7 in. Length: 97 ft., 8 in. Load: 35,000 lbs. Max. takeoff weight: 135,000 lbs. Max speed: 383 mph Cruising speed: 356 mph Max. range (loaded): 1,830 miles At approximately 9 a.m. on Feb. 23, 1967, soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, parachuted from their C-130A troop transports and seized Katum in southern South Vietnam, just 7 miles from the Cambodian border. They were followed by 10 C-130Bs carrying cargo and 105 mm howitzers. The Katum landing was the largest U.S. airborne operation since the Korean War and the only major one to take place in Vietnam. Although other transport aircraft were involved, the C-130 Hercules did the “heavy lifting,” carrying…

A month before the fall of Nazi Germany, Maj. Robin Olds of the 479th Fighter Group, U.S. Army Air Forces, scored his final aerial victory of World War II, chasing a Messerschmitt 109 through a formation of B-24 Liberator bombers and shooting it down. More than two decades later, on Sept. 30, 1966, a U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules dropped Olds, a colonel by then, and the rest of the passengers on the wrong end of a runway at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, home of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. “We stood on a piece of hot concrete a mile away from base ops, the sun beating on us from a brassy sky,” Olds wrote in his memoir. “A fine greeting for their new commander.” The pilots of…

When Staff Sgt. Leon Fletcher, interpreter Sgt. Rep and I were ready to return to An Khe after trucking Christmas gifts to the leprosarium in Qui Nhon in 1966, Fletcher suggested that he drive Rep and me to nearby Landing Zone English, where we could catch a Caribou transport plane (like the one shown above) to An Khe, and he would take the truck back. Rep and I thought that was a great idea. This was Jan. 8, 1967. The Air Force had taken over operation of the Caribou transports from the Army on Jan. 1. As I recall, the Caribou had 24 seats, and there were eight of us on this flight. A chaplain was sitting in the seat across from me. As I started to sit in a…

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 By Max Hastings, HarperCollins, 2018 When it comes to war histories, the Vietnam War and World War I are in a class by themselves. More sheer nonsense has been written about these two conflicts than just about any other war in history. Both wars shook to their very foundations two of the world’s greatest powers of the time, Britain in the Great War and the United States in Vietnam. Thus, in a very real sense, both wars are still being fought and re-fought in history books, novels and movies, which partisans of all ideological stripes use to advance their social and historical agendas. There are, of course, many excellent histories too. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, by the highly regarded British historian Max Hastings, is…