Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i Vietnam

A bill moving through Congress to provide Agent Orange benefits to “blue water” sailors of the Vietnam War came to a dead stop in December when two senators objected, using a legislative maneuver that effectively killed the legislation. Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Mike Lee of Utah, both Republicans, voiced concerns about the costs and scientific evidence underpinning the bill, which would have treated sailors on offshore ships the same as many other Vietnam veterans with diseases related to exposure to Agent Orange, a chemical sprayed through much of South Vietnam to kill vegetation that hid communist troops or provided food for them. Vietnam veterans who served on the ground or on inland “brown water” rivers are presumed to have been in contact with Agent Orange and don’t have…

In 2007, environmental historian and university professor David Biggs traveled to Hue for the Fourth of July holiday. During the trip, Vietnamese officials told him that harmful chemicals abandoned during the war were still buried all over the country. The hidden chemicals, including napalm, tear gas and Agent Orange, were a persistent danger to any locals who happened across them. The Vietnamese asked Biggs—an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has studied Southeast Asia for decades—to help them find the chemical caches. Working with specialists and comparing archival aerial photographs with satellite images, Biggs mapped the likely locations. In the process, he saw how wars can leave behind significant and enduring imprints that create complicated environmental and social legacies, often stretching across many centuries of military conflicts.…

Crew: 2 or 3 System weight: 67 lbs. Missile weight: 24 lbs. Missile length: 3ft. Finspan: 1 ft. Warhead: High-explosive anti-tank round Guidance: Manual control, line-of-sight wire-guided Speed: 254 yds. per second Max. range: 2 miles Min. range: 328 yds. Optimal range: 1,000 yds. In the early morning of April 23, 1972, a North Vietnamese anti-tank missile company ambushed South Vietnamese tanks from the 20th Armored Squadron outside Dong Ha, in northern South Vietnam near the Demilitarized Zone. The 10-minute engagement destroyed three of the squadron’s M48A2 Patton tanks and several M113 armored personnel carriers. It was the Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s first encounter with the Soviet-built missile, the 9M14 Malyutka, meaning “little one,” and designated by NATO as the AT-3 Sagger. The North Vietnamese Army received the…

After 32 casualties during the first 30 hours of Operation Pursuit, initiated in mid-February 1968 by the 1st Marine Division to search for enemy rocket caches in the mountains west of Da Nang, Lt. Col. Bill Davis ordered Charlie and Delta companies of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, to get off Hills 270 and 310 and return to their base camps in the flatlands to the east. A little later that morning of Feb. 16, the acting commander of Charlie Company, 1st Lt. Dana F. MacCormack, whose men were descending from Hill 270, radioed Davis: “Here come the NVA, colonel! I’ve got one more KIA that the last helo did not have room for. We are having a hell of a time carrying this body, and the bones are…

First published in 1950 in Frankfurt, Germany, as a counterpoint to Department of Defense-sanctioned outlets like Stars and Stripes, Overseas Weekly gained a loyal following by covering the serviceman’s point of view. The newspaper was banned in the early 1950s for a series of articles on controversial subjects that angered commanders, but support from Congress, Hearst Corp. and the American Civil Liberties Union got the ban lifted. When Overseas Weekly published its first “Pacific issue” in October 1966, during the widening conflict in Vietnam, it was again banned from military newsstands, but a yearlong legal battle put the paper back on American bases. Gen.William Westmoreland and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara despised Overseas Weekly for its reporting on topics like courts-martial, racism, drug use and opposition to U.S. policy. But…

After reading the article concerning war dogs (“No Room on the Chopper,” by Dana Benner, February 2019), I am totally disgusted with the actions of the military at the end of the Vietnam War. I served with some of the dogs and their handlers in Europe and Southeast Asia. These were not pieces of equipment to be discarded but living creatures that deserved better. H.B. MageeOvid, Mich. Your February issue touched on three special memories from my tour in Vietnam, 1970-71: “No Room on the Chopper” brought back the unfortunate memory of reacting to contact when a valiant dog and handler did not survive an enemy mine and ambush. While you covered Robin Olds and F-4 Phantoms in air combat (“The Bad Boy Commander of Operation Bolo,” by Don Hollway),…

Many articles and books about the Vietnam War, and other wars, understandably emphasize the feats of frontline fighting troops. While that focus on combat action provides interesting reading, it unfortunately overlooks the stories of the vast corporate enterprise working in rear areas to make that exciting battle mayhem possible. These mostly unsung logisticians, often derogatively referred to as “loggie toads,” are generally invisible—except, of course, when they screw up. One of the best known historical examples of a screw-up—quite literally, involving screws!—is the January 1879 Battle of Isandlwana during the Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa, where two battalions of British regulars, augmented by several hundred locally recruited native contingent troops, took on 20,000 Zulu warriors. The Redcoats, firing as fast as possible to hold back the onrushing Zulus, soon ran…

Crusader: General Donn Starry and the Army of His Times By Mike Guardia, Casemate, 2018 Former U.S. Army armor officer Mike Guardia has made the most of his second career as an insightful military biographer. The talented author of a 2013 book about Vietnam War battalion commander Hal Moore, subtitled A Soldier Once…and Always, has often focused his considerable research and writing skills on Army leaders unfairly overlooked, including World War II special operations heroes Russell W. Volckmann (American Guerrilla, 2010) and Donald D. Blackburn (Shadow Commander, 2012). Now Guardia has provided a much-needed biography of Gen. Donn A. Starry, one of the Army’s most influential “agents of change” in the second half of the 20th century. Born in New York City on May 31, 1925, Starry was the only…

US Navy F-4 Phantom II Units of the Vietnam War 1964-68 By Peter E. Davies, Osprey Publishing, 2016 For U.S. Navy aircrews flying the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II, the Vietnam War could be divided into two periods: the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing runs, 1964 to 1968, and the period from 1968 to 1973 that included the adoption of the Topgun fighter training program, the Operation Linebacker bombing campaigns and a dramatic rise in successful air-to-air fights that created the war’s first American aces. In No. 116 of Osprey’s “Combat Aircraft” series, longtime jet age historian Peter E. Davies focuses on the Rolling Thunder years, when a big twinengine plane originally conceived as a missile-armed shipboard interceptor was adapted for a variety of other roles, such as close air support,…

An international tribunal has ruled that the Khmer Rouge communist regime of dictator Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, committed genocide against the country’s Muslim Cham and Vietnamese minorities. The Khmer Rouge killed at least 1.7 million people who died from executions, forced labor, starvation and disease. The United Nations-backed panel charged the two most senior surviving members of the regime, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, with multiple crimes against humanity, including torture, and breaches of the Geneva Conventions, which define war crimes. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment. They were already serving life sentences in Cambodia after earlier convictions for crimes against humanity. The declaration of the atrocities as genocide, reports The New York Times, establishes a precedent for future prosecutions of crimes against humanity. But…

The Montagnards, mountain people, were a collection of tribes from various ethnic groups, such as the Rhade and Jarai, living in South Vietnam’s highlands. They were often at odds with the Viet ethnic group that ruled the country. Other major ethnic groups were the Cham and Khmer. On the night of Sept. 19-20, 1964, Montagnard militias at five U.S. Special Forces camps (below in red) near the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot attacked South Vietnamese troops also stationed at those camps.…

By the time Lyndon B. Johnson became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, the United States had already made a significant commitment to South Vietnam’s struggle against communist forces. Military advisers were first sent to Vietnam in 1950 by President Harry S. Truman, and their numbers grew during the presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Kennedy, but no combat troops were there when Johnson came into office. On Aug. 2, 1964, three small North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin (a second attack was alleged on Aug. 4 but did not occur). Johnson ordered airstrikes against North Vietnam, and Congress on Aug. 7 passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the president to use “all necessary measures” to…

Echoing opponents of earlier American wars, critics of the Vietnam War often claim that the decision to intervene militarily in Southeast Asia was not only unwise but fundamentally unjust. The United States, they argue, waged war on behalf of an immoral, illegitimate South Vietnamese regime utterly lacking in popular support. But was the Vietnam War truly unjust? If so, by what standard should it be judged? Ethical, morally responsible war-making, explains military ethicist Eric Patterson, depends in part on how well a country’s leaders adhere to the principles of “just war” theory. Rooted in the ancient writings of Cicero and St. Augustine, just war theory looks at the ethical considerations that can provide justification for entering, waging, prolonging and ending wars. Patterson organizes Just American Wars around those ethical parameters…